On April 7, 2026, Social Science Matrix hosted an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, by Trevor Jackson, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Professor Jackson was joined in conversation by Chenzi Xu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, and Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor of History, moderated.
The Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public. This event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Economics, History, and Sociology.
About the Book
Today, virtually the entire world lives under the economic system called capitalism, and most people alive have never known another. But as the economic historian Trevor Jackson argues in this powerful book, it wasn’t always capitalism, it didn’t have to be capitalism, and capitalism didn’t have to be this way. How did it happen?
With a firm grasp on history and economics and a keen eye for the telling anecdote, Jackson explains the rise of capitalism from the discovery of the New World to the First World War. A fast-paced work of global history that explores the role of Chinese mulberry trees, Dutch tulips, and whale blubber — along with Spanish conquistadors, Mexican mine workers, and English bankers — The Insatiable Machine traces capitalism’s development from the accidental construction of an international monetary system to the creation of banking, the emergence of a new form of slavery, fossil–fuel industrialization, and finally the global capitalist system spread by imperialism.
Podcast and Transcript
(upbeat electronic music)
[MARION FOURCADE]
Hello. Hi, everybody. How wonderful to see so much of an audience.
And we also have an audience online because so many people registered for this that we had to also put a live stream. So welcome. Thank you all for being here.
My name is Marion Fourcade. I’m the director of Social Science Matrix. Now, it is always a very distinctive pleasure to host an Authors Meet Critics panel for a new book from someone in the Social Sciences Division.
And in this case, it feels a bit uncanny because just a little over two years ago, we were just here in the same room discussing another book by Trevor Jackson. This new opus that will be discussed today is ambitious in both bite and breadth. The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World traces where capitalism came from, how it spread across the globe, and how it came to be the dominant way of organizing life.
The topic, of course, is a well-traveled territory, so can we learn something new and exciting? And I guess all of us here are eagerly awaiting an answer, and we have a really panel of rock stars to produce that answer. Now, before I turn over to the panelists, let me just say a few things.
First, this event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Departments of Economics, Sociology, and History. Also, let me mention a few upcoming events. So tomorrow, especially, I want to draw your attention because tomorrow we have another outstanding panel, a Matrix on Point on the U.S. dollar hegemony in transition.
If you want to understand what’s going on in the world today and how that might affect the U.S. dollar, then please come, and we’ll actually have Chenzi again tomorrow to talk about this, you know, the dollar and stable coins and everything that’s happening in the monetary world. Uh, on Thursday, we also have a great author-meets-critics panel on Charles Briggs’ book, Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine, where we will have actually a real ER doctor debating an academic, which doesn’t happen very often. So please come for that one too.
I think it’s going to be really fantastic. And then, as you can see, we have still, you know, a lot of really important and interesting events until the end of the semester. Now, Let me introduce our moderator, Abhishek Kaicker.
Abhishek is a historian of Persianate South Asia with focus on the history of the Mughal Empire. He’s interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts, early modern global history, religion, politics, and the city, and more generally, in the continuities between pre-colonial and post-colonial South Asia. His first book, The King, The People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi, which came out in 2020, and we had a fantastic panel here as well, shows how ordinary urbanites emerge as assertive political subjects in the Mughal capital.
And I won’t pronounce the Mughal name. I’ll just say it’s Delhi over the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is now engaged in two new major research projects.
One, a prehistory of the British conquest of Bengal in 1757 from the perspective of the Mughal Empire, and another on the transformation of Mughal modes of popular politics into modern modes of communalism in North India under colonial rule in the 18th and 19th century. More immediately, he is writing a biography of Anand Ram Mukhlis, an 18th century courtier, scribe, essayist, diarist, poet, connoisseur, gourmand, and inveterate aficionado of all things Delhi. Well, you could say Delhi in both senses, I guess.
And finally, together with Professors Asad Ahmed and Lawrence McCrea, Abhishek is now an editor of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, which is a new peer-reviewed venue for emerging conversations on the intellectual history and culture of pre-modern South Asia. So without further ado, I will now turn it over to Abhishek.
[ABHISHEK KAICKER]
Okay. Thank you very much, Marion, for that very generous, too generous introduction. It’s my pleasure to introduce our distinguished panelists today, and I’m so happy to be able to do that to such a wonderful crowd of colleagues, students, former students and friends who I recognize in the audience.
So it’s delighted to see Berkeley at strengths. Let me begin with my colleague, Professor Trevor Jackson. He’s an economic historian who researches inequality and crisis, mostly, but not exclusively.
In fact, not at all exclusively anymore in early modern Europe. His first book, Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690 to 1830, was published by Cambridge University Press very, very recently in fall 2022. His current research interests focus on the problem of gluts, overproduction, and overaccumulation since the 17th century.
And he also has an ongoing research interest in the histories of extinction and catastrophe, as well as early modern occupational health. Many of these themes appear in his recent book, which is a synthetic history of early modern capitalism entitled The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, which was just published by W. W. Norton. And he obviously, as you know, writes about money, banking, and economic crisis for publications such as The Nation, the New York Review of Books, Dissent, and The Baffler.
Let me now mention our panelists. So our panelists include Professor Xu Chenzi an assistant professor of economics with research at the intersection of finance, international economics, and economic history. Her work focuses on the relationship between financial institutions and the flow of capital and goods, with a particular interest in understanding how historical events shape and impact modern outcomes.
Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, so welcome to the right side of the bay.
(laughter)
She holds a BA and PhD from Harvard in economics and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in economic history. Professor Dylan Riley studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism, and knowledge regimes in a broad comparative and historical perspective. His first book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870 to 1945, argues that fascist regimes arose paradoxically on the basis of strong civil societies in the pre-fascist period.
And I’m wondering if we may expect a revised edition anytime in the near future with further case studies that bring it to the present. Reviewers have called this book the most original and provocative new analysis of the preconditions of fascism that has appeared in years, and brilliant and courageous. A second book, How Societies and States Count: A Comparative Genealogy of Censuses, with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed, argues against state-centered accounts of official information, that censuses work best where there is intense interaction between state and society.
So Professor Riley has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Sociology, Social Science History, and he’s a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review. So with these eminently suitable colleagues, I now turn the floor over to Professor Jackson to speak for about twenty minutes.
[TREVOR JACKSON]
Great. Well, thank you, Abhishek, for that very kind introduction, and thank you to Marianne. Thank you also, Sarah and Chuck, and the staff of the Matrix.
I don’t know if Ava or if Amanda are here. Amanda, if you are here, you’re also in my footnotes. So thank you for that.
And thank you, all of you, for coming out. It’s great to see a lot of familiar faces, including many I haven’t seen for a long time, students and colleagues and advisors and many others. So thank you all for coming.
