Angry Planet - ‘Capitalism Is a Series of Regime Changes’

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Another week and another Angry Planet about the horrifying systems that rule our lives.Is there a depressive theme running through the work right now? Possibly. I promise we’ll soon replace it with rage.This week on the show we have Sven Beckert to talk about his new book Capitalism: A Global History. Beckert is a professor of history at Harvard and his tome is an attempt to capture the entire history of an economic system in one book. It’s a doorstop, but it’s also readable and clear-eyed. Some come with me on a journey that runs through the plantations of South Carolina to the tech markets of Shenzhen.Cotton as an entry point to the history of capitalismThe economic big bangIndustrial Revolution as mutation“It’s still being born.”Human data is oil to be frackedThe Quaker Oats metaphor“The market is God.”Ascribing morality to economicsWhen Gary Hart ushered in Neoliberalism“Capitalism is a series of regime changes.”Moments of great change offer opportunitiesCapitalism: A Global HistoryThe Old Order Is Dead. Do Not Resuscitate.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. You know, we've been doing a lot of conversations recently about feeling like we're at the end of things. and that maybe something new is coming,

and that maybe we even have an opportunity here in the midst of the turmoil that we're all experiencing. And I would say that this is another episode that is on that theme. And with us today to talk about it is Sven Beckert, sir. Will you introduce yourself? Great to be here, Matthew. So my name is Sven Beckert. I'm a historian.

I study mostly the history of the United States, but I also do increasingly global history. I'm working in the field of economic history. I teach courses on the history of American capitalism. And I just finished a book on the global history of capitalism, which is an effort to tell the entire 1,000 years of capitalism throughout the planet between two book covers. And it came in at around like, what, 1,200 pages, give or take? It's not short.

It's not short. But I think it's a great read. It's not a difficult read. I think, you know, if you're interested in how we came to live in the world we live in today, I think that's a great starting point. So one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you today is because I live in South Carolina and you have written quite a bit. One of your previous books is about cotton and like the importance of that crop to like the world, essentially, and how it. And, like, how the history of it and, like, why, you know, why states like mine thought it was so important, thought they were going to be able to kind of change the world because of cotton. So how does one go from cotton to capitalism writ large?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that's a fantastic way to start our conversation. And I'm happy to, you know, hear that you're from South Carolina and to have that background because this is important. to the history that I wrote in my first or last book, The Empire of Cotton, but it's also quite important to the history that I'm telling in my book on the history of capitalism. So basically I came to write the history of global capitalism because first I wrote this global history of cotton, which actually started out as a history of cotton mostly, and

only later I saw in the process of writing I saw that actually looking at the history of cotton does tell you something about capitalism as well. But of course, as many people pointed out after they read Empire of Cotton, there's more to capitalism than Cotton. I mean, Cotton is very, very important. And South Carolina is very, very important to the history of global cotton and global capitalism. But of course, there's so much more to the global history of capitalism. And so I decided that I should expand this story of global capitalism and to look at the entire thing. also because I noticed when I published Empire of Cotton that a lot of people are thinking

about capitalism, a lot of people, you know, either they hate it or they love it, people have often strong opinions on it, which is fine, but often they really don't know so much about it. And so I felt, you know, my task as a scholar and as a historian is to illuminate a history that is just so important to our contemporary lives and to do so from a historical perspective because I believe that capitalism cannot be understood, kind of in the abstract, but it needs to be understood through the analysis and the telling of its actual history as it actually unfolded in time. And thus I came to embark upon what was a somewhat insanely difficult project. But now it's done. And I have the whole history of capitalism between

two book covers. I think Cotton is a great place to start because it is like you're focusing on one good. Yeah. And it is this one good that warps the, the future of a country and the future of a region. And like it is this thing where if you go back and look at the historical record from my state and like the way people talked about like, you know, we talk about the civil war. We talk about slavery here, of course. but I don't think like we get the education on like the crops that were underpinning it and allowed that system to perpetuate and the the speeches that were given on the floor of

you know the legislature in this in my in the state house here and you know in Washington where they were literally saying like this crop is so important to the world that we can kind of do whatever we want right so kind of can you kind of thread the needle for for me between like actually let me back up we ask a very basic question define capitalism okay let me you know i thought your first question was actually great so let me answer that first and then i'm going to talk about defining capitalism and that is yes uh slaveholding southerners believe that cotton was crucial to the global economy and they were certainly not wrong about that cotton was the most important input to industrial production.

