I’ve been working for months on a review of Sven Beckert’s new book Capitalism: A Global History. It’s a monster of a book—more than 1300 pages, with notes and the index—and I’ve had trouble writing my way into the review.

When I write, I label each draft with a number. If I’m writing an article, the first draft is Article 1, the second Article 2, and so on. I put a date on each draft, too, to remind myself when I started the draft. In this review, my Article 1 has a date—October 11, 2025—and then a blank page. Which means I circled around and around the piece for months and wrote nothing that I could even keep. Then the draft has a second date—December 16, 2025—followed by some words, which means that’s when I finally allowed myself to keep what I had written.

That was three weeks ago. In that time, I’ve come up with all of three paragraphs. No one has read them except my wife. Here they are:

Revolutions promise freedom. They deliver tyranny. Their leaders don’t oppose freedom; they misunderstand it. They’ve read too many old books. In the ancient world, citizens handled all the reins of power that held them in check. To ensure that no one besides them, neither a local despot nor a foreign people, got ahold of those reins, they imposed upon themselves a strict regime of virtue. Tracking each other’s movements, censoring one another’s thoughts, dictating everyone’s emotions, and cutting off, whenever necessary, a failing limb, they made themselves into a body politic, which they called free. Today, we call it dictatorial, authoritarian, woke. Though it’s better to ride than be ridden, modern lovers of liberty would rather quit the arena and retire to the quiet of their homes, where no one can interfere with them or their lives. That, they call freedom.

Countless versions of this argument have been mounted since the English Civil War. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the French liberal politician and political theorist Benjamin Constant gave it a sociological gloss and a capitalist spin. The ancients, he said, sought and satisfied their wants through plunder and war. They were, by necessity, an eventful and aroused citizenry. Freedom was that necessity. Modern people find their happiness in commerce. Their meetings are milder. If they make sacrifices, the returns must be individual and secured. Freedom is that security. For the ancients, freedom was an exercise of the polis. For the moderns, it is an enjoyment of the market. To a commercial people happily caught in the business of life, the frenzy of politics that the ancients savored and the revolutionary demands, the “compulsory filling” of our time with public life, feels like an intrusion and a burden, often worse. We have been made into the sort of people who cannot tolerate such privations of the self.

With the end of communism and rise of neoliberalism, we no longer worry about the totalizing demands of revolution. We grapple with the totalizing effects of capitalism. No movement of politics or religion has ever taken up as much of our time and space. The too many meetings of socialism have been swept away by the twenty-four-hour tide of working two or three jobs, in person, or on Teams, Slack, Asana, WhatsApp, Zoom, Meet, Chat. On any map of the Cold War, columns of red ink poured out of the Soviet Union, spanning south, east, and west. Today, capitalism is so global that we have no way to represent it. It’s just the map.

I liked the sentences, but they weren’t getting me anywhere. I did what I often do when I’m faced with this problem: I tussled and tinkered with the sentences for weeks. I knew that I was wasting time and circling the drain, that I was avoiding the next steps because I wasn’t certain of those steps. But I kept telling myself that I was doing something, intoning the words that the older writer E.I. Lonoff passes on to the wannabe writer Nathan Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer: “I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again.”

Yesterday afternoon, after grumbling about the writing process (for the umpteenth time) to a friend and his partner over lunch, I finally took the next steps. I came up with this:

The words capital and capitalist emerged without much fanfare in the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Capitalism entered the lexicon in the nineteenth, laced with venom and hate. “Long live capital!” cried Louis Blanc. “Long may we go on to attack capitalism, its mortal enemy, with even more intensity.”

As soon as I wrote those sentences, I realized that I had not just taken the next steps but actually had gotten, finally, to the point. I tell my students this all the time when I read their drafts. It’s only in the last paragraph that they finally state a thesis. Everything before that is just throat-clearing filler. I tell them to get rid of everything they’ve written, start with the very last sentence, and go from there.

That’s what I had done: write a lot of throat-clearing filler.

No one likes to hear this kind of thing, least of all me. But facts are facts. You can’t cheat the process; the house always wins. I had to face up to it: I had written a lot of pretty sentences that were wasting the reader’s time. I trashed those three paragraphs I had so lovingly tended to for nearly a month, and started again.

This is now the first sentence of the piece:

No one agrees on when, where, or how capitalism began, or whether it began at all, but everyone agrees that “capitalism,” the word, did not appear until the nineteenth century.

Now I can move.

Sometimes it just takes time. And a willingness to waste time. And then, on top of that, to throw out what little you’ve produced, no matter how pretty the sentences, in that wasted time. In Shakespeare’s play, Richard II says, “I wasted time, now doth time waste me.” I often torture myself with that line. In writing, while you do waste time, and time does waste you, you can, if you just keep going, and are patient with your crap, as Roth says, you’ll get to where you’re going. Or at least starting.