The 2024/25 academic year saw a community of academics and practitioners, mainly drawn from the humanities and social sciences, undertake Fellowships at The New Institute. Though some worked in clusters and some as individuals, their collective task was to explore a common theme: Re-Thinking Capitalism. The writings in this series represent the work of some of the Fellows from this period. Each piece represents a expert’s perspective on this theme, in keeping with this Fellow’s own background. But the unique mix of individuals at TNI in 2024/25 meant that each Fellow got exposed to knowledge and ideas that they had not, and would not, have come across in the normal course of their careers prior to their time at TNI. Accordingly, there is a unity to the writings here.

In these introductory remarks I’ll try to say something brief about the subsidiary themes explored more fully in the individual contributions. But before getting into that, I want to offer a perspective on the overall theme itself. It’s worth asking what we really mean by ‘capitalism’, and indeed whether people mean the same thing as each other when trying to address what they take to be some important aspect of it. This, of course, bears on what possibilities exist when it comes to re-thinking capitalism.

The word ‘capitalism’ is one of those that people tend to use as if everyone’s on the same page: The shared meaning is so commonly felt that there’s no need to spell it out. The same might be true of some related terms and concepts, like ‘neoliberalism’, ‘economic growth’, and others that appear in the contributions gathered here. But the confidence (or is it neglect?) with which most of us throw around the term is reason enough to take a pause and ask whether we really are all on the same page. Reason too is the sheer proliferation of ‘capitalism’ to refer to what look like different aspects of the economy. It is easy to find narratives invoking labels like ‘vulture capitalism’, ‘disaster capitalism’, ‘woke capitalism’, and others. But these tend to pick out rather different aspects of contemporary social and economic life. And yet the repeated use of the ‘capitalism’ suffix gives the impression, though never really defended, that these diverse factors are all symptoms of a unified system – tips of the same capitalist iceberg, in some sense.

One rejoinder is that ‘there are many capitalisms!’. This may be true enough, but leaves it unexplained what features these many capitalism have in common, such that it makes to see them as unified and in contrasts to whatever the ‘non-capitalisms’ are. Getting too deep into all this runs the risk of getting bogged down in an academic debate, one which can will be continued elsewhere.

It might be better to emphasize where there is agreement and where exactly capitalism might be “re-thought”. And sure enough, people can’t mean wholly different things by ‘capitalism’. A capitalist society is surely one in which prominence is given to markets, private property, the pursuit of profit, the enforcement of contracts, credit and lending, and so on, probably combined with the emergence of social norms that reinforce this (the stigma of unemployment, the esteem given to certain forms of visible consumption, and so on). And most of us would at least accept that economies evolve over time, and that ‘capitalism’ has come to refer to something different, or a wider range of conditions, than once. When political economists first started to talk about ‘capitalism’ in the 19th century, there was no welfare state and little political representation for workers. The industrial revolution clearly had expanded production to an enormous extent, but it was difficult to see how the greatly expanded output would find a way to become more evenly distributed. Indeed, the sort of industrial innovations that had enabled the divisions of labour behind this great rise in output (principally in manufacturing) tended to work by de-skilling labour. This made workers easier to fire and easier to replace. Of course, much the same persists today in the garment factories of Bangladesh and the assembly lines of China, and throughout the Global South. But the 20th century, at least in most of the Global North, saw capitalism show a different side. Divisions of labour didn’t always de-skill – some of the best paid workers, such as surgeons, are far more specialised than they were in the 19th century. Workers found ways of gaining political representation short of carrying out a revolution, leading to resource pooling to fund retirement and unemployment, free (or near free) provision of childcare and education. Child labour came to an end. Many workers of the Global North are now employed in the state sector or non-profit sector and not by for-profit firms, which complicates older narratives about workers being exploited by capitalists. As new economic realities have evolved, they have always brought scope to re-think what we mean by capitalism and what we want to do about capitalism.

