It's extremely misleading to talk about Hannah Arendt's suspicion of capitalism as if it's a defining feature of her thought. What she despised was progress fo

It's extremely misleading to talk about Hannah Arendt's suspicion of capitalism as if it's a defining feature of her thought. What she despised was progress for progress' sake, a feeling she traced to the (supposed) ancient Greek prejudice against productivity. Like the article mentions, in her hierarchy of human activity, action is above work which is above labor. Our society, she argues, has become a laboring society, where public space (space reserved for action) has been expropriated. She would prefer a society based around action. She never claimed that capitalism failed to produce abundance but, rather, she questions the idea of productivity and abundance as ends-in-themselves. Arendt was extremely critical of 20th century socialist societies, which she saw as stripping people of actual freedoms that existed in capitalist societies and replacing them with illusory freedoms. For her, socialism, as implemented in the real world, was a continuation of what she disliked about capitalism (the expropriation of the public sphere). Moreover, she viewed collective ownership as a contradiction in terms.