In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Ewa Nizalowska, covers the new article by Chiara Cordelli, University of Chicago, “What Is the Wrong of Capitalism?”
What, exactly, is the problem with capitalism? Political theorists have traditionally rooted their analysis of capitalism in questions about how goods are distributed under capitalism; how bosses interact with their employees in the workplace; and how bosses extract surplus value from wage workers. However, these critiques have tended to fall short of identifying issues that are unique to capitalism or identifying forms of injustice that could not be plausibly resolved without upending the current economic order.
In response to the traditional critiques’ shortcomings, political theorists have increasingly rooted their diagnoses of the wrongs of capitalism in a tradition known as radical republicanism. Radical republicans see capitalism’s injustice as a matter of structural domination. At its most basic, the radical republican critique of capitalism describes capitalism as unjust because it gives those who own the means of production (business owners) the power to dominate those who do not.
In a recent APSR article, political theorist Chiara Cordelli challenges the prominent radical republican critique of capitalism. By focusing on the process of labor, Cordelli argues, the radical republican critique neglects another key site where capitalism reproduces itself: the mode of investment. All capitalist production, she argues, requires a process she calls “capitalization.” Simply put, a good is capitalized when it is given monetary value based on expectations about how much profit it can generate in the future. This process of investment is the key to how capitalism reproduces itself, because business owners can only keep producing goods if those goods are expected to yield future profit. Cordelli views capitalization as inherently future-oriented: capitalization depends on investment, and decisions about investment are made on the basis of subjective expectations about the future.
“Under capitalism, citizens experience a gap between their present society (which is a result of past investments) and their own actions and values.”Guided by the idea that theorists have neglected capitalism’s mode of investment, Cordelli argues that capitalism’s distinctive wrong is that it privatizes the power to build the future. According to Cordelli, capitalism leaves it to the impersonal forces of investment markets, rather than to citizens, to decide what values the future is built on. She argues that her account is a more promising alternative to both the radical republican critique and earlier critiques of capitalism.
Cordelli argues that the loss of our collective power and involvement in the future is best understood as a form of alienation¾a relation of estrangement between citizens and their sociopolitical order. Under capitalism, citizens experience a gap between their present society (which is a result of past investments) and their own actions and values. The problem with capitalism, then, is not primarily that it subjects us to the arbitrary decisions of bosses or markets, but rather that it submits us to the decisions of the impersonal forces of the investment market.
Cordelli’s novel account of the wrong of capitalism holds implications for how we think of the goals of anti-capitalist politics. If she is right, then we cannot think of socialism only as a matter of overcoming domination in the workplace. Rather, the project of socialism ought to allow citizens to reclaim control over the investment process, thereby allowing citizens to collectively shape our future.
- Ewa Nizalowska is a PhD candidate in political theory at Cornell University with research interests in American political thought, feminist theory, and theories of political economy and empire. Her dissertation examines how early to mid-twentieth-century radicals theorized the organization of economic power in the United States and strategized for its rearrangement. Her work has been supported by, among others, the American Political Science Association, the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University, and the Yan P. Lin Centre at McGill University
- CORDELLI, CHIARA. 2025. “What Is the Wrong of Capitalism?” , American Political Science Review, 1–16.
- About the APSA Public Scholarship Program.