It fueled the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom, in the northern United States, in Europe. It was an extremely important commodity. And so there were some reasons to assume that, yes, the world could not live without southern cotton and that this would transfer into enormous political power and global political power for the American South. But what they didn't take into account is a basic lesson of the book that I just finished, namely that capitalism is undogmatic.

Capitalism is enormously flexible. And in the end, a word was possible in which much more cotton was grown than was ever grown in the American South before 1861 without the use of slave labor. So I think this is, in a way, it illuminate. It illuminates very well an important theme within the broader history of capitalism. And so you ask about what is capitalism? I mean, this is probably, it makes sense to kind of first clarify that before we go into the nitty-grated details of its history.

And let me just say, the book, as I already mentioned, is a history. It's not obsessing about abstract discussions on capitalism. We have plenty of those, you know, just open up any economics textbook and you will have all kinds of grabs and mathematical calculations and all of that. And we have from the left and from the right, we have very much of a discussion on the definitions of capitalism. This book doesn't really dwell on that in any great detail because what I want to do is to tell the history of actually existing capitalism, of really existing capitalism. It's actual history. And as we already heard, capitalism changes drastically. It's undogmatic and flexible and all of that.

But of course, there needs to be across all of these changes, there needs to be something that capitalism in all of its difference moments has in common, because otherwise it wouldn't make sense to talk about capitalism at all. And what I think is the kind of crucial core of capitalism is that it's a system, a form of economic life in which there is privately owned capital, which is productively invested to produce more capital. I think this is the very core of capitalism. It's not markets, because markets have existed throughout human history. It's not trade. And trade because trade has existed throughout human history, but it's a particular use of capital in productive ways to accumulate more capital. And that then also creates a kind of core

characteristic of capitalism, namely that it's always expansive. It always seeks out the next thing. And that can be geographically. The logic can spread to new geographic spaces, but it can also be that it captures new spheres of our lives. You know, let's say social media is a kind of brand new way of how capitalism has expanded in the past few decades. But this, I think, is a logic that you find the book starts with the merchant communities of the Arab world in the 12th century. It goes on to, for example, talk about a state like South Carolina in the 19th century, and then it talks also about, like, Detroit in the 20th century

or Shenzhen in the 21st century in China. And these are very different societies. It's a very different thing that are getting produced, They look very differently, these places, but they all have the same economic logic underpinning them. And that's why I think this allows us to speak of all of these different articulations of capitalism as still part of one economic logic. What is capitalism's big bang? I think capitalism, the basic logic of capitalism that we spoke about has been around for a long time. And I start the book around the year 1,000 or 1,000 years ago,

but you would certainly find examples of that logic also earlier. And I think it started among merchants, among people who traded, who bought things and sold them elsewhere for a profit. And these kinds of communities of merchants emerged in many, many different parts of the world. So I start the story in Aden and Yemen in the 12th century, but those communities also emerged in East Africa and West African, China and India and also in Europe. And for a long time, so this was a logic of economic life that is strikingly modern. We would recognize it today when we read the letters of these merchants that were written a thousand years ago.

