Historical

How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

Anchor questions

• If capitalism was made rather than given, when and where was it made? What was there before it?
• How did most people come to have nothing to sell but their ability to work? What did they lose along the way?
• What did it take, in force and law, to turn land held in common into private property?
• What is the relationship between the wealth of the industrial world and the slavery and colonialism that came before it?
• Whose resistance is missing from the story of capitalism’s rise, and why?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.

Books

• Leo Huberman (1903 to 1968), Man’s Worldly Goods: The Story of the Wealth of Nations (1936). Possibly the best beginner’s narrative history of capitalism from feudalism to the 1930s, written for workers and told as a story. Plainspoken and Marxist without jargon. The ideal first book for a general reader. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942 to 2016), The Origin of Capitalism (1999; expanded in 2002 as A Longer View). The clearest short introduction to the debate over capitalism’s birth, arguing it was not natural or inevitable but a specific product of agrarian social relations in the English countryside. The entry point to “political Marxism.” Free to borrow, in the 1999 Monthly Review original: archive.org
• E. P. Thompson (1924 to 1993), The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The great popular history of how the industrial working class was made, not simply born from factories but self-formed through struggle, custom, and culture between 1780 and 1832. Long and endlessly readable. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Michael Perelman (1939 to 2020), The Invention of Capitalism (2000). Shows how the classical political economists quietly advocated stripping peasants of self-sufficiency to force them into wage labor, the secret history behind laissez-faire. Excellent on the making of the wage. Free PDF: files.libcom.org
• Silvia Federici (b. 1942), Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004). A feminist history of the transition to capitalism that places the witch hunts, the disciplining of women’s bodies, and unpaid reproductive labor at the center of primitive accumulation. Widely used in popular education. Free PDF: files.libcom.org
• Eric Williams (1911 to 1981), Capitalism and Slavery (1944). The classic thesis that Atlantic slavery and the slave trade financed the British Industrial Revolution: capitalism and racial slavery as intertwined, not opposed. A cornerstone of the slavery-and-capitalism strand and a bridge to Race and Racial Capitalism. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Peter Linebaugh (b. 1942) and Marcus Rediker (b. 1951), The Many-Headed Hydra (2000). A history from below of the revolutionary Atlantic, the sailors, slaves, and commoners who resisted the making of the capitalist world. Narrative and inspiring. Free PDF: files.libcom.org

The twentieth century: boom, crisis, and the turn

Between the enclosures above and the neoliberalism below sits a century this lens used to skip. It matters, because neoliberalism was not an idea that won an argument. It was an answer to a specific crisis, and knowing which crisis is what stops it looking inevitable.

• Chris Harman (1942 to 2009), Zombie Capitalism (2009), especially Part Two. The interwar slump, the long postwar boom, and why the boom broke in the 1970s, narrated in plain movement language rather than academic prose. On its own it closes the gap between primitive accumulation and the present. Free: marxists.org
• Wolfgang Streeck (b. 1946), “The Crises of Democratic Capitalism” (2011). One essay that runs the whole arc: the postwar compromise, the inflation of the 1970s, the debt state, and austerity, as a single sequence in which each fix displaced the crisis rather than solving it. His conclusion is the provocation worth arguing with: democracy and capitalism were reconciled only briefly, and conditionally. Free PDF: piketty.pse.ens.fr

Neoliberalism

• David Harvey (b. 1935), A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005). The standard critical history of how a fringe doctrine became the water we swim in, read not as economics winning an argument but as a project to restore the wealth and power of a class that had lost some of both. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: global.oup.com, and see the note on access for how to get it. Harvey delivering this argument, free but niche at about 23,000 views: youtube.com

Primary sources

• Karl Marx (1818 to 1883), “So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” Capital, Volume I, Part VIII (1867). The foundational account of how the peasantry was violently separated from the land through enclosure, expropriation, and colonial plunder to create both capital and a propertyless working class. Vivid and readable, the origin point for everything else in this lens. Read chapters 26 to 33. Free: marxists.org
• Lewis F. Powell Jr. (1907 to 1998), “Attack on American Free Enterprise System” (1971). A confidential memo to the US Chamber of Commerce in which a corporate lawyer, two months before joining the Supreme Court, tells business it is losing the argument and sets out how to win it back: fund the chairs, staff the courts, monitor the textbooks, buy the airtime. Read it beside Harvey and the story stops being abstract. Free: scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu

Films and lectures

• Crash Course World History #33, “Capitalism and Socialism” (CrashCourse, John Green, 2012). Roughly 11 minutes. About 11.3 million views, the most-watched item across this whole theme. Traces capitalism’s rise out of the Industrial Revolution and the socialist reaction. Mainstream framing, useful as a shared starting reference to then complicate. youtube.com/watch?v=B3u4EFTwprM
• “Neoliberalism: From Ronald Reagan to the Gig Economy” (Tom Nicholas, 2019). Roughly 25 minutes, about 448,000 views. A video-essay history of neoliberal capitalism from the 1970s to precarious gig work. Bridges the historical and practical lenses. youtube.com/watch?v=rG3bNSyhlSU
• Ellen Meiksins Wood on the origin of capitalism (lecture). The most authoritative short treatment of enclosure and the agrarian origins of capitalism, but a niche academic upload with only a few thousand views. Best assigned as facilitator preparation alongside her book, rather than screened for a group. youtube.com/watch?v=7nKE6oN4i8U

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization, and Welfare (2006). The postwar settlement and full employment through the 1970s profit squeeze to financialization and welfare retrenchment, with the numbers. Left-Keynesian and Marxist-influenced. Not free: global.oup.com
• Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018). Traces the Geneva School from the Habsburg wreckage to the WTO, arguing neoliberalism was never about shrinking the state but about insulating capital from democracy. Not free: hup.harvard.edu
• Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017). The Buchanan-to-Koch line of public choice economics as a funded project to insulate property from majority rule, which understood itself as anti-democratic and said so in private. A free C-SPAN talk by MacLean carries the argument. Not free: penguinrandomhouse.com
• Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016). Investigative reporting on the Koch network’s funding of think tanks, academic chairs, and astroturf. The money behind the ideas, and the free alternative to MacLean. Not free: penguinrandomhouse.com

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome.