Factually! with Adam Conover - What’s Wrong with Capitalism? with John Cassidy

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

While we’re certainly in a uniquely bad time for our capitalist society, we’re definitely not the first people to be having the thought, “what if things weren’t quite so terrible for 99% of people?” From the beginning, capitalism has justifiably had critics. Today Adam is joined by John Cassidy, New Yorker writer and author of Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI, to discuss the history of how this broken system became so embedded in our psyches that we’ve collectively started to believe that there’s nothing to be done about it. Find John's book at factuallypod.com/books--If you’re 21 or older, get 25% OFF your first order + free shipping @IndaCloud with code FACTUALLY at https://inda.shop/FACTUALLY! #indacloudpod--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything.

Hey there, welcome to factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, it's pretty apparent if you look around the world today that capitalism, or at least the kind of capitalism we have, is not going great. You know, climate change could have been addressed early on decades ago if it weren't for the efforts of the global oil industry and the rest of the corporations that run the planet to stop us from doing anything about it.

And the neoliberal era of globalization, which hollowed out the middle class in this country, created massive inequality around the world. Well, that paved the way for the fascist backlash we are living under today. We as a society, as a species, let capitalism run rampant across our planet in a way that has mangled our future, our democracy, and ultimately all of our lives. It was fundamentally self-destructive to do so. So what the fuck happened? Why did we do it?

And why were we unable to stop it? We have lived under capitalism for so long, my entire lifetime and many, many lifetimes before me that it seems like a natural thing to us, like the air that we breathe. But the truth is that capitalism is just a system, an economic system that's not inevitable. It's not all powerful. It's not unchanging or impossible to get a grasp on. It's just a system that we as humans built. And that means that we as humans should be able to do something about it.

And I don't just mean this in a glib fuck capitalism kind of way. The problems we are facing, whether it's fascism or job destroying AI, have precedence in the history of capitalism and we can address them if we actually look at them with a clear-eyed lens. And there have been thinkers and writers who have done this. They've responded to those developments every single step of the way with clear and incisive criticism. So if we want to understand the challenges and contradictory, and true fuck-upedness of capitalism today, we need to look back at what people have been saying about it

the entire damn time. Well, my guest on the show this week has written a fantastic new book that does exactly that. I cannot wait for you to hear this conversation. Before you do, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all the episodes we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

We would love to have your support. And if you'd like to come see me do stand-up comedy on the road, My new tour, the Big Divorce Energy Tour, hits all over America this fall. I'm going to be in Indianapolis, Indiana, St. Louis, Missouri, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Brea, California, Tacoma, Washington, Spokane, Washington, Los Angeles, California. We just added a new date at the lodge room. Sammy Maui opening, I would love to see you there. Des Moines, Iowa, Atlanta, Georgia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Head to Adamconover.comnet for all those tickets and tour dates. I'd love to come see you on the road and give you a hug in the meet and greet line after every single one of those shows. And now, let's get to this week's episode. My guest this week is New Yorker writer John Cassidy. He's also the author of the new book, Capitalism and Its Critics, A History from the Industrial Revolution to AI. I know you're going to love this conversation. Please welcome, John Cassidy. John, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thanks for inviting me on. Well, let's jump right into it. When we look at the history of capitalism, obviously it's something we live under now, but folks have been living under it for a long time. What sort of critiques of capitalism have come up over and over again throughout history? Well, that's obviously a big question. And I wrote a book about 500 pages on that. Yeah, yeah, but summarize it in one sentence for us.

You know, do the whole book real quick. I mean, that's one of the things which I sort of, when I was researching the book, I found out that a lot of the critiques of go back to the very beginning. Let me give you a few, which seems. you ask for them. The critique that capitalism is unfair, that it's soulless, that it exploits workers, that it's damaging to the environment, and that it exploits consumers. All those critiques have basically been there since the year dot, which in my case is sort of 1770 in England, which is where I start the book with the sort of rise of industrial capitalism. Now, those

arguments have what have ebden flowed over the centuries, and sorry, another one, monopoly and monopolistic, sort of when I meant exploitation of consumers, I mean through monopoly, pricing, et cetera. These have all been there since the beginning, and they've sort of ebden flowed over the years and over the decades. But at the moment, they've sort of all come back together. That's what's sort of, I think, shocking and sort of interesting about the current moment. Yeah, you feel we're in a moment where we're seeing those critiques or the sorts of those critiques sort of coalesce again in a new, bigger way? I sort of, I got the idea for the book nearly 10 years ago when Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were both running