What an intriguing,
(laughter)
what an intriguing transition that was. But thank you for the tonal shift, because I was trying to think of how to pull off my own abrupt tonal shift, but in a different direction. Which is to say that I feel it would in some ways be remiss for me not to note that we all came out today and took times out of our day, nonetheless under the shadow of war and genocide.
And that it may seem a bit, I don’t know, pretentious or aggrandizing of me to begin that way. But I also think it’s something of a dereliction of our civic and social function as academics to have a platform and not say something to that effect. And I consider it a failure on our part of universities writ large, including this one specifically, the American Historical Association included, to have said nothing against any of the ongoing conflicts in the world.
And I think it’s actually relevant to what I want to say, because one thing I wanted to do with this book was to persuade the general public that history is not a thing separate from us that is over and that we have no say in, but rather that we are historical subjects. And my historical subjectivity was formed predominantly by the Iraq War of 2003 and the 2008 crisis. And my first book was about impunity, and it’s true that that was a history of the 18th century and financial crises and the separation of capitalism as an economic sphere from the political or the moral or the legal.
But it was also a case of me being so angry about the thoroughgoing criminality of the Bush administration and nobody being held accountable for it, that I did something truly drastic, which was write a history book about the 18th century. Um, And so, you know, a lot has happened since 2003 to 2008. Uh, a lot of books have been written.
There’s been a lot of very good critical scholarship, um, but it’s also led us here. And I spent much of 2004 to 2006, especially, being deeply afraid that George W. Bush might do something to tamper with elections in blue cities and blue states, that there would be a war for oil in Iran, that there would be a coup in Venezuela, that there would be mass surveillance and a right-wing consolidation of the media, and that a right-wing paramilitary would be disappearing people without due process off the streets. And here we are.
And so a difficult question that I want to pose that in my mind hangs over this book, and indeed everything that I am doing, and maybe everything that all of us are doing, which is we’ve written a lot, but what has it done? What has it led to? What are books for?
What are history books for in our current moment? And I’m not promising that I will answer that, but it’s a question that I want to pose, and it’s a question that I want to try to take seriously. But as much as I’d like to derail all of this to talk about anti-war foreign policy, that’s not why you all came here.
Like me, you came here to hear from our panelists. So I’m going to try to get through the remainder of my remarks relatively quickly. But I thought it might be helpful to give a kind of very fast overview of the narrative arc of the book, just in case some of you have not done the reading.
I think we have a QR code from the publishers. I’m told that there were two copies at Moe’s and they’ve both been sold, which is two more copies than my first book sold.
(laughter)
It’s a small portion size. You know, we recommend ordering three to four per person. So I thought I’d give you a brief narrative arc of the book and give you a sense of what I was hoping to do with it and maybe finish up by spoiling the ending.
Um, so the book is a synthetic history of capitalism, which is to say it’s not a generalized economic history of the world. It’s not a history of economic growth. It’s not a history of global trade.
There are many such books. They are very good. They’ve informed how I’ve tried to do this, but it’s an attempt to tell a synthetic history of what I’ve tried to argue is a coherent, organic phenomenon, a kind of way of organizing economic and social life that I’ve called capitalism.
And so you might think of this not as the history of capitalism, but as a history of the capitalism, as a kind of coherent story of one thing rather than, say, cultural behaviors, castes of mind, different perhaps social affects. But rather as like one continuous or evolving economic formation. And so the book begins with the destruction of the old world, the pre-capitalist world, which had reproduced itself with a high degree of stability over and over for generations.
Perhaps a thousand years. I say perhaps a thousand years because every time I describe what I think of as something as constitutive of capitalist modernity, a Roman historian always invariably tells me that they had those things in the Roman Empire. Um, I always believe them.
They’re very persuasive. But at least from, say, the reforms of Diocletian, in the fourth century until perhaps the Black Death of 1348, we can think of a relatively stable world that was relatively equal between regions, relatively unmonetized with relatively little wage labor, most things determined by custom and tradition rather than prices, not available for sale in markets, and especially very few markets in what I call the factors of production: land, labor, and capital, the things that make other things. And that world persisted, perhaps always at the edge of subsistence, which doesn’t necessarily mean everybody’s starving, but did mean that disaster was always nearby.
And it was a world, perhaps, with limited possibilities for large-scale sustained economic change. We might see efflorescences of economic growth around the world. They might last as much as a century, but they’re not persistent continual economic change.
And so that world comes apart through a series of contingent large-scale events, the Black Death being one of them, which undercuts the land-labor ratio in Europe. We can think of the Reconquista, so a political process of violence between Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East. Perhaps the beginning of the Little Ice Age, or at least the end of the medieval warm period.
But these things together begin to undercut the basis of what used to be called feudalism in Europe and produce an outward expansion of European empires. Most notably for the story that I’m telling, the Portuguese discover gold in the city of Ceuta in what today is still Spain. What today is in fact the bleeding edge of the enforcement of the European border against migration from Africa.
But in that city, they discover gold that had been transshipped across the Sahara, and the Portuguese go out in search of this gold, and that inaugurates a long process of European overseas expansion and exploration. For our purposes, and here I am greatly simplifying, in the New World, the Spanish conquistadors discover silver. They discover it in the course of a truly horrifying demographic calamity.
And so when we think of the end of the old order, in the New World, the end of the old order truly was the end. But the Spanish conquistadors discover silver in Zacatecas and Potosí, and that silver unleashes a wave of monetization in a process that we call the price revolution. And so the price revolution is sort of revolutionary in two ways.
It’s both an increased process of inflation across about 150 years on a scale that had never been seen before. Now, by our standards, very, very small, but unlike anything that anyone had ever experienced, and at a sufficient velocity that it was perceptible to people at the time. But it’s also revolutionary in the sense that that process incentivized more people to exchange more things for money and prices than had been the case before.
And as we know, inflation doesn’t mean all prices rise at the same rate. What it means is that some prices of more elastic, more monetizable things rise at a faster rate than other things that are more governed by custom and tradition. If you are on a 99-year lease, you will not be able to change that lease unless you can break it in some way, and raise the rent in a way that if you’re on a one-year lease, you can.
Right? And so this has the effect of scrambling both international positions as Spain especially experiences an influx of silver, a series of mismanagement, bad decisions around wars that undercut the fiscal basis of the state, and a collapse in debt and inflation. We can think also of the undercutting of the monetary system of the Ottoman Empire, a continual process of monetary derangement around the world.
But it also has the effect of scrambling class positions and helping to break apart this older, more stable world. Out of the wreckage of the destruction of that system, we get the emergence of new, I argue, the first capitalist polities, most notably the Dutch Republic in the first half of the 17th century, where we see the development of marketized agriculture, wage labor, financial institutions, things like the Dutch East India Company that we can think of as having an IPO, as they make their shares permanent. and these institutions, in turn, cross the channel.
Perhaps they’re invited, perhaps they’re not, in 1688, and form the basis of a new British capitalism by the end of the 17th century. Now that, of course, coincides with class changes, the beginning of enclosure, large-scale economic change in Britain itself. Whatever the case, by the end of the 17th century, I think we can speak of a Britain and a Dutch Republic as being fully formed capitalist societies.