We kind of immediately understand what this is about. But when they lived, their logic was exotic. Much of the world did not work like this. This was a tiny group of people concentrated in a few cities around the globe, but much of economic life on planet Earth was following a very different logic. And over the next couple of hundred years, this logic spread very slowly. So there wasn't really kind of a big bang that I don't think we can find, you know, a place where capitalism kind of suddenly at a particular moment in time,

at a particular date emerged. Capitalism doesn't have a birthday. You know, we cannot directly say that it emerged this year in the city of Aden or Cairo or Baghdad or Florence or Venice or elsewhere. But its process of emergence was at first very slow. It took very many centuries so that this logic spread into other spheres of economic life, especially into agriculture and into industrial production. And then, of course, one of the results of this expansion of capitalism

was in the late 18th century, in the early 19th century, the industrial revolution. This is really for the first time that capitalism gets clearly married to radical productivity advances, especially to new machinery. And this is then the moment

where a capitalism that is recognizably modern that we would recognize today emerged. And then the development was much accelerated, much faster after the year, approximately after the 1800. But in a way, capitalism does not, has not a birthday, but

capitalism in a way is still in the process of being born. I mean, this is a weird thing. It's a thousand years old, but it's still being born because there are still spheres of human life or they're parts of the world that do not follow this economic logic even to this day. And so in those places and in those spheres

of life, we can sometimes observe the kind of emergence of bursts. of capitalism today. And that's why I end the book in Cambodia, because I observe kind of the birth of capitalism in Cambodia in the 21st century. What are the spheres that are not completely dominated by capitalism? I think an important sphere that is not completely dominated by capitalism is the family.

You know, usually we don't sell and buy children. So that is, you know, so the market logic where we organize our home life, usually not through cash payments to our spouses, you know. So they are, I think there are important spheres of life that are still outside the logic of capitalism. In some ways, you know, we have the welfare state, you know, that is kind of outside the logic of capitalism. So there are important spheres of life that are outside of capitalism. And they probably always will be because one of my ideas, is that a completely, a society that would be completely organized around this logic would be

impossible. That doesn't mean they're not going to try, though. Because, like, I think one of the metaphors I find useful for talking about social media specifically is that the company, there are companies that have figured out a way to render us into oil and frack us. no absolutely right so they're going to attempt to to kind of use this to force this market logic into a bunch of places right and I feel like most of us see that every day or a little bit exhausted by it yeah no that's a very good observation yes our daily interaction on social media is something that can be sold and bought on on markets it's a source of profit so it does follow this particular capitalist logic I I I read somewhere that there now efforts afoot to kind of read our thoughts so they could be. So even our thoughts that are not particular, that are not, that we are not conscious of

ourselves, could possibly be sold on markets. Yes. So I tell you, the creativity of capitalism is unending. And yes, it is being pushed into the most intimate parts of our lives. I mean, once upon a time, you met your spouse at the village dance, you know, or, you know, comparable places. But now there are sites that are sources of profit that make those arrangements or enable those arrangements. That's another kind of frontier. Once upon a time, most people cooked almost all of their meals at home. I mean, even just your grandparents probably,

you know, they rarely went to a restaurant. They didn't buy prepared foods. They cooked themselves. So this was a kind of rhyme outside of the market. And now increasingly people don't do this anymore. There is a kind of, this is what I mean. There is a kind of an expansion of capital, not just in space, which we can clearly see when we, let's say, look at Cambodia, but also within ourselves. Right. You know, 100, 200 years ago, I would have had a relationship with a miller down the road where I would have purchased my oats from him or done some sort of barter system and done some chores for him around. And now I buy my oats in a box that has a signal, like it has a symbol of the Miller on the front of it instead. Yes, no, that is, that's so good that you observe that because often people forget that.

But that's really a trace, you know, it's a memory of a different kind of economic logic that was, even for our grandparents, still quite, quite important and it is still important in many parts, parts, parts of the world. And in a way, the capitalist revolution has undermined these other logics to economic life. I mean, often for the better, sometimes for the worse. But clearly there is a kind of conflict between the capitalist logic and the logic that you described earlier. What were some of the other competing market organizations that have kind of dwindled out or died off? I mean, what has died off more or less is, you know, a very important form historically of economic life, namely tributary rule, like feudal laws. They would, you know, dominate their peasants, and they would even own their peasants in some ways, and they would draw resources by force, by physical coercion from these peasants. That was a very common form of economic life in many different parts of the world in Asia.