We have now just completed the first quarter of the 21st century. And there are already plenty of contrasts with the 20th century. There has been a steady increase in globalization since the 1990s, which has had its impact by way of increasing the vulnerability of supply chains, changing the stakes of geopolitics, and driving domestic tensions around immigration. The impact of the economy on the planet, and the looming prospect of climate harms, is for many the biggest concern. Increasing attention is only recently being given to demographic projects: By the end of the 21st century, global population will be falling. Rather than stabilize, it may simply continue to fall precipitously. (The 20th century saw huge global population growth, but this was driven by a fall in infant and maternal mortality that mathematically cannot continue, and can no longer offset the global fall in birth rates that ran through the 20th century also.) The geopolitical outlook is also uncertain: There may be more wars, and fear of wars is by itself likely to have considerable economic impact, perhaps rolling back globalisation and trade.

It is these prospects that occupy the attention of authors in this collection. Some write about the big picture. In part this is about updated older ideas under 21st century conditions. 19th century perspectives suggested that capitalism will eventually produce enough that the economy can slow down, enhancing human quality of life. This idea has found followers in the contemporary de-growth movement, who draw on the force of current environmental concerns. Kohei Saito and Matthias Schmelzer’s respective pieces are complementary here but importantly distinct. Schmelzer focuses on the case for democratic planning as we address “the climate endgame”. Focusing on the political consequences of ecological disasters, such as cyclones, Schmelzer discusses the ways in which the aims of degrowth complement real and feasible reactions to catastrophes. This provides a kind of optimism, or at least a way forward, for how humanity might deal with a climate collapse. These approaches contrast with other apparent ways of weaning ourselves off the pursuit of economic growth. Part of the (stated) rationale for Donald Trump’s promotion of import tariffs was the idea that we consume too much and could get by with less. For de-growth advocates like Saito, this is of course true enough. But the problem with tariffs, and perhaps other aspects of economic nationalism, is that they do not fit into any sort of plan and will result merely in recessions that will tend to hurt the least advantaged, both in the countries that pursue policies of economic nationalism and those with which they formerly traded. Insofar as de-growth is about pursuing justice as well as economic reform, Saito’s paper is mainly about explaining the difference.
As for climate itself, Maja Groff and Eoin Jackson offer a sustained discussion of structural reforms. Here the emphasis is on financial and institutional reform, encompassing taxation, greener industrial policy, and relief of sovereign debt in the Global South. Although the focus is very much on the big picture, each proposal is shown to draw in some way on existing reports and scholarship, drawing on Groff’s lengthy professional experience working in cross-border legal cooperation.

Martin Mulsow takes a more conceptual approach to thinking about climate and the prospect of collapse. Capitalism, for Mulsow, is not simply an economic system but a wider cultural condition – one we sometimes associate with ‘modernity’. The impending climate collapse will upend the cultural status quo along with the economic status quo. This threatens a shift away from liberal/democratic cultures towards the conditions of a “wartime” society, in which key freedoms are suppressed as society tries to survive. To re-think capitalism, then, is to re-think what sort of dependency exists between our cultural condition and our economic one. The challenge of adaptation is as much about the former as it is about the latter.

Climate, then, looms large – as it should – but other questions persist. How capitalist are today’s developed economies really? Virtually all advanced economies rely on taxing income (from labour) and consumption rather than wealth, land, or inheritance. This made some sense during the high growth era of the 20th century, when people died soon after retiring. Recognition of demographic aging has already led governments to look at minor policy reforms that shift the tax-burden away from younger people, for example by raising retirement ages. But as a more foundational matter, why should capitalism favour the taxation of market exchanges, rather than the use of tax bases that, in an intuitive sense, lie outside the market? At least, the idea that the income tax is central to the organisation of developed economies is something of a dogma in discussions of capitalism, across the political spectrum. This is despite the fact that taxing income and consumption is likely to impede upward mobility more than taxing wealth and inheritance, especially when economic growth stagnates (and even if we, like the de-growthers, see upsides to this). I try to dislodge the dogma around the primacy of income tax in my own contribution.