And those capitalist societies in turn set about doing many things, and one of the things that they do is creating an Atlantic Empire. Now, that Atlantic Empire itself does many things. It transmits new forms of capitalist property, And so we can think of the creation of capitalist property relations in the New World.
There’s a terrific book about this by Allan Greer called Property and Dispossession. It creates new patterns of trade, a kind of Atlantic division of labor. It creates the need for long-term capital investment.
It also creates a new form of economic life on the slave plantations in the Caribbean. Now, as many of you know, the debate about the relationship between slavery and capitalism or slavery and the Industrial Revolution is one of the most heated and, I think, unresolved debates in economic history. For our purposes, I am persuaded both that the slave trade enriched many capitalists across the Atlantic world.
It also produced a series of delicious, addictive tropical products that could not be grown domestically in Western Europe, had to be purchased in the market. And so that incentive to purchase in the market led to what you might call, and indeed some of us in this room have called an industrious revolution, meaning more people in Western Europe, in order to buy these delicious tropical products, oriented more of their labor towards the market. They worked more days, more hours, more for market money in order to buy these goods in the market.
And that meant the creation of a modern labor force and modern consumer culture. And that connects in some ways the sugar-dominated slave economies of the Caribbean of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century to economic change within Europe itself. It doesn’t quite add up to a smoking gun connecting the cotton of slavery to the Industrial Revolution in Britain, but it perhaps connects a series of preconditions.
And instead, for a very widely debated set of reasons, in the eighteenth century, Britain begins the creation of what we might think of as modern economic growth. And so this is what we call the Industrial Revolution. And I try to argue in the book that one way of thinking about the Industrial Revolution, which more than a century ago was described as a thrice-squeezed orange, meaning all of the juice was out of it, so it’s very difficult to wring anything new out of the Industrial Revolution.
But one way to think about it is as a kind of metabolic shift. a metabolization of the world. That in fact what economic growth is, is an increase in energy consumption per capita, as it has continued to be ever since.
And in fact, there are many people around this campus and many people around the world working on something that we are calling an energy transition, ignoring the fact that there’s good evidence to suggest that there never has been an energy transition. That in fact it isn’t transition, it’s addition. The year in which the world consumed the most coal for energy was 2025.
The year in which the world consumed the most wood for energy was also 2025. We’re on track to exceed both of those in 2026. So the Industrial Revolution represents this rupture, and a drawing down of the stock of energy, unleashed in a form of economic growth that had never existed before, right?
And that produces enormous economic transitions, among them a transition in labor relations as we move from expensive labor to cheap coal, which was readily abundant in Britain. That has the effect of undercutting the basis of labor controlling what you might call access to the means of production. Something violently resisted and violently suppressed in the early nineteenth century.
It also had the effect of producing new technologies like railroads, like steamships, like telegraphs, like machine guns, biotechnologies like quinine, the sorts of things that make global empires easier to achieve. And so we might say after the Industrial Revolution, the price of global empire fell, and Europeans bought more of it. And so the book ends with this construction of global capitalist empires on this basis of these new industrial technologies.
That world is one of what we can call a global division of labor. Different countries either choose to or are compelled, in a colonial sense, to specialize in the export of given commodities onto the global market, a global market that’s integrated because of the cost advantages of these new technologies. And so that’s a world of relatively rapid growth, relatively rapid change, high rates of trade, right?
Transformations in everyday life, but it’s also a profoundly unequal, a profoundly unstable world. Right? There’s a financial crisis, an international financial crisis in 1825, 1836, 1848, 1856, 1866, 1873, 1878, 1885, 1893, 1896, 1907, and then 1914.
But otherwise, it worked fine. Um,
(laughter)
And so this world, I argue, is sort of the first moment where we can say that capitalism was the dominant economic form of organizing economic life across the globe. And so in some ways it’s a close parallel to our contemporary moment. I don’t want that to sound too much like I’m subscribing to the new Gilded Age thesis that many of my colleagues do.
I have a variety of skepticisms around that. But there is something prefigurative about this moment that I think is still instructive for us. And that world ended in disaster.
The capitalist empires eventually come into conflict with one another, and the world blunders into the First World War. And so the book ends in an inter– a moment of interwar crisis. A moment when between, say, 1917 and 1933, capitalism appears to be at its global low point.
It appeared to have blundered into World War I, was unable to resolve its problems, was unable to get out of the Great Depression, exactly as alternatives emerged in what at the time appeared to be a more efficient way of organizing the world. That’s not to say that it was. That’s not the way that it turned out, but I wanted to end on a sort of destabilizing periodization, because I think we’re so apt to think of capitalism as being an efficient form of producing the future that I think we lose track of the fact that there was a moment when capitalism was associated with the 19th century and as a broad sense, even amongst sympathetic observers like Joseph Schumpeter, that capitalism was over.
It, in fact, was not efficient. It was anarchic. It was redundant, right?
Right, it’s an economic system that produces 40 different kinds of mustard. Um, uh, on the corner of Gilman and San Pablo, there’s a Chevron across the street from a Chevron. This isn’t efficient, right?
Well, well, they are with different prices, right? Right. Um, right.
So, right, this is something that observers would have looked at and said, “This isn’t efficiency.” “This is anarchy.” “This is redundancy.”
“This makes no sense.” Well, the future will be a series of planned economies. Well, that’s not what happened, right?
Those all themselves ran into disaster such that there, I think, is no viable alternative in the world today. And so the book ends there, in part because there are many great economic histories of the 20th century, and I didn’t want to be redundant to them. I also felt that if I added the 20th century, the book would end up being 1,344 pages.
And I didn’t wanna do that. But I also thought that the novel periodization would be helpful, that it would be a way of provoking the reader to think more about what large-scale systemic change might mean. Because the attempt of the book is to narrate the creation of capitalism, although nobody intended it, nobody realized what they were doing.
Everyone’s trying to solve short-term problems that collectively add up to something else. And so I wanted us to think about what that looked like and what it might look like again. And so just to wrap us up, I want to return to my initial question.
Not to answer it in good scholarly fashion, but to pose it in a different way. So this is how the book ends. I’m going to spoil the ending of history for you.
If asked, many people would say that the reason to learn history is to learn lessons from the past, perhaps to avoid repeating past mistakes. But almost no historian believes that to be the case. Instead, historians emphasize context and difference.
But that does not mean there is no reason to study history or that history has no contemporary relevance. Instead, history is a radical, emancipatory, imaginative act. When we learn history, we are learning that nothing about the world around us is natural, permanent, or inevitable.
Instead, it was all created by people, which means it can be changed by people. The world does not have to be this way. If the world used to be different, it can be different again.