for president with critiques of capitalism from the left and the right. Now, there've always been critiques on the left, but it was sort of something new to see somebody running from the right with a critique of capitalism. I mean, people, I guess these days don't think of Trump as a critic of capitalism. But if you remember back in 2016, he was running as a sort of anti-bank, you know, the outsider criticizing corporations for moving jobs overseas, criticizing in bankers for ripping off people. Him and Bernie Sanders, you know, sort of agreed on a lot of stuff like then. So, and I think, you know, a lot of political commentators at the time just wrote that

off, wrote them both off initially as sort of outsiders who wouldn't get anywhere. Sanders nearly won the Democratic nomination and Trump obviously swept all before him in the Republican nomination. And I think, you know, in the last 10 years, we've just, we've seen that that wasn't a one-off at all that the sort of critiques of the system, the economic. economic system, capitalism, whatever you want to call it, have continued and intensify, you know, on all sides. And again, that's sort of unusual in history, I think. The last time we've had a sort of critiques from the left and the right of the system was back in the 1930s. Since then,

most peaks have, you know, have come from, I've come from the left. Well, I mean, the critiques from the right that you're talking about are still coming from people who are aligned with Trump. I'd like to know a little bit more about who you mean currently. And also, in what way do you think Trump is no longer quite the critical of capitalism he used to be? Well, I mean, they just passed the bill, right? Extending the biggest tax cuts in history to the sort of 1% of very, very, you know, very regressive tax cuts. Right. And I follow, you know, got a lot of stuff on social media. And if you look at even some of the MAGA accounts, they're very critical of that. and they, you know, people are saying, who's Trump really working for?

Now, at the same time, they're very supportive still of his sort of critique of free trade and protectionism. I think the MAGA people are 100% behind that. I think they're 100% behind restricting immigration, but I don't think they realized they would come along with, you know, huge tax cuts for the rich. That wasn't sort of, that wasn't something which Trump campaigned on. Yeah, it's interesting because he is still doing things that rations. Wall Street to a certain extent, but then they seem to sort of make their peace with it

because he's still doing enough things that they like. Yeah, and on Wall Street, I mean, you know, I think Wall Street thinks they've got. The measure of Trump now, after the, you know, when he announced his huge tariffs on April the 1st, or April the 2nd, rather, which he called Liberation Day, and then you remember the markets collapsed, the stock market collapsed. Yeah. Even more alarming for Wall Street, the bond market started to have conyptions. And when that happens, that means, you know, sort of potential financial financial.

crisis, Trump immediately or not immediately, but within a few days he backed down. And now, you know, the acronym for Trump on Wall Street is taco, Trump always chickens out. Yeah. So he just announced his new tariffs yesterday, day before, and nobody's taking any notice with the market has gone up since then. They think he'll chicken out again. Yeah. So it is, it didn't try. I think they obviously is not chickening out on the immigration side. He's doubling down on that. But I think you don't hear Trump talking, in his first term, and especially when he was running for office, he was very critical of Wall Street. And even earlier this year, when he first came back to office, he threatened to take away a big Wall Street tax break, the so-called carried

interest deduction, which is a loophole that hedge funds and private equity companies exploit to lower their tax rates. And Trump actually said, or his spokesman said in February that he was looking at getting rid of it again, you know, that lasted a few days. He backed off. And of course, it wasn't in the final bill. So the sort of populist credentials, his populist credentials, I think, have taken a hit over the last few weeks. Yeah. Do you feel that he's sort of now paying lip service to this anti-capitalist mood for political purposes? But, you know, fundamentally now that he's president, he has to play along with the economic system that he lives under. Yeah, he is a capitalist himself, so it was always a bit of a pose.

Of course. Yeah, he's a real estate developer and a billionaire. He's literally a capitalist, yeah. Exactly. So he's not, he's not an untaic capitalist bench. But I think he, you know, his argument was that the big corporations are basically sold out America for decades by moving, you know, all their manufacturing abroad and that that's damaged his supporters. He still got that central critique. And even the Biden administration sort of reacted to that by offering incentives to people. do, you know, move car manufacturing and electric EV manufacturing, et cetera, back to the U.S. semiconductors, et cetera. So that's a sort of, I mean, to give Trump a bit of credit, he was sort of ahead of the curve there. I mean, that's a sort of bipartisan consensus that the U.S. government should sponsor at least

