Crack-Up Capitalism

Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

By: Quinn Slobodian

Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright

In a revelatory dispatch from the frontier of capitalist extremism, an acclaimed historian of ideas shows how free marketeers are realizing their ultimate goal: an end to nation-states and the constraints of democracy.

Look at a map of the world and you’ll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether.

Crack-Up Capitalism follows the most notorious radical libertarians—from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel—around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism. Historian Quinn Slobodian leads us from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world’s oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy.

A masterful work of economic and intellectual history, Crack-Up Capitalism offers both a new way of looking at the world and a new vision of coming threats. Full of rich details and provocative analysis, Crack-Up Capitalism offers an alarming view of a possible future.

A Macmillan Audio production from Metropolitan Books.

©2023 Quinn Slobodian (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“Ranging from Liechtenstein to Somalia, and from Hong Kong to Silicon Valley, Quinn Slobodian's Crack-Up Capitalism exposes how zones of exception promise capitalism an escape from the confines of the modern state and the constraints of democracy. Revelatory reading. A worthy successor to Slobodian’s brilliant Globalists.”—Adam Tooze, author of Crashed

“In Crack-Up Capitalism, Quinn Slobodian takes us on a wild ride through the fenced-in compounds and failed states of today’s capitalist world, and invites us to imagine a future where the rich have privatized safety, turned working people into a disposable servant class, and bought entire countries outright. This sharp and wickedly entertaining book is a necessary field guide to the LARPers, bloggers, and grifters of the libertarian and anarcho-capitalist world, a warning that they are closer to fulfilling their fantasies than we might think, and a clarion call for collective action to preserve—and greatly expand—democracy as we know it.”—Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back

“Revelatory. In this head-spinner of a book, Quinn Slobodian shows how zones, islands, micronations, gated communities, and cyber realms are remaking our planet. The capitalist future they portend isn’t a borderless utopia but a jurisdictional shatter belt, where democracy is a distant dream.”—Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire

Solid look at what our future might be like

In this divisive and tumultuous time across the US and many developed countries this book explores what the alternative might look like. Just don’t look for the definitive answer, as this book is more of a brainstorm rather than a path to an exact solution.

Central to modern debates

A must read for the current thinker. This book covers the basic principles of the neoliberal quagmire we face today.

Everyone Needs To Read This Book

This book is a well-researched and concise accounting of one of the important ways the capitalist class and corrupt governments are taking over our lives, our resources and our freedoms. Everyone should know about this nefarious paradigm.

Insightful read/listening

Intriguing writings shine lights over the role of crack-up capitalism played in the fast dissolving and turmoil world with history and facts. Everyone should read it, for at least to know why and to think independently .

Terrible, but still worth a read.

This book has all the tropes -- medieval history that isn't so, people with no learning curves nor character arcs, missing important factors (pretty much only one woman mentioned other than in passing, that being Ayn Rand) and the assumption that the people who think that they have all the power actually have that power while the rank and file people are their toys. The author's claim to Metis heritage makes his assumption of powerlessness of any but the people at the very top particularly strange.