The specific challenge posed by capitalism is exactly the way that it has organized social life around individual struggles for survival instead of around intentional democratic collective action. The first step to any kind of change is understanding how that happened, that it could have happened differently, and thus to recognize that capitalism has a history, which means it may also have an end. So instead of easily applied lessons, history, I think, offers us other things.
Community, solidarity, and meaning begin with the recognition of a shared condition and shared struggle. And history helps us realize that we share conditions and struggles, not just across space, but also across time. The central argument of this book is that there was nothing inevitable about the capitalism that we have.
And that means when we recognize it and attempt to resist it or to change it, when we struggle for a more equal and a better future, we do so in community and solidarity with those who came before us. And when we recognize our community with the past and the fact that history is not separate things that have already happened, but rather that we are in it and of it, we can see that we are not so isolated and atomized as we have been led to believe. The knowledge that the world has ended before is also the knowledge that something comes after the end, something which is impossible to imagine, as it is impossible to imagine the kinds of people who will inhabit that future and how they will look back on us as historical actors.
That recognition, in turn, allows us to see that the struggle of people against this system is also immortal. There is no escape from our march through time, and we don’t know where we’re going, but we’re not alone.
[CHENZI XU]
Thank you so much for having me here. It’s really such an honor. And unlike Trevor, I cannot speak without a substantial set of notes.
And so you’ll have to bear with me that I did the economist thing of making slides as a crutch. So I’ve been a huge fan of Trevor’s work for a long time. Our PhDs overlapped a little bit, and we both had a lot of interest in financial history.
So I first came across his work as a graduate student, and I’ve always found it very insightful, so well-written, and as you just saw, he’s such a great presenter. So this was just a really great opportunity for me to read his book carefully and to think about it and to put it into the context of how I think about the world, or if I might dare, how economists think about the world. So that’s where my comments will come from.
And I’m going to start with the central thesis that I saw in this book, which is this argument that capitalism was not inevitable. It’s built on a set of institutions that are essentially constructs of different societies over time. And on the hopeful note, we can think that, you know, the failures of capitalism also means that there’s a future in which maybe we can rebuild some of the, um, the, uh, the issues that it has.
Okay, so what I wanted to discuss is that it was really enlightening to me that literally the language of how capitalism is described, this market for factors, is exactly how we today teach economics. And then I want to talk about what capitalism does well, which is to say what markets solve, but also what… what that comes… what price that comes with.
So the price of having a price for everything. And then finally, where I would say economists have some tools to think about the failures of capitalism and where it really doesn’t, and where that leaves us. Okay.
So, one equation. For those of you who remember undergrad, you might remember the general production function, right? This is the way in which we think about the world, that anything that is in the world, this output, generic Y output, is built on these foundation blocks of technology, capital, land, labor, and that these different factors of production and the output are all traded in this market where the prices are based on basically how much a factor contributes to the final output and how much the final output contributes to your happiness, or we would say, your utility.
Okay? So what was very striking for me is that the way we teach this equation is that the market for everything, pricing everything, that happens in a frictionless benchmark. This is a world where markets work perfectly.
There are no contractual frictions. There are no losses of legal protections. There’s no information asymmetries.
But all of those things I just listed are very real parts of the world, and in fact, that’s how the world starts. But we call those frictions, right? So like the world begins as a frictionless benchmark, and the world evolves with these additional frictions that we put in that are essentially deviations.
But, um, in fact, of course, the history tells us that this, this frictionless benchmark is not the starting point. The starting point is the world full of frictions, where we then built institutions to try to deal with these frictions, and then eventually created a world where we could support markets in a reasonably developed way. Okay?
And so I think the first point I wanted to make was that it was very helpful to see how just the way we teach economics today, which is fundamentally a market-based economy, is one in which we kind of invert the history, and we start with where, you know, we might imagine perfect markets will go, but certainly it’s not where we are and certainly not where we started. Okay. That being said, I do think there are a couple of things that capitalism does really well that, I would at least like to spend just a moment on, which is that it, it coordinates millions, billions of people in a way that personal exchange based on smaller societies or personal knowledge just is not capable of handling.
And this has allowed us to specialize so that we don’t all have to know literally how to make our own food. It allows us to focus on the things that we are best able to do, and then to use the returns of what we specialized in to buy the things that we need. And so, from an economist’s point of view, this allocation of resources to where it can be more efficient is a huge engine of growth, and it’s one of the reasons why we do have this large increase in living standards today relative to the past.
The other element that’s, I would say, virtuous about markets is that they are anonymous, or at least theoretically they are anonymous. They don’t care who you are, where you grow up. They don’t care about your religion, your kinship, your class, so long as you offer something to sell, right?
And so for someone where all of these things that I’ve outlined might not come to your advantage, then the market is actually beneficial. So, you know, there are these great elements of coordination and anonymity, but of course, this also comes with a price, which is that markets fundamentally are dehumanizing. And we take these elements of life that are relational, that are embedded in human meaning, and we squash them into a very one-dimensional price, right?
Like your home is part of the housing stock. The care of children and elderly is part of the healthcare market, the childcare sector. What you spend your day doing is your human capital, right?
And so this idea that we have commoditized things that were not meant to be sold is an old idea, but it does come with this cost, which is we can harness resources efficiently, but not everything in the world maybe should be viewed as just a pure resource. Okay. So, you know, I would say that one thing that economists can do with the failures of capitalism and, you know, this idea of prices for everything is that we can think about where prices fail us.
So one example of the environmental failures is a failure of prices as they are currently dictated by the market. So today, what we pay for gas doesn’t incorporate all the future costs to future generations, To the world. But theoretically, it could.
Theoretically, we could pay that price, and if we did, we would use so much less of it. Okay? And so again, theoretically, we have a solution for this.
We can impose taxes, we can impose regulations, but this is, I think, where e-economics or markets fails, which is we don’t have solutions for what we should be optimizing. We have to have an objective in order to create a solution, and economists are just– or the profession of economics is not designed to think about what the objective should be. Okay?
And so let me be very clear about a place where I think we are particularly weak, which is that the market economy and the way of thinking about the world as a theory of production and a theory of exchange, We have a very large set of tools and a very broad language for thinking about all many different aspects of that part of the world. What we don’t have so well-developed is a theory of allocation. And the reason is we’ve just kind of always abstracted away from that.
We’ve said, “Okay, well, you know, you have some factors of production. Those factors should get whatever they contribute. And everybody owns factors.
You know, we’re endowed with land, we’re endowed with labor. The households own the firms. You know, it’s just like the distribution of the allocation ex ante has not necessarily been of interest.
But of course, history makes it very clear that that is a fundamental determinant of, you know, when we think about who owns the land, how did they come to own it? And so the examples in the book, enclosure, slavery, colonial conquest. The initial distribution of the factors of production are not just a harmless detail.