Other contributors, drawing on experience as practitioners, take a narrower focus on specific but equally significant issues. José-Luis Chicoma examines the “neo-liberal diet”: Most of us live on food that is visually appealing, homogenous, ultra-processed, cheap, and addictive. Such food is also low on crucial nutrients. Prolonged consumption increases the frequency of chronic conditions, like diabetes and hypertension. Capitalism, for Chicoma, pushed the profitability of food production away from the real value of food as a way of keeping us healthy. Even school meal programs have led to children being fed spoiled food due to corruption and the lobbying power of industry in winning government contracts. And it has done so in ways that have been detrimental to producers, particularly small-scale farmers, as well as consumers. Only large structural reforms, that can overcome entrenched powerful interests in the industry, can undermine the dominance of the neo-liberal diet.

The expansion of the university sector was one of the features of the 20th century’s economic evolution mentioned earlier, when higher education became accessible to a wider demographic of students. The 20th century model, perhaps setting aside the USA, placed universities within the fiscal system – funded by taxation and tasked with primarily serving students who did not have to pay to attend. Now in the 21st century, the position of universities has moved away from this ideal. The final contribution is in dialogue form between Zeynep Alemdar and Giulia Dal Maso. Universities are under increasing pressure to ‘market’ themselves so as to increase revenue from alternative sources, such as tuition fees and research grants. Academics themselves need to reckon with a world of metrics – journal rankings, student evaluations, and so on. Periods of precarious work and frequent changes of institution (and country) are now common. Alemdar and Dal Maso share their experiences as scholars whose careers have involved navigating this system, and of the challenges facing those who seek to resist the forces of marketisation for the sake of scholarship and pedagogy.

Sayed Azam-Ali’s contribution is also focused on the university sector. In keeping with the accessibility of university teaching in the 20th century was the production of research itself: Rather than being produced to make money, knowledge was a public good where university researchers were funded by the state to carry out whichever research was most needed. States are increasingly less willing to do this, and expect research to be funded by competitive grants (some awarded by the state itself), or by industry. This has created wasteful competition and a tendency to publish – indeed plan entire careers – according to what sort of work will get funded, what will look good according to the key metrics, and so on. Azam-Ali draws special attention to the academic publishing industry, which charges large sums for libraries to access the material it possesses, produced by work that publishers have paid little to help produce. Teaching has become “modularized” as academic departments compete with each other to attract students and receive funding accordingly. All of this adds up to knowledge having been turned from a public good into a private good, and being less valuable and less accessible as a result. For Azam-Ali, this adds up to “academic capitalism”. Academics and universities need to find ways to resist “the demands of rankings and metrics” if they are to rediscover their ability to produce knowledge as a public good.

The summaries I’ve given are just that – more detail and insight can of course be found in the contributions themselves. I’ll close with some remarks about where these papers want to take us. By the end of this century things may well look very different from right now. It will be clearer which climate harms are the worst and where they are located. We will have a sharper sense of which of our current fiscal policies are capable of performing in light of demographic realities. Specific industries (like food and higher education) may be in a rather different shape, in large part because of the changing ecological and demographic background.

As ever, we might wonder whether we should we be pessimists or optimists about capitalism. The contributions gathered here are all in some way pessimistic, as they try to identify and understand some negative consequence, feature, or trajectory that we now face so long as the economic status quo persists. But all of the contributors try to say something about which reforms are needed, and explicitly avoid romanticising the past or simply suggesting that the status quo needs to be undone. At the same time, revolution has never had a good track record and the status quo is, I have suggested, not ‘pure’ capitalism anyway. Without losing sight of the big picture, debates about capitalism should focus on the details and anyone studying capitalism should seek to learn from the wider community of scholars and practitioners. Such was the spirit of the program at The New Institute, and ran strong among its Fellows and Staff. With these contributions we hope to share this spirit with the reader.

Special thanks go to Erck Rickmers, who made this truly horizon-broadening year possible for us. Thanks also to Diana Perry Schnelle, who edited the texts with great professionalism and care. Finally we are grateful to Britta Padberg, both for her leadership and support throughout the Fellowship program, and for her efforts in ensuring that this volume could be completed after Fellows had departed.