Asia and Europe and elsewhere. So that, I think that form of economic life has pretty much died out. And then even more important was another form of economic life, namely that people organize the economic lives around their own subsistence. So they prioritized growing food that they consumed themselves. They produced textiles. They produced pottery that they would consume themselves or they would exchange it with their neighbors or their family or maybe the village community,

just exactly the kind of thing that you described earlier. That is a logic that I think still does exist in some parts of the word. It was a logic that actually was quite important in the upcountry south before the Civil War, where there were many people living in those kinds of economic words. And this is a word that has been done away with by the capitalist revolution for many centuries, but it does survive in some parts of the words. So I think these are the kind of two.

different logics. And then of course, okay, then we come to capitalism itself. And capitalism itself, of course, has shown great variety over time. So we already talked about the merchants in Yemen. So this is like one word of capitalism. Then we can, let's say we jump to South Carolina in 1820. So this is another word of capitalism. Then we jump to Detroit in 1950. That's another word of capitalism. And then we jump to Guangzhou or Shenzhen and China in the year 2025 and that's again another word of capitalism. So capitalism

itself has changed quite drastically. It is not you know, it is not the same thing that just produces somehow ever more but it is the institutions in which it has embedded

the structures of capital, the way how labor is mobilized, the political regimes in which it is embedded always have changed over time as well. Can you talk about its adaptability, which you already have started to, but like it's, I'm very particularly interested in its resistance to an ideology. It's, it's agnosticism, I guess, if you can put it that way. Yeah, no, in some ways that is that is definitely a striking characteristic. And I think that also explains partly its, it's staying power.

It is, unlike most people who write about capitalism, it is in its sense. quite undogmatic and and it it has changed quite drastically over time of and you know each moment in time there has been has been an effort to kind of make that particular arrangement to be to seem natural so as you know you know if you look at the american south the planters of the american south certainly made a kind of form of economic life that was based on the exploitation of slave labor, made that out to be natural or like God-given. You know, it turned out some decades later that this was definitely not the case. You know, at other moments, you know, in the late 19th century in a city like New York

or throughout the United States maybe, there was this idea that a kind of laissez-faire capitalism is the true and natural order of capitalism and capitalism kind of naturally gravitated to this particular order. That turned out not to be the case after 1929 when there was now a much greater involvement of the state. There was a kind of redistribution of wealth. There was the emergence of a much more significant welfare state. There was the emergence of the power of trade unions, there was a diminishment of social inequality. And then we come to the 1950s, 1960s when many observers think, okay, this is the natural order of capitalism. We'll forever be living like that. It will be just more and more of the same. But then in the 1970s,

it turned out this was not the case. And suddenly we enter again at a very different order within capitalism, namely what I call the new liberal order. And there is suddenly many of the things that were constitutive of the order of the 1950s and 1960s, suddenly was considered to be problematic and were done away with it. And so now we enter a word in which there is, you know, the idea is that the state should remove itself from economic regulation. We enter a word in which free trade is seen to be the greatest accomplishment of modern civilization. We see a word in which manufacturing departs, so much manufacturing departs the United States to move to various parts of Asia. So again, this word, you know, I mean, we remember the neoliberal order.

You remember, it was considered to be the law of God. You know, the market is God. It was impossible to, you know, it was seen as the pinnacle of all human history that we got to this particular point. Okay, lo and behold, you look around the world today, and suddenly, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Suddenly, you know, from the highest, you know, from the highest parts of the federal government, we see people arguing exactly against that. So, you know, so capitalism itself is, is quite adaptable, which, you know, I mean, this is one of the core lessons, I think, of the book to see that. That's why we need to look at history, because if we look only at one moment in the history of capitalism, I'm not going to see this particular

dynamic. So we need to look at the full history of it. And of course, that also tells us that the word we live in right now can also be different. We can shape this word in a variety of ways. What do you make of this drive to ascribe or morality to capitalism? You know, obviously growing up in the 90s, just like you said, growing up in Texas in the 90s, like it is capitalism is a force of good it was kind of how i i was the received wisdom of my childhood um other parts other other other other areas of history other parts of the world capitalism is seen as an evil um why do you think this force in our lives uh calls people to like ascribe a morality to it because it's uh you know it's so powerful it's such a powerful

presence in our lives. And so we kind of need to come to a moral judgment about it. So I don't find that surprising at all. But, and, you know, of course, I think both of these stories are true. Like, you know, everything around us now is certainly a result of the capitalist revolution. And, you know, as you just mentioned, people, you know, we produce so many more things. I mean, I think the global output of, has pretty much doubled since, I think, the 1980s. You know, so that's kind of, this is unprecedented in human history. You know, we produce so much more. We can consume so much more.

