Crafting Capitalism: Two Great New Reads That Terrify and Inspire

Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about progressive politics, policy, and economics. We write on the latest with an eye toward the long game. We’re focused on building a new economy that centers economic security, shared prosperity, and rebalanced power.

“In English factories you don’t hear singing, chatter, laughter. The master doesn’t want a memory of outside existence to distract the workers from their task for one minute: he requires silence, and deathlike silence reigns.”

-Flora Tristan, from The London Journals, 1839

“The miners here are desperate, and like their mountaineer brothers in Kentucky, they can shoot.”

-Katherine Ellickson, writing from a coal miners’ strike in West Virginia, 1931

The economy is in the hands of the beholder. The shape it takes is hardly a foregone conclusion. It’s up to us.

In two new books, Chris Hughes, an economic historian, and John Cassidy, longtime economics columnist for The New Yorker, aim to explain “the economy”—that most abstract, most technical, most fundamental of systems. Hughes and Cassidy don’t use formulas or algorithms. They do not speak in the language of equilibria or tax rates. Instead, they are portraitists. Between them, Hughes and Cassidy tell the stories of scores of people wrestling with a capitalist economy, trying to mold it at human scale. Both bring the camera in closer and closer.

Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics profiles thinkers and writers whose work spans centuries, and who are linked by a shared view: that capitalism is, in Cassidy’s inimitable description, “soulless, exploitative, inequitable, unstable, and destructive, yet also all-conquering and overwhelming.” Hughes’s Marketcrafters is the brighter side of the coin, recounting stories of movement organizers and public officials who, over the past 100 years, have fought to shape capitalism’s markets toward better outcomes. Hughes’s marketcrafters take their power seriously. Like Cassidy’s critics, they are keenly attuned to society’s problems, and struggle to land policy decisions and allocate capital in the hopes of improving our collective lot.

The books are different, but they are companion pieces. Readers of both will see and even feel “the economy”—its limits and its powers, the miracles it can produce and the suffering it can cause—through the hearts and minds of people alive to their times.

Like many of us who work at places like the Roosevelt Institute or who read things like this Substack, the characters Hughes and Cassidy focus on are experts and authors, theorists and policy nerds. Some, like Flora Tristan, one of Cassidy’s many subjects, are little-known to most contemporary readers.

Tristan, married unhappily in 1821 at the age of 17, survived an attempted murder by her own husband, had him arrested, and, thus alert to the imprisoning power of coverture laws, began to travel the world alone. She was self-taught. Her travelogues record her increasing fury at the living conditions of workers in British factories and enslaved people on Peruvian sugar plantations. In 1843, Tristan published The Workers’ Union, which called for a universal union so strong that it could “appropriate every power in the land,” and began “TO ALL WORKERS, MEN AND WOMEN, hear me!” Throughout the 1840s, Tristan distributed copies of The Workers’ Union to Parisian activists, including a young German exile who was an associate of Karl Marx.

Chris Hughes helps us see that the clarion call of the manifesto is but one tool for economic warriors. Fast forward a century to Katherine Ellickson, the daughter of German Jewish immigrants who joined the effort to organize industrial workers soon after graduating with an economics degree from Vassar, and became in 1935 the first employee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Hughes tells Ellickson’s story as one of labor versus capital, and also one of relentless organizing.

The CIO was a more militant offshoot of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Echoing Flora Tristan’s advice to organize at scale, across industries, by the end of the 1930s the CIO notched big wins, contracts with the behemoths General Motors and US Steel. As such, the CIO became a platform from which Ellickson would spend several decades on her life’s work: using the power of the labor movement to ensure that all Americans would have health care.