They are something that if we’re going to think about production, we need to think about allocation. And so markets allocate according to the returns that a factor produces, but it doesn’t tell us how to reallocate if we have an issue with the initial, um, ownership. Okay, so I’m going to wrap up and just say in closing that, you know, I do think markets do some things incredibly well.
That’s part of why I think capitalism is hard to replace, but it has no normative tools. And so maybe, you know, a more humble objective is to supplement it with a way of thinking about how we should be allocating our resources as opposed to just how we have been. So thank you very much.
(applause)
[DYLAN RILEY]
Okay, let me… Can you guys hear me?
Or I need to talk into this thing here? Okay, great. Um, so thanks very much for coming out to this.
Thanks for inviting me to be on the panel. This has been really interesting so far. I just want to, first of all, give a real plug to this book, as much as Trevor has already done so.
It’s a really remarkable feat to compress as much history as there is in this book in such an economical way. And it’s just… It’s also, I mean, it’s quite funny at certain points.
There’s this kind of humor that comes through the prose, which I think is really admirable. And you know, there’s a real analysis here that I think is really, really worth a careful read. One of the things about the book that I appreciated, and from which I learned actually a great deal, was the incorporation of environmental history into the history of capitalism.
I’m not going to talk about that. I’m just going to say that I appreciate that as a dimension that makes this text pretty distinctive. But in the interest of time, I’m going to just get fairly quickly into what I see as the sort of central analytic issues that the book raises, and I’m just going to propose a couple of sort of methodological, almost sort of ideas that I think would be worth extending and thinking about in our discussion of The Insatiable Machine.
So the, the issue, what is the central question that the book is really focusing on? I mean, the way I read it, the central thing here is how to understand the connection, on the one hand, between the history of European colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, and on the other, the development of something called capitalism. So it’s really, I think this is the core of, for me, the core analytic sort of issue that the book poses.
And I think we can break that down into three more specific questions. The first of them is the question about the relationship between colonial plunder in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the rise of capitalism in Europe, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second of them is about the connection between the rise of chattel slavery on the one hand in the 18th and 19th centuries and industrial capitalism, particularly in Britain.
And the third of them is the question about the relationship between capitalism and imperialism, especially in its late sort of classic late 19th century phase. So those, to me, those are the central kind of issues, that I think were worth thinking through. But before getting to those points, I do think we should spend a little bit of time on trying to understand what capitalism means here, how we should think about this system.
Now, as Chenzi pointed out, Jackson identifies capitalism or defines capitalism in the first instance as an economic system in which there are markets for the main factors of production, those being, of course, land, labor, and capital. What makes capitalism distinctive, as he puts the point in a felicitous turn of phrase, is that individuals can buy and sell things that produce all of the other things. But this is not actually the end of the definition for Jackson.
He insists too on the idea of market dependence. So it is not just the existence of a market for factors. It is also the fact that workers are dependent on labor markets, sellers on commodity markets, and even capitalists on capital markets, and also markets for their goods, the cost of inputs, and so on.
I’d like to take a step just to think carefully about this issue, that the existence of markets for factors and the existence of market dependence are not the same. One could well purchase land or sell or buy labor, or even accumulate capital without being compelled to do so by the setup of property relations. Cases like this are rather common where, for example, peasants would trade labor in an economy that was fundamentally subsistence-oriented, or there are local markets, markets that are not particularly capitalist.
So the big issue I would say is that the capitalist economy cannot be described as a market economy. It is something much more than that, it seems to me. And so the question that I think we need to pose, the analytic question, is how is it that the existence of markets gets transformed into a political economy in which there is a condition of all-around market dependence?
And it strikes me that the answers to that question probably lie in the structure of ownership. Chenzi was mentioning the notion of allocation. So capitalism requires not just markets, but a social monopsony on the ownership of productive resources such that workers do not have direct and unmediated access to their means of social reproduction, on the one hand, and such that owners or enterprise heads need to compete with one another on cost.
So on that, workers must find access to employment and owners need to compete on cost. And it is this syndrome that produces, it strikes me, the main thing that we’re interested in about capitalism, which is this incredible growth dynamic. So the question we could say is, then how is it that we get this?
How is it that we get not just markets, but a market-dependent society? Now I’m a little skeptical that any general theory of that is possible. It may be possible, but my own view about this and just is that many different causal processes might lead to that.
But this is sort of the problem is to explain that, it strikes me. Now, with that in mind, I want to return to the three analytic questions that I posed earlier. The first one about the price revolution and capitalism.
Jackson says that the price revolution was one of the first global economic transitions that created capitalism. But I would want to push a little bit on this and wonder about that to a certain extent. For if we read Jackson’s book carefully, what we find out is that, of course, the Iberian Peninsula, right?
So the place in which the silver from the Americas first poured in did not make a successful transition to capitalism. It, in fact, was a deeply backward part of the European economy, particularly by the 18th and 19th centuries. Furthermore, as Jackson points out, a huge part of this global monetary system that emerges as a consequence of the kind of early round of European colonialism was the accumulation of silver in China.
But again, as Jackson puts it, China does not produce a socially general capitalism prior to the nineteenth century. So precisely, we could say, precisely the place that sort of gets the price revolution going, and it brings the specie to the Old World, and the place where the specie all ends up are precisely places that don’t really make a transition to what we would consider to be, modern economic growth, which raises a huge puzzle about why. Why is it that precisely those places don’t seem to have been particularly successful in terms of growth?
Now, what about the question of capitalism and slavery? I think that one of the most lucid and interesting parts of the book is this incredibly kind of brilliant portrayal of the rise of the Atlantic economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the discussion of the slave societies, Brazil, Caribbean, North Atlantic, the presentation of the triangular trade and all the complex ways in which slave-produced commodities were kind of being traded across the world.
But it raises a question for me, which is, in what sense was the slave economy, or slave societies in particular, a causal component in the emergence of capitalism? There’s no doubt that commodities produced by enslaved persons, and also I would like to emphasize other forms of unfree labor, and here we might think particularly, of course, of those forms of unfree labor in Eastern Europe and Russia, right?
So the great landed estates of the Junkers and the Russian nobility. These were central both as consumption items and as inputs to production in what were unquestionably capitalist enterprises. But Jackson is quite correct to point out that, quote, “The evidence for a necessary causal relationship between slavery and industrial capitalism is not strong.”
The contribution of the profits that were gained in the slave trade to national investment in England, as Jackson points out again, was just about two percent. And slave plantations, of course, were a relatively restricted market, and if they had not, if those commodities had been produced by free labor, it is quite likely that the markets there for the cod and rice, for example, produced in the North Atlantic would have been much deeper than they were with the slave economy. So what appears to me to be the case is that the main result of the Atlantic economy was the enrichment of an international class of merchant elites.
But it is not clear to me that we are talking here about the emergence of capitalism. Now, I’ve just got a few minutes, so I want to get to the main kind of issue that I think that Jackson’s analysis points to, and this is this. I think it’s very important in this discussion to distinguish very sharply between capitalists and capitalism.
