The Charges Against Capitalism

Is capitalism the natural order of things, or a system that has to be enforced? The main charges against it, from Marx to Mattei, the strongest replies, and what the evidence settles.

Essay · economy · October 2026

“What I show in the book is that capitalism is far from spontaneous. It requires constant violent enforcement of those policies of austerity to preserve the system in place.” Clara Mattei, an Italian economist who teaches at the University of Tulsa, said this to Krishnan Guru-Murthy in an episode of his Channel 4 podcast, Ways to Change the World, released on 13 February 2026.[1] The episode’s title put it in five words: capitalism is not natural, it is enforced. She was presenting a new book, Escape from Capitalism, whose publisher sums it up as the claim that capitalism “isn’t inevitable, scientific, or natural”.[2]

Her definition is precise. Capitalism, she told Guru-Murthy, “is a system based on two pillars”: wage labour, in which most people have no option but to sell their capacity to work, and private investment, in which a few decide what is produced and why. “And of course the roof is production for profit.” Austerity, the cutting of public spending, raising of interest rates and weakening of unions, is in her account not a mistake that governments keep making. “It’s irrational for us for the logic of need,” she said, “but it’s very very rational for the logic of profit.” It keeps people needing to work for whatever wage is on offer. “We would not have capitalism without a good dosage of unemployment.”[1]

The argument is old in its outline and new in its evidence. Mattei’s earlier book, The Capital Order (2022), went into the archives of the British Treasury and of Mussolini’s first finance ministers to show how economists designed austerity after the First World War, when workers’ movements were strong, and how liberal Britain and fascist Italy applied the same recipe.[3] It is one charge among many. Since the system got its name in the nineteenth century, capitalism has been accused of being imposed by force, of taking from those who work, of breaking down at regular intervals, of emptying life of meaning, of consuming the planet and of buying political power. Each charge has a reply, and some of the replies are strong.

This essay takes the charges one at a time, with the evidence on each side, and Portugal beside the large economies where the argument is usually conducted. It is a survey, not a verdict; this blog has looked at parts of the question before, in O Grande Debate, on neoliberalism, and in the essays on rents, profits and work listed at the end.

7%of GDP: Britain’s average primary budget surplus in the 1920s, the decade Mattei studies

43% → 10%share of the world living on less than $3 a day, 1990 to 2025

28 → 35%share of Portugal’s pre-tax income going to the top tenth, 1980 to 2022

56%of people in 28 countries agreed in 2020 that capitalism as it is does more harm than good

What is judged

What is on trial

The first difficulty is that the word means different things to the prosecution and the defence. To most of its critics, capitalism is what Mattei describes: a social relation, in which those who own the means of production employ those who do not, and production is organised for profit. To most of its defenders, it is markets, private property and free exchange, the arrangement in which people trade with each other and nobody needs permission to start a business. The two descriptions overlap but do not coincide. Markets existed long before wage labour became the normal way to make a living, and wage labour has existed under governments that called themselves socialist.

The second difficulty is that capitalism comes in very different settings. Political scientists Peter Hall and David Soskice divided the rich economies into “liberal market economies”, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, where firms coordinate mainly through markets, and “coordinated market economies”, such as Germany and the Nordic countries, where unions, employers’ associations and banks negotiate much of what markets elsewhere decide.[4] The differences are large (Figure 6, below): France spends 31 per cent of its GDP on public social programmes and the United States 20; in Portugal, 83 per cent of employees are covered by collective agreements, in the United States 11. A charge that is true of one of these economies may be false of another, and many arguments about capitalism are really arguments about which of them to be.