We live lives that are much healthier. We are better educated. We live longer. We even grow taller because nutrition is better. And there, of course, so many more humans on planet Earth now than they were 100 years ago. But then you can also tell just as, you know, as well documented, you can tell a history of, you know, massive dispossessions, you can tell a history of slavery, you can tell a history of colonialism, you can tell a history of exploitation, you can tell a history of violence, all of which are also part of the history of capitalism. And so the book is really not concerned with kind of making a final moral call on capitalism. capitalism because I see my task as helping the reader understand how this world came into being

and to see all facets of it. You know, we see the, let's say, you know, the massive expansion of industrial production in Detroit in the 1920s, you know, which certainly is sea change in history. And we also encounter the terrible working conditions, not just, you know, at Ford in Detroit, but also, let's say, in the rubber plantations in Liberia that produced the raw materials, some of the raw materials that went into Ford Automobiles. So, you know, I think we need to be able to keep both of these things in mind at the same time. And, you know, kind of a mindless celebration or condemnation of capitalism is really not what this project is

is about. I mean, if that's what you conclude by the end of the book, that's fine with me. But I think we need to have a more complicated conversation on these things. I think people probably older than me, so many of them grew up in kind of that binary world that's going to be hard for people to shake out of that. If you're American, communism was the great evil. Capitalism was the force for good. if you were, you know, in the Soviet sphere of influence, it's flipped. And so it's, it's going to take a little bit for that to kind of be shaken off and for like the nuance and understanding to grow.

Yeah, that's, I think, a really great point because in a way, the whole conversation on capitalism was poisoned by the enormous political stakes that were attached to this conversation. Absolutely, you're absolutely right. And that has led to kind of a, the, an understanding. undeveloped thinking about capitalism as such. But I feel like we are now at a historical moment where we can perhaps look at it. You know, the Soviet Union has been dead for how many years, 34 years. So I feel like we can now have a kind of different conversation on these matters.

And I think it's important because we live in this world that is created by capitalism. And, you know, I think we cannot really understand ourselves in the world we live and without understanding capitalism. So I think there's great urgency in that. We need to understand how we came to be, how we are right now. And then, you know, I leave it to the readers to decide what to do next. I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to tell them. It's almost as if one of the great lessons of capitalism itself is that you should set aside your dogma and approach things as they are. I'm writing about really existing capitalism, not how, you know, ideologically we might envision it.

And that's, I think that's a real difference in approach. And that's why I think history is actually the tool to understand capitals. All right. So you used a word, and I want to get a definition for it, too. It's kind of at the center of a piece that you just published the New York Times. And it's also like I spend a little bit too much time on the internet. So it's like a buzzword I hear a lot that is kind of lost. Sometimes it's lost its meaning to me.

What is neoliberalism? I mean, neoliberalism to me. So as I mentioned before, I think there is a kind of shape shifting in Canada. capitalism. Capitalism looks very different. We talked about this in Aden and Barbados in South Carolina and Detroit in Shenzhen and so on. And change in capitalism is, of course, continuous. There's every year there we produce more, we consume more, we invent new machines, all of that. This is a continuous process. But some change in capitalism is not continuous. It's kind of sudden. There is a kind of shape-shifting of capitalism. The institutional embedment of capitalism,