This was crafting a market from disparate parts, rather than from whole cloth. That might have been easier. Instead, Ellickson had to lead the battle against well-funded private insurers and the well-organized doctors’ organization, the American Medical Association (AMA), which functioned effectively as a cartel. Hughes tells Ellickson’s story: years of strategy meetings with White House officials and members of Congress. Organizing a political base of workers to demand health coverage. Moving from a universal demand, untenable in the face of relentless AMA pushback, to a demand for a public program to cover the elderly, which took almost 15 years to come to fruition as Medicare. The 1965 legislative win that led to increased coverage for millions of Americans through both Medicare and Medicaid. The surprising ways these limited wins allowed for expanding rights and access—from the racial integration of segregated hospitals in the South to more recent expansions of Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act—for decades to come. And the pain of those incomplete wins, because even today Medicare and Medicaid are part of a byzantine health-care system that still allows corporate control at too many points to ensure affordable care for all Americans.

Tristan and Ellickson are but two of the characters in Marketcrafters and Capitalism and Its Critics. Many, many people have used their words and their deeds to shape markets, and shape the world. At a time when “expertise” feels like something to disavow, and many people feel the urge to retreat, these stories are bracing reminders to act with all the resources at our disposal.

Here are three takeaways from these volumes:

First, righteous anger brings clarity of purpose to our shaping of the economy. Our best economic thinkers have spirit and imagination. Yes, data and evidence matter. Yes, good ideas and excellent management are critical. But what fuels the deepest economic change are ideas borne of both moral indignation and the clear-eyed view that our society can be better: that workers do not have to be exploited, and that our companies can produce more than loneliness and alienation.

Second, many great thinkers have done their best work together, and sought always to inspire many more. Tristan traveled through London hospitals with Anna Wheeler, a radical Irish feminist. She met with Robert Owen, who wanted to abolish factories to build more communal societies, and with the Chartists, the British political movement arguing that real progress required a mass politics, inspired by revolutionary ideas.

And third, the road ahead is likely to be very bleak. The last chapters of Hughes’s book tell a sweeping story of the Biden economic agenda—of shifts in thinking about the role of public investment and marketcrafting. The Biden team envisioned workers with power; government regulators with smarts and guts; and perhaps most radically, legislation that would not only increase social insurance but also use public funds to draw in private capital in whole new industries, shaping the entirety of a green economy for our collective future.

Some of these ideas became law. Between 2021 and 2024, we saw policy wins that made real, though unfinished, change for workers, families, and the health of our planet. Many of those victories, of course, are now at the mercy of different decision-makers, whose inclinations are both ruthless and senseless. Brute oligarchic force has led to tax cuts for the wealthy, crypto shilling and self-dealing, and the cruel fantasy of DOGE. Today’s economic indicators are now flashing somewhere between yellow and red, and investors worldwide have made abundantly clear that they no longer trust American economic institutions, which for half a century undergirded (albeit unevenly) global confidence and growth. Working people have already lost trust in American institutions. Now the elites are following suit.

Cassidy’s portraits of those fighting against the viciousness of capitalism help us understand at least some of this forward-then-backward motion. Many people have tried to build a different kind of power—not just to tame the raw edges, but to tame the central contradiction: that the system, as Thomas Piketty reminded us, will eat itself if not curbed. A fundamental question for our times is what to do with this core insight.

Reading both Marketcrafters and Capitalism and Its Critics will remind one both how hard shaping our economy is and how necessary. Capitalism has generated its own crises for hundreds of years. And yet those crises have pushed generations to fight for something better. Perhaps the people in these volumes will inspire the next generation to join the fight today—right now—so that we’ll have a shot at lives, economic and otherwise, shaped by and for ordinary people, and not the vanishingly few.

For more from Felicia, check out “Are We on the Brink of a New Social Order?”—a conversation she moderated at the CUNY Graduate Center that featured Chris Hughes; Leslie McCall, associate director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality and Presidential Professor of Sociology and Political Science the CUNY Graduate Center; and Dorian T. Warren, co-president of Community Change and co-founder of the Economic Security Project.

If you ask Eleanor

“The changes made in our country during the great depression of the thirties are what saved our capitalist system. And if we are wise we are going to continue to adjust our system of capitalism to our needs.”

– Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day  (February 4, 1959)