Imposed

The first charge: it had to be imposed

Mattei’s charge has a long pedigree. Karl Marx closed the first volume of Capital (1867) with an attack on the story economists told about how capitalism began, in which a thrifty few saved and a lazy many squandered. That story, he wrote, “plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology.” The real history was of English peasants driven from the common land by enclosure, and of laws that whipped and branded those who would not take work: “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.” Once the system was in place, force was rarely needed: “The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally.”[5] Mattei told Guru-Murthy the same thing in her own words: the system “was born through violence”, through “the exclusion of people from the land”, which ended people’s self-sufficiency and made them depend on the market.[1]

The economic historian Karl Polanyi, who was no Marxist, made a related point in The Great Transformation (1944). “There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course.” In nineteenth-century England the free market in labour, land and money was built by statute: the new Poor Law of 1834, the gold standard, free trade. Then society protected itself against it, in factory laws, sanitary laws and unions, and those protections came piecemeal, without a plan. His summary is one of the most quoted sentences in economic history: “Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.” Labour, land and money, he argued, “are obviously not commodities”: they are human beings, nature and a social convention, and to leave them wholly to the market “would result in the demolition of society.”[6]

What Mattei adds is the twentieth century. In The Capital Order she argues that after 1918, when strikes, factory occupations and demands for workers’ control spread across Europe, and the war had taught workers that “socioeconomic relations were no natural givens and could be different”, economists in the British Treasury and in Rome designed what she calls the “austerity trinity”. Fiscal austerity meant regressive taxes and cuts to “unproductive” spending on health and education; monetary austerity, higher interest rates and less money in circulation; industrial austerity, “layoffs of public employees, wage reductions, union- and strike-busting”. The three “worked in unison to exert a downward pressure on wages”, and their aim “was to shift national wealth and resources toward the upper classes, who, the economic experts insisted, were the ones capable of saving and investing.” Behind the experts’ fixation on debt, balanced budgets and inflation she sees “a more fundamental purpose: taming class conflict, which is essential for the continued reproduction of capitalism.”[3] And the experts presented their economics as “value-free truths about capitalism—natural facts of this world rather than constructed (or at least political) positions”: the same idea of a natural order that the podcast set out to dispute. Her British case rests on Ralph Hawtrey, Otto Niemeyer and the Treasury officials who prepared the international conferences of Brussels (1920) and Genoa (1922);[7] her Italian one on Maffeo Pantaleoni and his pupil Alberto De Stefani, Mussolini’s first finance minister, who could apply their models “without the encumbrance of democratic procedures”.[3]

The British numbers bear out the scale of the squeeze. The Bank of England raised its rate to 7 per cent on 15 April 1920 and kept it there for a year; as Mattei herself records, this was not a fringe view, for Pigou had argued in The Times for 8 per cent and Keynes told the Chancellor privately that he “should not be surprised if 10 percent would be required”.[3] From 1920 to 1929 the British public sector ran a primary surplus, revenue minus spending before interest, of about 7 per cent of GDP every year on average, with a peak of 9.4 per cent in 1923; before the war, in 1913, it had been 2.2 per cent (Figure 1). Most of the surplus went to pay interest on the war debt, which cost about 8 per cent of GDP, so the overall budget was close to balance. Unemployment, which had been 2 per cent in 1920, jumped to 11 per cent in 1921 and never fell back below 6.7 per cent before the Depression; on the official register of the time it stayed above 9.7 per cent.[8] Britain returned to gold at the pre-war parity in 1925, a decision Keynes attacked at the time.

Fig. 1 — United Kingdom: public-sector primary surplus (revenue minus spending before debt interest) as a share of GDP, and the unemployment rate, 1913 and 1919–1939; the war years are not shown. The unemployment series is the Bank of England’s estimate consistent with the modern survey measure; the official register of insured workers gives rates 3 to 6 points higher. Source: Bank of England, A millennium of macroeconomic data, version 3.1 (Middleton’s public-sector accounts); own calculations in scripts/capitalism.py.