some industries locating in the U.S. now. But that's just a change in industrial policy. I mean. Well, it wasn't an industrial policy, really. The only industrial policy the U.S. had for decades was the Pentagon. and DARPA and things like that. But there was no sort of industrial policy in terms of supporting the car industry. Well, there was in terms of voluntary export restraints, but not financial support like

they're given to the Biden administration of the solar manufacturers, et cetera. I mean, we'll move off of Trump in a second, but is it possible that he's just, could you frame it as that he is just creating a new more authoritarian form of capitalism and that Wall Street is pretty much okay with this. Like, okay, we can bow and scrape to him and do what he wants and play service to his whims. It's just, it's still capitalism. It's just now there's a president who wants to be tyrannical about it and exert more control over the system. But it's fundamentally still the same system.

Sure, it's strongman capitalism or crony capitalism, whatever you want to call it. Strong wants to call the shots to some extent. But leave the basic structure, the economy in place, leave Wall Street in place to keep making money. And, you know, the market's going crazy. He obviously is also a big crypto enthusiast. Now he's got his own crypto companies. So the financiers in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, they've got, more or less got what they wanted out of Trump.

And as you say, they sort of turn a blind eye, I think, to the crony capitalism side of it as long as it doesn't affect them. Well, let's back up for a second and talk about, you said, these criticisms have existed of capitalism since the beginning, since around the, you said the 1770s. how do you define capitalism as it came into being in that time period? What are its primary qualities? Yeah, that's a very good question because there was a pre-existing form of capitalism called, which is usually referred to as mercantile capitalism or colonial capitalism.

I mean, I start my book with a chapter about the East India Company, which was a British company, a British monopoly, which had a monopoly on trade with the East India, with everywhere, basically east of Africa. So India, Malaysia, what's now Indonesia, the East India company used to bring stuff from their cotton, all sorts of spices and exotic goods, bring them back to the UK and sell them at a big profit because he had a monopoly. Like a government guaranteed monopoly, correct? It was a royal charter.

They got a charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1600, and they kept it until 1857. So for 250 years, they had an incredibly lucrative royal monopoly. And it was an incredibly rich company had a, I mean, people think corporate capitalism is new, but it's not. The East India company had a headquarters in the city of London on Lennel Hall Street, which is where all the big banks are now. They had a border directors, they had shareholders, and they had all these employees out in the field in all different countries

doing what headquarters told them to do. So that was corporate capitalism, but it wasn't sort of industrial capitalism. They didn't really manufacture anything. They just traded goods which were bought abroad. Industrial capitalism, which is what most of the book is about, started really in the cotton industry in Britain in the 1770s, 1780s, with the invention of power, basically. First, water power, they used water wheels and then steam power, the invention of the steam engine. And that was sort of the basis of factory production, the rise of factory capitalism or industrial capitalism. that's how I define the sort of start of modern capitalism.

But it's certainly not new though, as I said, people were still trying to make money for, you know, forever. I mean, you go back to the Bible and Jesus sort of ran the money lenders out of the temple, right? And you go back to ancient Greece and Plato and the other Greek philosophers were very dismissive of financiers and traders. They thought that was a low pursuit. And what you really shouldn't do is, you know, be a philosopher. So it goes a long way back.

This is a book about modern capitalism and its critics. And as I said, it sort of starts in the late 18th century. It'll sort of start the late 18th century, early 19th century, and then moves across the Atlantic to the U.S. in the late 19th century when the great industrialization of America takes place. But so in addition to the new technology and the modern forms of production, like capitalism is also an economic system that has certain ideological components to it, right, of how it's meant to function.

Yeah, and also, you know, certain economic function. I mean, the big change in rise of capitalism, factory capitalism as sort of defined by some of the great critics like Karl Marx, for example, was that it's based on labor. It's based on the exploitation of labor. Society is divided into just two classes. You're either a worker or you're a capitalist. If you're a capitalist, you own the factory, they own the means of production. If you're a worker, you don't own anything in the classic Marxians phrase.

So all you have to sell is your labor. You're basically a commodity. So that's the great division. And in early 19th century, Britain, it was pretty much true because the workers were poor enough that they really didn't own anything else. The modern world is somewhat different. People have 401Ks, so ownership is split.

And all people own, obviously, real estate, houses, etc. But in early years, certainly in the early years and decades of capitalism, that strict class divide, you know, was a very accurate portrait of the system. And then what's when I start the book in sort of early 19th century, Britain, where there was a huge divide, technologically driven, which is actually very modern, the rise of factory capitalism and steam production and steam machines basically put all the old artisans out of work.