changes. So, for example, one day we have capitalism with slavery, and next day we have capitalism without slavery. So this is a kind of great example for the shape-shifting of capitalism. So there are particular moments, periods, regimes in the history of capitalism that define particular moments in time. And one of these moments, to get back to your question, is the moment of neoliberalism. In the 1970s, the Keynesian post-war economic order, the kind of golden age that so many Americans look back to fondly, that came to. to an end for a whole range of reasons and a new kind of order within capitalism, a new kind of regime that emerged. And that regime I call neoliberalism. And this was also a word that was

used by many of those who were kind of the architects and designers of this system. And this is an economic word in which, as we discussed earlier, it's a word in which, you know, conceptually the market is elevated to be like the kind of prime regulating agency of life. There is an effort to limit the political interference with markets. There is a great emphasis on free trade, on global trade. There is an emphasis on, you know, you organize your commodity, production chains globally. you don't you know you don't care if the product is manufactured this part of the word or that part of the word you just combine it all in whatever way is is is cheapest to enable the greatest production and the greatest profit and and and this word this new liberal word became very very powerful you know some of the greatest advocates of the new liberal word came maybe surprisingly not just out of the republican party i mean ronard regan was certainly a great advocate of that

but but it really came to full it fully flourished under Bill Clinton so a democratic president or Tony Blair in the United Kingdom and and this became a kind of economic order or a way of of thinking about the world that became very very powerful

so Clinton in some ways was a prime advocate of this economic order, the new liberal economic order. And it became, you know, there was in the 1990s, this guy published this essay, which argued that we kind of had reached the end of history. I mean, this is again kind of naturalizing a particular moment in the history of capitalism. We had reached the end of history.

The word will always continue like it is at this particular moment. Lo and behold, it turns out that this is not the case. And I think we are living now through, you know, at the very least, we live. living through a crisis of the new liberal order. And maybe we see the end of the new liberal order at this particular moment. And we enter a different moment in the history of capitalism. Yeah, Francis Fukuyama is one of the white whales of this podcast. I've tried to get him on repeatedly to talk about the end of history and like some other things.

And I just can't ever. He's too big a fish for me. That's too bad. I think he's an interesting guy. I do too. He does speak to this particular historical moment. It would be actually interesting to hear what he has to say about the. present moment, yeah.

He's got a, he, he publishes some things every now and then I think that I think are pretty interesting. The most recent one is an essay I really liked about, because he lives in the Bay Area, and he's talking about all of these technologists that are interested in living forever. And he's writing about how like, that's bad. We shouldn't, we shouldn't want to freeze a moment in time forever. And that is, you know, things need to die to move on to change is good. which I think in some parts is like the story of that you're telling in this book,

is that as you say in the New York Times piece, capitalism is a series of regime changes. Yeah. And maybe we're living through one right now. That's my sense. You know, I'm not, you know, I can't predict the future because it's hard enough to figure out the past. But, you know, thinking about the past does help you kind of have the tools to think about the present in the future. And one of the things that I draw from looking at the past is that there are these regime changes within the history of capitalism. So it's, you know, to be expected that

we probably will have such regime changes in the future as well. There's also a way to think about how we get from one regime to the next. And those, maybe I should say a few words about that, namely that, you know, every one of these regime changes went along with a kind of economic crisis and we did have that in 2008, 2009, but they also went along very much with elite and popular mobilizations against the existing regime. And we can also see that when we look at the new liberal order. We had the mobilizations from the left, you know, just think of the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, think about Occupy War Street, but then the most significant political mobilizations we've had probably against the new liberal order came actually

from the right, with the rise of right-wing populism, the T-Port, but also all these right-wing populist movements emerging throughout Europe in other parts of the world. So broadly speaking, that would be a pattern that is similar to a pattern that you find at other moments of regime change, let's say, the 1870s or the 1930s or the 1970s. This is something I'm interested in. Can you tell me a little bit more about the 1870s? 1970s and the 1930s and like what what was going on then that remind you of what's happening

right now? It seems like it gets worse from where we are before it starts getting better. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Maybe that's entirely possible. Yeah, no, no, it's not always, always getting better. You know, it can also get worse. I think you're absolutely right about that.