Her central evidence is about who gained. Using the same Bank of England data, she shows that the share of British national income paid as wages rose from 67 per cent in 1913 to 71 in 1918 and 78 in 1921, “an unprecedented increment”, and then fell back as austerity took hold (Figure 2). In Italy it went from 35 per cent in 1918 to 55 in 1922, and by 1929 was back at its level of 1913. Over the decade, she calculates, the ratio of profits to wages rose by 32 per cent in Britain, and the profit rate more than tripled. The defeat of labour shows in every count: about 2.6 million British workers struck in 1919 and 108,000 in 1927; union membership fell from almost 40 per cent of employment after the war to a quarter. In Italy, De Stefani reported to the Senate in December 1923 that days lost to strikes had fallen from 7.3 million to 247,000 in a year: “Profits and revenues are increasing.”[3]

Fig. 2 — United Kingdom: share of GDP (excluding rents) paid to labour, 1910–1938; the war years are shaded. This is the series Mattei uses for Britain in The Capital Order, fig. 9.1. Source: Bank of England, A millennium of macroeconomic data, version 3.1, sheet A1 (after Thomas and Dimsdale).

The same numbers also show where her account can be contested. On this series the British wage share in 1929 was 73 per cent: most of the gain since 1918 had gone, but not all of it, as the book says, and the share rose again to 78 per cent in the Depression, when profits fell faster than wages. Real wages of those still in work fell about 8 per cent from their peak in 1921 but stayed near their pre-war purchasing power, because prices dropped by about a fifth between 1920 and 1922.[8] Mattei answers that real wages understate what happened, since the losses came as unemployment, lost bargaining power and, in Italy, longer hours, which a wage index does not record.[3] Max Harris, a senior fellow at the Wharton School’s initiative on financial policy, wrote in the most mainstream of the reviews that “in interpreting events and policies exclusively through this class lens, Mattei discounts the problems facing policymakers. They were working in the midst of a grave economic crisis: debt was at all-time highs, inflation was on the rise, society was at a breaking point.” He noted that “Weimar” and “hyperinflation”, the alternative that haunted those policymakers, never appear in the book, which a search of the text confirms, and that under her definition “any policy that does not goose the economy is austere.”[9] Gary Mongiovi, a sympathetic reviewer, pointed out that Hawtrey later urged the Federal Reserve to fight the deflation of the Depression: “a technocrat he may have been, but he was not an austerity ideologue.”[10]

The most pointed criticism of the Italian half came from the left. Riccardo Bellofiore and Francesco Garibaldo, two Marxian economists, argued that Mattei mistakes the radical workers of Turin for the Italian working class, and that the sequence ran the other way: the workers’ movement “collapsed, as in Britain, because of its internal weakness”, and “Fascism came after and through the workers’ defeat.” They quote the historian Charles Maier, whose work Mattei builds on, to the effect that fascism became the strategy when a ruling class “could not impose austerity” by ordinary means.[11] On this reading, austerity and fascism were linked, but the arrow from economists to dictatorship is harder to draw than the book’s subtitle suggests.

Defenders of markets reply to the larger charge in two ways. The first is that the origin of a system does not settle its merits: much of what we value, from the nation-state to the rule of law, also has violent beginnings. The second is that what was imposed in the nineteenth century has since been chosen, repeatedly, by voters who could have chosen otherwise. Mattei’s answer is that the choice is constrained, because people who need wages cannot afford to vote for disruption; the defenders’ rejoinder is that the same voters did choose, and keep, welfare states, labour law and public health systems that Marx never saw.

