06/05/2026
Adam Smith has been kidnapped.
For two centuries, the priests of capitalism have dragged his name through every think tank, business school, campaign speech, and billionaire sermon as if "The Wealth of Nations" were a holy book of greed, competition, and "small government."
But the real Smith is more dangerous than the cartoon they sell.
Smith begins with labor.
He admits the worker once "enjoyed the whole produce."
He names "the appropriation of land" and "the accumulation of stock."
He exposes masters who are "always and everywhere" combined against wages.
He attacks monopoly.
He requires the state.
He warns that debt makes war easier and more hidden.
That is not neoliberal scripture.
That is a bourgeois confession.
My new Weaponized Intellects review reads "The Wealth of Nations" against itself - not as an actual description of historical capitalism, but as capitalism’s clean philosophical alibi: labor without power, property without theft, exchange without dispossession, national wealth without colonies, plantations, enclosures, slave ships, debt ledgers, and armed states.
Smith gave capitalism one of its most elegant self-portraits.
Historical materialism returns that portrait to the crime scene.
This review is not a book report. It is a cross-examination.
Capitalism after the robbery.
Read it here:
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is a twisted tale masquerading as a free-market manifesto, one that defies the naive faith bestowed upon it by neoliberals. It exposes capitalism’s fundamen…