And the 1930s, you know, it did get better. in some ways, in some parts of the world, such as the United States, but it got much worse in other parts of the words. So we always need to keep that in mind, you know, that history can develop in all kinds of different directions. But the 1870s, to me, a very important moment in the history of capitalism. It's a kind of moment of fundamental change within capitalism because until the 1870s, we have the dominant entrepreneurs in the history of capitalism. until the 1870s are clearly the merchants. The ones that we already saw like 600 years earlier emerged in the port of Aden. I mean, even the first wave of industrialization in the wake of the British Industrial Revolution

is still very much dominated by merchants and by the logic of what's called merchant capital. In the 1870s, that changes. We see, you know, massive steelworks, coal mines, you know, general electric, electrical machinery industries, chemical industries emerge. now after 1870, industrial capital is clearly at the center of the capitalist economy. And you see that, you know, now it's Andrew Carnegie, who is kind of at the center of it, or later Henry Ford and other such people. So this is one important regime change in the, that begins in the 1870s.

We see also that now in the 1870s, there are much more significant concentrations of capital. The amount of capital that is needed to build a steel mill or a car factory are just incomparably larger to the amounts of capital needed to start a small scotten mill in lower in massachusetts or to start a merchant house in in salem or in south carolina or elsewhere so we need see much greater concentrations of capital we see now also for the first time in the industrial world the massive concentration of labor we see factories that have 10,000 workers coming in every morning through the gates and producing steel or producing mining coal and other such things again this is totally unprecedented in the history of capitalism and it means that now for the first time a very significant

percentage of the population of the United States or many European countries are working for wages you know now we take that for granted everybody works for wages I mean almost everybody but but you know once upon a time almost nobody worked for wages it was actually a relatively recent innovation that so many people work for wages and not let's say work as independent farmers to grow their own food or be enslaved. So that is another big, big turning point in the 1870s. And then we see also in the 1870s that there is a kind of new,

a new connection developing between the state and between this industrial capital. Because the state is now completely dependent on this industrial capital because it provides the tools of modern warfare. And it, of course, also creates, you know, employment and economic output that can be taxed. So there is a real dependence of the state on this modern industry. And at the same time, this modern industry is now totally dependent on the state because the state becomes an important customer. It helps develop infrastructure in the United States.

It institutes very high tariff barriers, so that allows for the development of these kinds of industries. So I think these four factors are what really sets apart this moment after 1870 to the moment before 18. 1870. And so if I would have published the book in two volumes, which I didn't want to, but I would have had to do this, I would have split the book in the 1870s because I think in the entire thousand years of history that I talk about, I think this is to me the most consequential turning point. I'm going to throw you a curveball. And this may be one that you don't have an answer for, which is totally fine. the people that are there's a lot of companies right now that are saying that AI data centers that's the next industrial revolution that it's going to be a change akin to what you just outlined do you see any similarities do you buy any of that at all I mean I think it's too early to tell it's it's definitely true as I just made made clear that that these regime changes often go along with

with the emergence of new kinds of industries and also with the, and thus new kinds of technologies, you know, may be the steel industry, the car industry, or now artificial intelligence. I think that is conceivable, but far from sure. I think there are, you know, I think the computer is a whole, the semiconductor. If you would put that to be kind of the core

of a new moment in the history of capitalism, obviously would then start before the present. I think that is pretty well established. If artificial intelligence is kind of part of the semiconductor revolution or if it's its own thing, we need to see. I mean, I can only, you know, I read the newspaper, like your readers probably do, and, you know, there are various opinions on that.

I mean, some think that this is totally overdone the expectation of what this is going to lead to. and others saying the word is going to be unrecognizably different. So maybe somewhere in the middle. I think that's probably a good prediction. I do worry that it will, there's an awful lot of economic bets being made on it. Yeah. And that it could, in fact, precipitate a pushback or an economic crisis of the kind that you're talking about.

Yeah, that is widely reported in the past few days. Yeah, strikingly so. And that seems that I think there are good arguments for that. But again, I cannot, you know, I'm not giving it investment advice. I cannot tell what's going to happen next. But these things obviously have happened in the past. What does it like to live through a regime change? I think it's, that's a great, great question.