Unequal

The second charge: it takes from those who work

The oldest charge is about distribution. For Marx, profit was the value that workers produced beyond what they were paid; Mattei repeated it to Guru-Murthy, saying that workers “produce much more value than what they actually get in their paycheck”.[1] Few economists today use the labour theory of value, but the worry survived in other forms. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), Thomas Piketty argued that when the return on capital exceeds the growth of the economy, “as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.” In his conclusion: “The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier ... The past devours the future.”[12]

The data since 1980 support the direction of the charge, with large differences in size. The share of pre-tax income going to the richest tenth of adults rose from 34 to 47 per cent in the United States between 1980 and 2022, and from 28 to 35 per cent in Portugal; in France and Sweden it rose less (Figure 3). The top 1 per cent in the United States doubled its share, from 10 to 21 per cent; in Portugal it went from 7 to 10.[13] The share of national income paid to labour, as wages and the labour part of self-employed income, fell in the United States from 62 to 56 per cent between 2004 and 2025, and in Portugal from 65 to 58, on the International Labour Organization’s estimates; in France it did not change.[14]

Fig. 3 — Share of pre-tax national income received by the top 10% of adults (income split equally between spouses), 1980 and 2022. Source: World Inequality Database, via Our World in Data, retrieved 30 October 2026.

The replies are about cause and remedy. The countries in Figure 3 are all capitalist, and the differences between them are as large as the changes over time, which suggests that taxes, unions and education explain much of what happens to inequality, not capitalism as such. Piketty himself calls r > g “a historical fact, not a logical necessity”, and his remedy is a tax on wealth, not the end of private ownership. And a good part of what rose at the top is not the reward of owning productive capital but rent, income from scarcity, licences and protected positions, which a competitive market would erode rather than create. The Tollkeepers followed that argument, after Joseph Stiglitz;[a] Earned and Unearned and Who Gets the Profits looked at how Portuguese income is split between work and ownership, and who the owners are.

Unstable

The third charge: it breaks down

The third charge comes from within economics. John Maynard Keynes, who wanted to save capitalism, not end it, wrote in The General Theory (1936) that “the outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.” He worried most about finance: “Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”[15] Hyman Minsky went further, arguing that crises are not shocks from outside but are bred by good times: “over periods of prolonged prosperity, the economy transits from financial relations that make for a stable system to financial relations that make for an unstable system.”[16] The slogan “stability is destabilizing” is a fair summary of him, but not his sentence.

The record of banking crises bears him out. Luc Laeven and Fabián Valencia of the IMF dated every systemic banking crisis between 1970 and 2017. Counting the years in which one began, there were 3 in the 1970s, 39 in the 1980s, 69 in the 1990s and 30 in the 2000s, most of these in 2007 and 2008 (Figure 4). In 1995, 29 countries were in a banking crisis at the same time; in 2008, 24. Portugal had one from 2008 to 2012, as did Spain, Greece and the United States.[17] The rise after 1980 coincides with the freeing of capital movements and financial deregulation; the quiet of the 1950s and 1960s coincides with tight controls, which suggests that the frequency of crises depends on the rules, not only on the system.

Fig. 4 — Systemic banking crises starting in each period, all countries, 1970–2017: own count of the years in which a country enters a crisis in the World Bank’s Global Financial Development Database (indicator GFDD.OI.19, which follows Laeven and Valencia). Back-to-back episodes in the same country count once, so the total, 145, is a little below the 151 episodes in the original paper. Sources: Laeven and Valencia, IMF, 2018; World Bank, retrieved 30 October 2026.

The defence of instability was made most memorably by Joseph Schumpeter. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) he described a process that “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”[18] Booms and busts, firms that rise and fail, are on this view the cost of innovation, and an economy without them would also be one without new products. The reply is that banking crises are not creative destruction: they destroy firms that were sound, along with those that were not, and their cost falls mostly on people who took none of the risks. That was the argument of Owed to Ourselves, about money and debt.

Empty

The fourth charge: it empties life

A different set of critics care less about who gets what than about what work and markets do to people. In his manuscripts of 1844 the young Marx described the worker who is a stranger to his own labour: “He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor.”[19] The charge of alienation has been restated in every generation since, most recently as the complaint about meaningless jobs that this blog took up in Bullshit Jobs and The Duty to Work.