They are, uh, not the same. So there’s no question that the Atlantic merchant elite and the slaveholders in, uh, the Americas and the Junker agriculturalists in the east of the Elbe River were capitalists in the sense that they were oriented to profit, they kept careful books, they used sophisticated financial instruments. But I think it is much less clear that the rise of capitalists or that the interests of capitalists leads in any linear way, or maybe in any way at all, to capitalism as a system of all-round market dependence.
In fact, what tended to happen, it strikes me, is that these actors reinforced various forms of fundamentally labor-repressive, politically mediated modes of extraction, and that the social result was not modern economic growth, but very slow-growing, very unequal, and very poor societies. So it strikes me that perhaps we need to think very carefully about the relationship between capitalists and capitalism. And to put the point even more sharply, I could say perhaps the point is that capitalists have been among the major obstacles to the development of capitalism in the world.
Right? Why is that? Because as they become more powerful, what they do is seek to develop political connections to the state.
They seek to use preexisting modes of essentially politically mediated forms of extraction that undermine the development of markets and, uh, that allow them crucially to gain profit without risking their capital in investments in growth-producing machinery. Okay. So I think that we could say the fundamental problem with capitalism, one of the fundamental things about capitalism, about explaining its emergence, is that you have this class of market-oriented, profit-seeking, highly rational investors who have formed a fundamental obstacle to the development of a system of all-round market independence.
And we see many obstacles— many examples of this throughout history.
[TREVOR JACKSON]
Great. Thanks a lot.
(applause)
Well, thank you both for those comments. I think they were exactly what I was hoping for, and I was happy to have such different disciplinary perspectives because I was trying to do something interdisciplinary and to reach the widest possible audience. So I’m going to try to respond in order to the comments.
And I’m especially grateful that Chenzi sort of gives me the opportunity to say something that I didn’t say in my own remarks, which is a little bit about what I methodologically was hoping to do in this book, which is to say that it’s, well, a history book. It’s intended for general audiences. It’s a critical and opinionated book, but it’s intended mainly to be in conversation with and to have as interlocutors economic history as done by economists.
And so it very much adopts the language and methodology of economics, And most of the literature that I’ve tried to draw on is the economic history that economists mainly have produced over, especially the last thirty years. So it’s much less in conversation with my history colleagues than it is with economists. And I tried to take very seriously the notion that economics is normatively value neutral by using its tools to do things different than what many of the economists, economic historians that I know try to do.
I tried to reach different political and normative ends than what these tools typically are used for. And I hoped to show sort of perversely that that was consistent with what a lot of this research has said once you add it all together and make it into a kind of coherent historical narrative. Whether I succeeded at that or not, I’m not sure, but that’s what I was hoping to do.
And I did this in part out of frustration with both many of my historian colleagues who don’t engage with this work, and especially with this new literature known as the New History of Capitalism, which I had hoped after the 2008 crisis would bring the long-divorced history and economics back together, and it kind of profoundly didn’t. And it didn’t in part because the new historians of capitalism mostly did not read with and engage with the economic history that economists have produced. And I wanted to show that that was possible.
And if I have a skill as an academic, I think it’s the ability to translate what economists say for non-economists. And so I thought maybe I can try to do that on a large scale. So for that reason, the book is actually very much oriented around this idea of the production function and what comes from it historically.
And that, exactly as Chenzi pointed out, directs us to a historical question, which is sort of the original acquisition and distribution of resources. And that’s something that economics itself is not very good at solving. And once created, you know, there’s a problem of whether these neutral tools end up reproducing and recapitulating some initial act of expropriation, violence, colonialism or otherwise.
Somewhat annoyingly, though, as a historian, I am less on the genesis critique side than the validity critique side. Many historians fall between either pointing towards the origin of something as a source of critique, say that it originated, something that we like originated in something bad or a validity critique, which is to say that wherever the thing came from, its current effects or how it has developed is some source of critique. And I’m more on the second side than the first, even though I think the book is more trying to get at the historical origins of these markets, however they may be functioning later on.
And so that doesn’t add up to a theory of allocation so much as the point that the history of allocation doesn’t match any theory that we have. On the production function though, you know, one thing that as a historian I’m trained to do is historicize where our concepts come from. And the production function, as we know it, uh- is first expressed by a Unitarian minister named Philip Henry Wicksteed, in his essay on the coordination– the laws of coordination of production of 1893.
He is explicitly responding to and attempting to rebut Henry George, who was a kind of eccentric late nineteenth- century egalitarian, not quite a socialist. He had a whole obsession about land being the source of all value, and thus, producing of all wealth, and land owners reserved what he called an unearned increment, and he proposed that essentially all land be expropriated, either with compensation or with punitive taxes to take away all of the benefit. And the goal that Wicksteed set out to prove was exactly the idea that there is no exploitation and that Capital, land, and labor collaborate seamlessly together and share equally in the rewards. John Bates Clark in his book, The Distribution of Wealth from 1899, is even more explicit on the point where he says that if there is injustice and exploitation in markets for land, labor, and capital, then we are all obligated to become socialists. And he didn’t want that to happen, and so he set out to prove that in fact, the marginal productivity of distribution and production is just.
And so there’s something striking to me that like that is the origin point of this set of ideas, is like an explicit attempt to define away that allocation problem from economics. Now I kind of adopted that as I went through the book, but I don’t know, perhaps there’s something there. On the second set of comments, I found this…
I’ll try to clarify a couple of ways that I’m thinking about the historical questions, but I also want to respond to what I think is the right question about the difficulty of a general theory of moving from the creation of markets to a theory of market dependence. And to the extent that I have a general theory, and I try to say in the book that this is trying to understand capitalism historically, not theoretically. To the extent that I have a theory, it’s about the individual struggle for survival, and that that struggle for survival means taking a series of individual decisions that collectively add up to an unexpected consequence.
And so as individuals are trying, say, to increase their wealth or their capacity for competition against others, perhaps they’ll commodify things that had been uncommodified. Perhaps they’ll opt for these forms of repressive political labor extraction. Perhaps they’ll take over the state.
Perhaps they’ll try to shrink the size of the state. There are a variety of different strategies, but all of them are strategies employed in the struggle for survival. Um, on the price revolution, what I think the work that it’s doing in the book is more about the destruction of the old than the creation of the new.
It’s more about exactly why is it that Spain doesn’t become the global capitalist hegemon? Why is it that the persistence of custom and tradition give way to prices and markets? It’s more about the end of that old world.
I think it scrambles things such that it is possible in that moment of crisis for new capitalist powers to emerge, but it’s more of a destructive effect than a constructive one. Um, on slavery and capitalism, you know, this is a subject that I want to be very careful about and is one where I’m both argumentative but also maybe evasive, uh, in the book, um, because it’s such a huge topic, uh, with so much research in it. And I think the position that I’ve arrived at is that it maybe makes sense to me to flip the causal relation and instead of thinking about how did slavery contribute to the rise of capitalism, to instead think about how capitalism gave us a form of slavery we hadn’t had before, right?
