How Can We Build a World Post Capitalism?
In Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin 2025), Seven Beckert’s original approach to understanding capitalism helps us to see possibilities for challenging it in the present precarious time we are living in.
The billionaires are putting our world at risk through support for unregulated AI, funding the fossil fuel industry, and undermining democracy. They are using their unprecedented levels of power to lead us toward multiple pathways of total human annihilation.
Now is a good time to reflect on ways to challenge capitalism, a driving force behind the madness we face. And yet, on one side we have many people who are hesitant to name capitalism as a force behind destruction we face. On the other side, many of those few who do name capitalism use outdated and unhelpful frameworks for understanding how to challenge capitalism.
Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin 2025) is a book worth reading if you are interested in building a world past capitalism. Beckert’s original approach to understanding capitalism helps us to see possibilities for challenging it in the present precarious time we are living in.
Its approach to understanding capitalism as a process pushed by capitalists, developing their power, and colonizing the matrix of our social world, explains capitalism in ways that point to more productive approaches to anti-capitalism.
Beckert’s book has received awards and is being read widely. Yet much of the attention has been negative. Writing in The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus faulted the book for having such a diffuse idea of capitalism that it becomes “an inescapable vibe—responsible for everything, everywhere, all at once.” In his review in The Nation Corey Robin criticized it for offering a fuzzy and imprecise understanding of capitalism, which then makes the book unhelpful for shaping our anti-capitalist thinking.
These criticisms miss the political power and potential of this unorthodox approach to understanding capitalism. Beckert’s book takes capitalism to its origins and puts it into a global framework. It focuses on the agency of capitalists as a group of people who over time bring capitalism as a global system into being. Beckert’s analysis helps us update our understanding of capitalism in ways that make pathways to challenging it clear and actionable. Many anti-capitalist thinkers are stuck in a stale 19th century understanding of what we are up against. Those approaches make our search for solutions narrow and not actionable in the present.
There are three dead ends to anti-capitalist thought that Becker’s approach avoids. One is that capitalism began in Britain with the industrial revolution. That idea encourages anti-capitalist thinkers to focus on class as something separate from race and patriarchy. A second is that the main victims of capitalism are the industrial working class, that idea leads us to focus on the industrial working class as the most important carriers of movements to challenge capitalism. The third mistaken approach is that the only way to get rid of capitalism is through overthrowing the system in a dramatic revolution. That leads anti-capitalist organizers to focus on getting others to see how bad capitalism is but does not encourage them to build power to challenge it in the present. Each of these tendencies has its own way of being unhelpful for building anti-capitalist politics. Beckert’s approach to capitalism helps us find pathways beyond all of them.
Rather than staring his analysis of capitalism at the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as most anti-capitalist thinkers do, Beckert’s story begins in 1150 in Aden, in what is now Yemen. He argues that at that time, largely in the Muslim world, there emerged a global trade in luxury goods. It impacted very few people’s lives, and there were no societies based on it. This was a period of the emergence of capitalists—a very small subset of the population who traded goods for the sole purpose of generating wealth.
Many societies have engaged in trade to obtain goods that they could not produce themselves. What distinguishes capitalists from other traders is that they engage in trade for profits alone. The goal of any given transaction is money itself rather than something that money could buy.
Capital itself is money, or resources, invested for the sole purpose of generating more money. Early capitalists originally worked within the political realities they found around them. Over time these merchants worked to create political systems that would enable them to generate more wealth. These early capitalists often engaged in work to get governments to create conditions that were favorable to them. Think of Columbus and his relationship with Queen Isabella.
When these disparate acts of capitalists began to be elevated to the society-wide phenomenon we now call capitalism, was when they were able to control a land base and extract wealth, not just from trading, but from producing as well. Over time these merchants came to control more land and resources. Forced labor in the form of slavery was central to the early days of capitalism. So was colonialism: the forcible taking of land on which to engage in profit-seeking actions.
As more and more resources are controlled by capitalist processes, and as capitalists became more politically powerful, a large part of human society came to be dominated by these logics. Eventually, resistance to slavery made that form of exploitation less desirable to the elites. Employers were able to hire people into wage labor as the enclosure of commons threw them off the land they had previously used to sustain themselves. Colonialism was beaten back by people fighting for control over the political systems that dominated the places they lived. In many places colonialism was replaced by neocolonialism, where local people controlled the political system but continued to run the economy in the interest of faraway elites.
Beckert’s analysis broadens our frame in ways that allow us to avoid the pitfalls of an anti-capitalism that focuses only on the class-based harms of capitalism. If you accept the older framework, which focuses on capitalism as mostly about the exploitation of the industrial working class in Europe, then its relationships to slavery and colonialism are hard to understand. Much anti-capitalist thinking sees capitalism as a step forward from slavery and colonialism, rather than as their cause.