The same charge comes from the Catholic Church, which has condemned socialism and criticised capitalism for more than a century. Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) said that “a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself”; in the same text, socialism “must be utterly rejected”, and the remedy offered was a wage enough to support “a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner”, unions and charity.[20] Pope Francis was blunter in 2013: “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”[21]

The philosopher Michael Sandel, in What Money Can’t Buy (2012), gave the charge its modern liberal form: the problem is not the market economy, which he calls a valuable tool, but the drift into a market society, in which market values reach into things that should not be bought, such as places in a queue, school results or citizenship.[22] The defence here is weaker on evidence and stronger on principle: who is to decide which wants are worthy? The Manufacture of Wants looked at how much of what is bought is wanted because it was sold, and where that argument runs out.

The planet

The fifth charge: it consumes the planet

The newest charge is ecological. An economy organised for profit must grow, the argument goes, and an economy that grows uses more energy and materials, on a finite planet. Jason Hickel, one of the best-known advocates of “degrowth”, puts the goal as follows: “to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per capita consumption.”[23] The scale of what has happened is not in dispute. World emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and industry rose from 5.9 billion tonnes in 1950 to 38.6 billion in 2024.[24]

The reply is decoupling: economies can grow while their emissions fall. The European Union emitted 3.9 billion tonnes in 1990 and 2.4 billion in 2024; Portugal emitted 70 million tonnes in 2005 and 36 million in 2024, while both economies grew.[24] Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data wrote in 2021 that “many countries have decoupled economic growth from CO2 emissions, even if we take offshored production into account.” A study by Klaus Hubacek and colleagues found that between 2015 and 2018, 32 of 116 countries grew while cutting the emissions produced on their territory, and 23 while cutting the emissions in what they consumed, imports included.[25] The rejoinder is speed: decoupling is real but too slow, and happens mostly in rich countries. The growth series on this blog, starting with The Treadmill, went through that evidence in detail.[b] The charge is, in the end, against growth itself, which the planned economies of the twentieth century pursued as well.

Power

The sixth charge: it buys power

The last charge is political: concentrated wealth becomes concentrated power, and markets that were meant to discipline the powerful end up serving them. Its earliest version is in the founding text of free-market economics. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), warned that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The sentence that follows is less often quoted: “It is impossible, indeed, to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice.”[26] Smith distrusted merchants, not markets, and thought the remedy was competition, not the state.

Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom (1962), turned the argument around: “Historical evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a free market. I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.”[27] The claim is hard to fault as he stated it: lasting democracies have all had market economies. The converse does not hold, as Chile under Pinochet, whom Friedman’s students advised, and China today show; and Mattei’s point is precisely that liberal elites in the 1920s found Mussolini’s dictatorship a reliable partner, because he could impose what parliaments could not.[3]

The modern version of the charge is about technology. Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, argues that “capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism”, in which platforms such as Amazon and Google no longer compete in markets but own them, and collect rent from everyone who sells through them.[28] If he is right, the problem is not too much capitalism but its replacement by something older and worse; the defenders’ answer is that these are monopolies, which competition law exists to break, and that the leaders of twenty years ago, such as MySpace and Nokia, did not keep their thrones.

The defence

The case for the defence

The strongest argument for capitalism is not a theory but a graph. In 1820, according to the Maddison Project’s estimates, the average person in the world produced about $1,100 worth of goods and services a year, at 2011 prices; in 2022, about $16,700, fifteen times more. In Portugal the figure rose from about $1,700 to $29,000.[29] Most of that growth happened in economies organised around markets and private firms. In 1990, 43 per cent of the world’s population lived on less than $3 a day, the World Bank’s current line for extreme poverty; by 2025, on the Bank’s estimates, about 10 per cent did (Figure 5). A large part of the fall came in China, India and Vietnam after they opened their economies to markets.[30]

Fig. 5 — Share of the world population living on less than $3.00 and $8.30 a day, in 2021 prices adjusted for purchasing power. $3.00 is the World Bank’s international extreme-poverty line since June 2025; $8.30 is its line for upper-middle-income countries. 2025 is a nowcast. Source: World Bank, Poverty and Inequality Platform, release of September 2026, retrieved 30 October 2026.