Slavery had in many ways been socially general in the pre-capitalist world, but it wasn’t the permanent, heritable, racialized chattel slavery that we think of when we think of slavery. That takes a set of legal creations, and it’s a set of legal creations predicated on a prior set of legal creations of capitalist property. And so when in the Barbados Slave Code of 1665, the Virginia Slave Code of 1705, enslaved people are defined as chattel property.
Well, there had to already be such a concept as chattel property to define them as. And that meant their experience of being enslaved was different than any prior form of enslavement. And so it’s almost flipping the cause and the consequence.
And I agree that the story of Atlantic slavery enriched a kind of international elite, well, not even elite, but an international slave investing class. Um, and so… by trying to flip that causality and trying to move from a genesis critique that I think is quite common of saying that our contemporary capitalist economy, maybe all economic growth, the US economy, the British economy, whatever, are all indelibly tainted by the original sin of slavery and all economic growth has proceeded from it and thus is attributable to it. I’m skeptical of that being the case.
You know, I think that slavery can be evil in its own right without also being responsible for capitalism. Um, but by shrinking the economic impact of slavery, I, I thought that it would be more responsible to try to think of slavery in its own right and capitalism’s causal contributions to it. As a last point on that, um, I also think that the difference between capitalists and capitalism is an important one, and it’s one that I try to insist on throughout the book, um, as a way of shrinking where we think capitalism is and that we can find capitalists, I think, in many parts of the world prior to any socially general form of capitalism.
I think we can claim that if we try hard enough, we can find capitalists in the Soviet Union, we can find capitalists maybe in ancient Rome. But I don’t think we find capitalism there. And so I’m very happy with that distinction.
I’m very happy with the idea that in the struggle for competitive survival, people end up doing things that are socially destructive or counterproductive or otherwise work against their own goals. But historically, I think, where we see the emergence of capitalism as at least maybe nationally general economic system. It’s in places like the Dutch Republic that don’t have much of a state beyond city-level mercantile elites.
I mean, in terms of a national institution, it’s the VOC, the East India Company, that has representatives from all of the cities. Marjolein ‘t Hart is the great historian of this. She has a book called The Making of the Bourgeois State.
There’s not much state beyond the bourgeoisie. And so it seems striking to me that that is the place where I think I can first describe capitalism as being general. Its spread and development from there is certainly combined and uneven, and doesn’t always follow where the capitalists go.
I’m very amenable to the idea that what we’re living through right now is a great big lesson in the Miliband-Poulantzas debate, as we’re seeing the role of the state in organizing the disorganization of capitalist production is being broken, and all of that disorganization is kind of spilling out all over all of us all the time. But to my mind, we can, I think, point to these sort of moments of political dominance, uh, of capitalist interests, and that’s where I try to end the book at the end. Okay, I’ve gone on too long, so I will-
[ABHISHEK KAICKER]
Thank you.
[TREVOR JACKSON]
I’ll stop there.
[ABHISHEK KAICKER]
Um, so thank you. Well, well, don’t clap just yet because I’m waiting for your questions, but while you are, um, thinking of your own questions, I’m just going to, uh, put one out for you myself, like a model question. I want to bring in a question precisely on the question of the Dutch Republic and the story of China and India in this question, right?
And so the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty makes a useful distinction between what he calls history one, which is, let’s say, the normative timeline of European history and the normative structure of European history, and then what he calls history two, which is just the histories of non-European places that have different logics and different stories and are sort of continuing of their own accord until at some point they come into contact. And so my question for you is framed in terms of history one and history two, which is that you tell us that by the time of Newton, capitalism has all of the pieces of capitalism in place. Corporations, wage labor, enclosure, consumerism, monetized price exchange, financial institutions.
Now, what’s interesting is that many of these things also exist piecemeal in other places outside of Europe. And so my question is a very simple question, which is simply that as capitalism in this form, as you describe it, as it departs the land of History 1 and it enters the lands of History 2, does capitalism change as a result of this encounter, or does it simply overwrite the histories, uh, that we might think of as history too? In other words, is capitalism modeled, created, and emerged in Europe and applied to the rest of the world?
Or is capitalism a larger force that draws characteristics from the histories and economic systems of other places? And with that, I’ll open the floor as well.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Just briefly, the book is titled The Insatiable Machine. So I was wondering if you could talk about where the insatiability—what’s that about? I don’t think that came across in the summary.
And it seems very interesting. And you also said there’s a difference between the historian, the histories that economists have provided and the new capitalist histories. I’m guessing like Beckert.
And he talks a lot about force, war capitalism. And then we have this history in terms of markets, you know?
[TREVOR JACKSON]
Yes.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
And so there seems to be more emphasis on force, war, military, you know, maybe like Philip Hoffman, who at Caltech has a history. So maybe you could talk about that contrast and what role force and violence, especially given what’s going on in the background right now.
[TREVOR JACKSON]
Great.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
My question was basically just alluded to by the first gentleman. Your book is The Insatiable Machine. Turning from the fascinating history you’ve described to the future.
[TREVOR JACKSON]
Mm.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Clearly, the challenge of the world economy and of capitalism is in that word insatiable, because as we know, the world cannot support a system of infinite economic growth. To what extent is that insatiability inherent in the economic system, or is that more a philosophical or spiritual question almost in the sense that human beings, for all kinds of different reasons, are essentially insatiable, and this is a system that simply reflects that?
[TREVOR JACKSON]
Great. Um, okay. I’ll try to answer these as you all think of some more, so I’ll try to be brief.
Um, I’ll fail, but I’ll try. So yes, Insatiable, the very hungry capitalism, as I think of it. What is the insatiability?
Well, I mean, in part, the book has arrived at the very critical place that it’s at because of the deep pessimism that I’ve arrived at, that we can kind of stop the machine, right? And that we’ve reached a place where it threatens us as a species. And I’m very skeptical of the culturalist arguments that we could all sort of tomorrow decide to consume less and live more in harmony with nature and arrive at some sort of balance that would solve the problem because of this internal need for the struggle for survival.
There’s a collective action problem there that’s very hard to solve. And may be impossible to solve. And for that matter, all of us can decide to consume less and live in harmony with nature.
And Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos together will consume more in the next… By the time I finish this question, they will have consumed more of the Earth than all of us in our entire lifetimes. And so, you know, what we think of in terms of how to relate to nature, I just don’t think matters as much as what the systemic incentives are.
And I just don’t see resources within this system to solve that problem. I’m very—I wish I wasn’t— but and I’m available to be persuaded about this, but I’m very skeptical of degrowth arguments in the sense that growth has been the main idea of how to solve inequality and poverty in the world. If we stop that, does that mean that everyone currently in poverty is in poverty forever?