With regard to patriarchy, much anti-capitalist thinking focuses on the experiences of wage laborers rather than on the impacts of capitalist processes on the broader matrix of society that it transforms and destroys. This can lead to an anti-capitalist politics that defines the victims of capitalism so narrowly that racism and patriarchy are outside the frame of analysis. That makes building broad coalitions for anti-capitalist politics harder to achieve.
Moving on to the second dead end of much anti-capitalist thinking, if you see capitalism as fundamentally about the exploitation of labor, then you will not see the wide variety of ways that capitalism destroys the social fabric in which it operates. By prioritizing production and distribution that are done in markets for profits, capitalist ways of operating marginalize and deny resources to the caregiving matrix of our lives.
Caregiving labor, which has been disproportionately done by women, becomes socially invisible and undervalued. It is especially not valued in the discipline of Economics, which is largely the study of the profit-making sector. That narrow focus ignores the wide variety of ways that many people’s lives are made miserable by not having access to the resources they need to live well. It also ignores the many non-capitalist aspects of our economies that continue to thrive, even as the capitalist sector has increasingly large impacts on our shared social world.
By focusing on the capitalist class, as a group of people who are ready to subordinate our world to profit seeking, and by showing that members of that class act in a variety of ways in relationship to government, and the rest of society, in order to make the world over to enable their profit seeking, Beckert opens up our perception to the wide range of ways that capitalism causes destruction. He therefore opens us to a wide range of ways to fight against it.
Beckert’s approach is aligned with the work of Karl Polanyi. In The Great Transformation, his pathbreaking book from 1944, Polanyi argued that, in previous times, markets were subordinated to other social logics, and so their negative impacts were limited. What distinguishes capitalism is that the logic of markets comes to dominate, and their centrality undermines other ways societies have been structured to ensure that people's needs are met. Markets come to have lives of their own, and the needs of markets come to dominate over the needs of people or the rest of nature.
Beckert updates Polanyi's analysis by adding more detail, and also by naming more clearly than Polanyi does the forms of agency behind these destructive practices. This approach allows us to understand capitalism less as a total system and more as a set of destructive practices driven by those addicted to the profit motive. This approach helps us imagine a variety of ways to challenge capitalism.
We need to break the spell of pro-capitalist thinkers’ claim that human economies are best served when markets are allowed to decide what is produced, how it is produced, and who gets the things produced. We need to figure out how best to ensure that we are making the things we need, in ways that are sustainable, and distributed in ways that ensure that everyone’s needs are met.
We need to fight against the powers of the owners of capital by breaking our dependencies on capitalism for our survival. Fighting against the exploitation we experience in wage labor is a part of that. But gathering social resources for the caregiving aspects of our lives, developing public goods, and preventing the environmental damage caused by corporations pursuing profit at any cost, are also crucial aspects of challenging capitalism.
Finally, Beckert’s approach allows us to avoid the third and most destructive element of standard anti-capitalist thinking: the belief that we need to wait for a revolution. If you think of capitalism as a focused system that came into being all at once with one major transformation, it is easy then to imagine the way to get rid of it is through overthrowing that system with one large blow. That way of thinking about how to get rid of capitalism doesn't position us well to understand the work we need to be doing right now to build power to stop the forces of social destruction while building the better world we are looking for, now.
Rather than waiting for a revolution to overthrow capitalism, anti-capitalists need to build power to fight against the variety of ways that the capitalist class is destroying our world. One way to think of this is with the idea of revolutionary reforms, the steps we take to make our world better, as we fight against the forms of destruction caused by capitalism and against the power of the capitalist class to destroy our social fabric.
Both Beckert, and Polanyi before him, owe a great deal to the work of Karl Marx. Marx’s criticism of capitalism remains an invaluable starting point for anti-capitalist thinking. But Marx's narrow focus on the exploitation of labor as the single most important form of destruction caused by capitalism has led generations of anti-capitalist activists to hope the industrial working class would lead us away from capitalism. Those hopes have been repeatedly disappointed.
Marx faulted colonialism and slavery for the ways they were part of the destruction caused by capitalism, but many of his followers see those processes as side issues to the problem of capitalism. And so many anti-capitalists insist on a class-first analysis, which undermines their ability to work well in broad coalitions.
On the question of revolution or reform, Marx actually said very little. And much of what he said was contradictory. In places, he argued that the path away from capitalism was through building political power via elections. At other times, he claimed that all of that was a distraction from a revolution that would overturn all social relations in a short dramatic period. Many followers of Marx assume, incorrectly, that he only supported the second strategy,
Much of the criticism of Beckert’s book from the left has rested on the ways his understanding deviates from a telling of the history that leads to the core set of beliefs that have kept anti-capitalist thinking from being politically productive. Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History doesn’t address these questions of political strategy. But its approach to understanding capitalism as a process pushed by capitalists, developing their power, and colonizing the matrix of our social world, explains capitalism in ways that point to more productive approaches to anti-capitalism. If we want to bring anti-capitalist analysis into the broad liberatory social movements that are animating our time, we need to base our anti-capitalism on an updated understanding of what we are up against. Beckert’s book offers a starting point for that understanding.