The same figure contains the critics’ reply. On a less austere line, $8.30 a day, the share of the world’s population below it fell much less, from 70 to 45 per cent, and the number of people has barely changed: 3.7 billion in 1990, 3.7 billion in 2025.[30] Critics such as Hickel add that much of the fall in extreme poverty happened in China under a state that directs its economy, and that counting dollars misses what people lost when they were drawn into the cash economy. Defenders answer that the state that directed China’s economy before 1978 presided over famine, and that it was the turn to markets that changed the figures.

The second argument is about knowledge. Friedrich Hayek, in a 1945 essay, argued that the information an economy needs “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” Prices gather it. When a raw material becomes scarce, “without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people ... are made to use the material or its products more sparingly”, and Hayek called that “the marvel”.[31] It is an argument for markets, not for any particular distribution of ownership, and many socialists have accepted it. But it is the argument that the planned economies of the twentieth century were unable to answer.

The defence is often summed up in a sentence by Winston Churchill, who said in the House of Commons in October 1945, shortly after losing the election to Labour: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”[32] Even Churchill granted the vice. And Schumpeter, capitalism’s most admiring analyst, did not expect it to last: “Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.” Not because it would fail, but because “its very success undermines the social institutions which protect it”.[18]

Which capitalism

Which capitalism?

The charges and the defences are usually made about capitalism in general, but much of the evidence above points to differences between capitalist countries. The rich democracies all have private firms, wage labour and markets; what separates them is how much of income is redistributed, how wages are set and how much finance is allowed to do. Figure 6 shows two of those differences for seven of them.[33]

Fig. 6 — Public social expenditure as a share of GDP, 2024 (United Kingdom 2023; recent years are OECD estimates), and share of employees whose pay and conditions are covered by a collective agreement, latest year available. Portugal highlighted. Sources: OECD Social Expenditure Database and OECD/AIAS collective bargaining data, retrieved 30 October 2026.

Portugal is closer to the coordinated end than its reputation suggests: most employees are covered by sector agreements, which the government extends to whole industries, although only about 14 per cent of workers belong to a union, and social spending is a little above the OECD average. The countries that spend most and bargain most collectively are not poorer: Denmark and Sweden are among the richest in Europe. That is the strongest evidence that what is attributed to capitalism, in inequality, insecurity and the power of finance, is in good part a matter of rules that democracies can change, and do.

Mattei rejects that conclusion. In her view welfare states and collective bargaining are concessions, won when workers were strong and taken back when they are weak; the austerity of the 2010s, which Portugal knew under the troika, is her evidence that the concessions are never safe. Her own proposal is local and democratic rather than revolutionary: participatory budgeting, on the model of Porto Alegre, which she promotes in Tulsa and which, she told Guru-Murthy, “fits even within the constitutional framework and the current laws”.[1] Kristóf Szombati, reviewing the new book, found that it offers “existence proofs in place of a theory of transition”: examples that other arrangements can work on a small scale, but no account of how a whole economy would get there.[34]

The public

What people think

The charges have a wide audience. In 2020 the communications firm Edelman asked people in 28 countries whether “capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world”; on average 56 per cent agreed, with majorities in 22 of the 28 countries, from 69 per cent in France to 47 in the United States and 35 in Japan (Figure 7). The answers barely differed by age or income.[35] Portugal was not included, and there is no comparable independent survey for it.

Fig. 7 — Share agreeing that “capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world” (top four points of a nine-point scale), selected countries of the 28 surveyed. Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2020, Global Report, p. 66.