I think it's disorienting. I think people often respond in disbelief. I mean, you see that much in the commentary among, economists who are many of whom are kind of invested in the new liberal order that they think of the recent economic policies of the past 10 months as as kind of mad you know kind of totally like irrational and all of it and maybe they are you know I mean I don't know but but but but but but what this shows is that there is it's it's not easy to let go of an order a word. You are very deeply invested in it. You live in it. And of course, many people thought that

this is the right way of organizing our economic life. And so it's hard to let go. And then, of course, I think humans generally don't like uncertainty. And clearly, we live in a moment of great uncertainty. And I think it's, you know, it's reasonable to be concerned about that. and to worry about that. But what I also would say is that these moments of regime change are always also moments of possibility. These are moments in which we have a kind of opportunity to create a word that is different from the word that we were born into.

And as we said, when we talked about the 1930s and the regime change in the 1930s, there were two different trajectories in the 1930s. There was the liberal, democratic one of the United Kingdom and the United States, and there was the fascist variant, which was very powerful in many parts of the world. And, you know, one of them, fortunately, did win out and the other decisively lost. So they were, but there were two futures kind of to be had in the 1930s. And maybe they are different kinds of futures to be had right now as well.

And so, you know, we can endeavor to shape those futures. And that is, you know, that's a different way of thinking about a moment that is clearly, clearly disconcerting. And maybe I'm unreasonably optimistic here, but still, I think history does show that these are moments in which the future in some ways is up for grasp and we can, we can shape it. But capitalism probably here to stay, right? you know the death of capitalism has been predicted for a very long time for 200 years and you know now if you go into the bookstores you find many books that predict the imminent end of capitalism and of course we also cannot know maybe this is true i don't know but but as a historian i have to say you know there is precedent for that people have made those arguments for 200 years and obviously much of the history of capitalism is is unfolded after its end was predicted for the first time. So that's true. And, you know, there is clearly there were capitalism has gone through very serious

crises before, no more so than the 1920s, 1930s crisis. When many conservatives also thought that this would be the end of capitalism. I mean, there was a really widespread belief that capitalism would not be able to continue. And lo and behold, it did have its kind of most productive. moment after the 1930s. So there is enormous staying power, there's enormous creativity within capitalism. But then, as a historian, I also have to say capitalism, as we just discussed, has a beginning. You know, we can't trace its emergence. And of course, in history, anything that has a beginning also has an end. You know, when this is going to be or how this

is going to unfold is obviously something nobody can predict. But capitalism is, but capitalism is historical. And so, you know, who knows, at some point, something else will come about, come around. So then do you have any tips for people to survive this time of monsters or, as you've translated it, the era of varied morbid phenomena? The time of monsters. Yes, I think I think it's good to see the importance of this moment to be scared of the monsters, but to also think of what futures we would like to live in. And maybe there is a possibility to design those futures now in ways that would not have been possible 20 or 30 years ago

when the neoliberal order was kind of the law of God and nothing could be done about the rule of the market. I mean, we have seen a great politicization of markets in the last nine months in ways that would have brought about great, great complaints from from from from from the new liberals but but you know yes we maybe we can address issues of inequality of environmental destruction in in ways now that are kind of creatively different from how we thought about them but during the 1990s or 2000s I think that's a good place to in the conversation okay

Svenz thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this give us the title of the book one more time. Thank you so much, Matthew. And the title of the book is capitalism, a global history. Very simple. It's about capitalism. It's global. And it's a history.

And we will have a bookshop link to it in the show notes. Great, great to talk to you, Matthew. Great to talk to you. War War never changed That's all for this week Angry Planet listeners As always, Angry Planet is me

Matthew Galt and Kevin Nodell and Jason Fields It's created by myself and Jason Fields We will be back again With another conversation about conflict On an Angry Planet Stay safe until then It's going to be a little bit of a rocky December

Got something weird for you next week I think you'll find entertaining. See you soon.