Or do we commit to some sort of gigantic global redistributive scheme where everyone normalizes their per capita income at the level of Mexico? I think probably not. I think that’s a hard thing politically to achieve.
What do we do with that? You know, how do we reconcile these problems? And I’m just not sure that the resources for it are within the existing set of concepts that we have.
And so the big game that I’m trying to hunt in the book is how to think the future outside of and beyond a set of constellations of ideas that we perhaps take for granted. And for that reason, I was trying to construct a new critical language because I think the one thing that’s holding us back is that critiques of capitalism remain anchored to the imaginary and the conceptual form of maybe late nineteenth, early twentieth century Marxism. And that I think we just need to think far beyond that.
I don’t think that’s at all adequate either to the history or to the challenges that are in front of us. As to force, I… there’s force throughout the book. There’s force before the book, there’s force after the book.
Some force is profitable, some force is destructive. I think of force as one of the menu of tools available in this sort of ongoing struggle for survival. I disagree with Beckert in his Empire of Cotton book that we can think of a prior phase of what he calls war capitalism.
Previous generations referred to essentially the same thing as mercantilism, and that that gives way to industrial capitalism. I just don’t think that the force goes away. I’m not sure that the force was the important thing to the construction of capitalism in the first place.
In that book, he has no unifying definition of what is capitalism across these two things. And so I just sort of broke the periodization there. I’m fine with that.
[ABHISHEK KAICKER]
Right. This maybe pushes back a little bit against what you described as your conclusion, Right, Professor Jackson, which was that we’re looking for us to supplement capitalism instead of replacing it. It feels to me that capitalism has, especially the way we’re seeing it today, seems to have inbuilt mechanisms that can outrun, Out- outmaneuver any fir- attempt to supplement it.
Um, we attempt to vote for higher taxes on the wealthy, but the wealthy then turn around and convince us all to do otherwise, And that maybe by looking at economics alone, we would not, or the system, that system alone, we wouldn’t find a way forward. just would love to hear other ways of moving forward besides depending upon what would be the goodwill of capitalism to allow itself to be moderated.
[TREVOR JACKSON]
Well, so I think that’s why I wanted to end with this point about history as a resource for imagination, is that I think, you know, when I hear questions or when there are conversations about replacing capitalism, I think that we have those conversations in a mental universe that we’ve inherited from the past, right? And we think of replacing capitalism as like perhaps whatever, some form of socialism or communism comes after. Well, that’s inheriting a stadial theory of history that almost nobody subscribes to.
And so instead, what I wanted to do was provoke the reader to try to think about large-scale social and economic change that is as unimaginable to us today as today would have been to Isaac Newton or Martin Luther, right? That they had no notion of anything like the industrial capitalism of the 19th century. And we have no notion, I think, of what might come next.
And so I want us to recognize that and to try to think on a scale and in an imaginative ambition beyond either tinkering at the margins, which in the face of climactic disaster feels insufficient to me, or trying to replicate the emancipatory imaginaries of the past that either led to disaster or to nothing. That I think we need to be able to think of the new and that history is the only way to do it.
[ABHISHEK KAICKER]
Yeah. Um,
[MARION FOURCADE]
yeah.
[TREVOR JACKSON]
It seems like we also have not only, um, market dependence, but we also have a kind of cultural dependence and political dependence on being locked in our structures, and I’m wondering how you see the escalation of environmental crisis and events affecting the possible breakdown of some of the institutions and, in the context of those, that breakdown of the current structures, there may be possibilities for new economic, in, um, improvements.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Um, for– so this is for Professor Jackson. You said that– I’ve heard you say before that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, And I mean, I agree because we don’t know any other reality. But I was wondering if you had a sort of idea or a vision of what that could look like, ’cause I’ve been trying to figure that one out for a while as well, and, um, I can’t.
I, I have no idea what that could look like. So I was wondering if you have like a game plan for us?
[TREVOR JACKSON]
Eloise, I appreciate your faith that I can do that in 90 seconds. Well, so that sentence comes from the literary theorist Fredric Jameson. And I think, endearingly, he says it twice.
He says it once in 2004 and said it previously in the early ’90s, and in 2004 he says, “Someone somewhere said this.” Perhaps having forgotten that it was himself. And I find something a little bit heartening about that.
Um. So, okay. So I mean, the, I think both these questions are similar enough that I’m going to try to take them together, um, while observing the tendency, uh, to ask historians to predict the future.
Um, but I guess I, I, I invited that. Um, You know, I, I think… Prior, you know, in, in contrast maybe to the dreams of the ’90s and 2000s, when we hoped that there might be a transcendence of the nation-state and that perhaps the EU or some form of perhaps human rights, perhaps some transnationalism would replace the nation-state as the organizing political unit that had led to so much conflict and suffering in the 20th century.
And that, to my mind, appears to be completely failed. That if anything, climate change, environmental disaster, seem, if anything, to be reinforcing the nation-state in a violent and exclusionary way. And I don’t see many resources for that tendency to change.
But that tendency weirdly is matched at the same time by the creation of a truly international elite billionaire class, for lack of a better term. Elon Musk being perhaps the best example, right? A South African-born person who deranged the American government and is profiting from all sorts of enterprises around the world.
I mean, whatever. However, you’ve looked at the Epstein files. There’s, there’s quite a diversity of people in there.
Well. So part of the incoherence of our moment, I think, is between those two things. You know, I don’t want that to sound like I’m subscribing to…
There’s a theory from the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, who speaks of a market people and a state people, and that the market people are in contrast with the state people. I’m very skeptical of this claim as well. Rather, I think there’s a kind of instrumentalization of the level of politics that the nation-state is coming to form exactly, perhaps, as a way of organizing the otherwise discordant disorganization of capitalist production, but also because the nation-state is the level at which violence is organized.
And it seems to me that in a world where we are giving up on the promise of the redemption of future economic growth as a way of solving our distributive problems, instead, uh, and I think maybe emerging out of an international order predicated on state sovereignty and equal rights, between equal rights, force prevails, and that there’s a move towards Violence as a means of solve– state violence as a means of solving distributive problems in conditions of declining economic growth and technological change. And that seems to me plausible as a way of moving forward. Not one that I’m advocating, but that seems to be where all the resources…
I mean, look, you’ve read the news. That seems like where today things are going. What possibly can follow?
I mean, I think we are nowhere near a stage of answering that. I think instead, my mind is occupied by two questions, and one is: What resources exist for trying to constitute something that follows, that I think we’re in a phase of salvage, not of construction? And how is it possible to make the people who would make the future different?
And that’s perhaps modestly something that I was hoping this book might provoke people to think about. Or at least not as an answer, but perhaps as a way of posing that question.
[ABHISHEK KAICKER]
Great. And that’s a terrific note on which to end. Thank you very much, and I hope you will all have the chance to read this book.
(applause)