The words “as it exists today” matter. When Gallup asked Americans in August 2026 how they felt about capitalism, 55 per cent were positive; 43 per cent were positive about socialism, the highest in Gallup’s series, which began in 2010. Among those aged 18 to 34, socialism was ahead, 57 per cent to 43.[36] Mark Fisher called the mood of the 2000s “capitalist realism”, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” He took his epigraph from a line usually credited to Fredric Jameson, who in 2003 introduced it with “Someone once said”: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”[37] Two decades later many people can imagine an alternative; fewer agree on what it would be.

The verdict

What the charges establish

On the first charge, that capitalism had to be imposed, the historians are largely with the prosecution: the market in labour and land was built by states, often by force. Mattei has shown in the archives how deliberately the post-1918 order was restored, and her figures show that it worked as she says: the share of income going to labour fell, profits rose and strikes all but vanished, in a democracy as in a dictatorship. Whether that was the purpose or a side effect of fighting debt and inflation, and whether the order needed fascism, is where her critics, on the left as well as the right, find the evidence thinner than the claim.

On distribution and instability the evidence supports the charges in direction and the defence on remedy. Inequality has risen in every country in Figure 3, by very different amounts; banking crises came back when finance was freed, and were rare when it was not. Both depend heavily on rules that capitalist democracies set differently.

On the planet the charge is real and the reply is partial: emissions have started to fall in rich countries, not yet fast enough. On meaning and power the questions are moral and political more than empirical, and the answers depend on what one thinks markets are for.

And on the defence’s central claim, that no other system has done as much to make people richer, the evidence is with the defence, with the qualification that the fall of poverty is far smaller on any line above bare survival. Mattei is right that capitalism is not a natural order: it is a set of institutions, made and kept by laws. That is also why the argument about it is not settled. What was made can be made differently, and the rich democracies already make it in very different ways.

On method and tools

This piece was written collaboratively with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): human specification and editorial direction; machine research, analysis and drafting. Research agents gathered and checked the sources on 30 October 2026; quotations were read in the original or in a full-text copy except as noted. Mattei’s words in the podcast are taken from YouTube’s automatic captions of the episode, at the timestamps 1:39, 2:13, 5:58, 7:29, 8:55 and 24:05, and were not checked against the audio. The Capital Order was read in full, and its figures for Britain were checked against the Bank of England dataset it cites; the reviews are quoted from their full texts, except Charles Maier’s phrase, which is quoted as Bellofiore and Garibaldo report it. Sandel’s argument is paraphrased from reviews, and the description of Varoufakis’s book and the Hubacek study from secondary sources. The figures come from a script, scripts/capitalism.py, with data typed in from the Bank of England’s millennium dataset, the World Bank, the World Inequality Database, the OECD and Edelman; the count of banking crises per decade is my own arithmetic on the World Bank series. The figures for Italy, the profit rate and strikes are Mattei’s, from her sources.

Cover: Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857, Musée d’Orsay, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, cropped. Gleaning, the right of the poor to pick up what the harvest left behind, was one of the customary rights that enclosure and the law of private property took away.

Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer

Go deeper

Ideas this essay uses without stopping to explain them, and where this blog does. The letters in the text point here; the links go straight to the section.

[a] Reward or toll

How to tell income earned by making something from income collected by controlling a scarce gate. The Tollkeepers, “How to tell a reward from a toll”.

[b] What GDP counts

What the measure of growth includes and leaves out, and why growth in GDP is not the same as growth in material use. Growth of What, “What GDP counts”.

Related essays on this blog

1. O Grande Debate: Neoliberalismo em Perspetiva — the arguments for and against neoliberalism, side by side.
2. The Tollkeepers — rent against reward, after Stiglitz, with Portugal’s rendas excessivas.
3. Productive by Definition — who counts as productive, after Mazzucato.
4. Earned and Unearned — how Portuguese income splits between work and ownership.
5. Who Gets the Profits — who owns Portuguese firms.
6. Owed to Ourselves — money, debt and who carries the risk.
7. The Treadmill — the first of four essays on growth and the planet.

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