Handloom, he was most famously. This is the cotton industry, remember? So it used to be run by people called Hanlund, Weaver, they weave the cotton at home, and they had like wooden looms, and they're actually quite well paid. It was a pretty highly skilled job. And then suddenly you could do it in a factory much cheaper, much larger scale, and you didn't need the machinery sort of ran itself.

You could actually just hire women or children to look after the machinery. You only needed men to sort of feed in the cotton. So the handloom weavers who were the sort of skilled artisends of their time, they ended up starving, basically, and been sort of emiserated. and sort of, you know, the numbers just collapsed. And I have descriptions of that in there. And some of them resorted to violence to try and stop this. The Luddites, I have a chapter on the Luddites,

who basically started to break into the factories to try and smash the machinery. They first appealed to Parliament to show, you know, can you do anything for us? The government ignored them. They didn't have any votes. Britain wasn't really a democracy at the time. It wasn't universal suffrage, and most of the working class didn't have any votes. It was very aristocratic parliament, and he basically ignored the pleas of the people saying, you know, we've had these sort of jobs for centuries and now they've been taken away from us, do something about it. And the parliament did nothing. Eventually, some of the people resorted to violence and tried to smash up factories. And that produced a massive sort of counterreaction from the government. They sent in the army who were more British soldiers in the north of England than they were involved in the peninsular war against Napoleon. And they arrested a lot of the leaders, the labor leaders, and sent some of them, they hanged some of them and sent the other ones to penal colonies in Australia and other places.

So it was, you know, if you're sort of thinking of the impact of AI, as we all are at the moment, if that's going to displace massive amounts of workers, including professional people like ourselves, you know, we may be going back to the early years of the Industrial Revolution when we did have large-scale labor displacement. and it was a pretty vile of croesus. Yes, and we didn't just have those at the beginning. They persisted for at least a century. But it's funny how the Luddites have come up again and again in the past year. Past guest on the show, Brian Merchant, wrote a book called Blood in the Machine about the Luddites. If people want to go back and check out that interview. But it's really striking that at the moment of capitalism's birth, as you date it,

there was an uprising against it that was brutally put. put down by the government that capitalism had to be enforced by military force and death. It was not the natural order of events. It had to be enforced. Yeah, I mean, that's totally true. I mean, the idea that capitalism is some sort of natural system that emerges is just not not historically correct. It's always been enforced by a government. You need, you know, the Enlightenment and the sort of British political revolution in the 17th century, it created strict property rights. You need strict property rights and you need a government which is going to enforce those property rights. Now, with that, during the Luddai rising, that's what the government thought it was doing. It was enforcing the rights of factory owners to employ who they want and use whatever machinery they wanted. It was basically protecting their property rights. So the system,

ultimately depends on the government, which ultimately depends on force. I mean, that's just how political regimes work. I see. Even if they have mass support, which eventually, obviously, the democratic capitalism did have in the end. And that fundamental change in production method from, you know, workers owning their own means of production, to use the Marxist phrase, and, you know, weaving the cotton themselves, doing the work themselves, having control over time and place and manner and receiving the money to them only being able to sell their labor to someone else who owns the machine.

The labor becomes commoditized. You get whatever money they give you. They tell you when to show up, et cetera. That is the characteristic transition of capitalism and form of capitalism. And, you know, as I said, it sort of occurs in Britain first. I mean, I have a chapter on Friedrich Engels' fascinating figure. Most people concentrate on Marx, but Engels, his partner, was actually a capitalist himself. His father owned a cotton factory, co-owned a cotton factory in Germany and then invested in one in Manchester in England, too, a much bigger one.

And Engels in the 1840s went to work there for a couple of years and wrote a famous book based on his time there, call the condition of the English working class, and explains in sort of great detail the sort of conditions that the workers were, you know, living under and the sort of grotty living quarters they had, et cetera, and disease and squalor and everything. So, yeah, it was a new economic system in which, as you say, based on wage labor and the sort of, you know, the The capitalist basically ruled the ruse. They, as you said, decided how long the factories would be open. There weren't even any factory acts then.

It took a while, you know, the sort of 10-hour, 12-hour day acts didn't come in until the late 1840s. There were some earlier ones for women and children, but some of these factories operated 14 hours a day. And some of them actually operated, you know, around the clock. So it was pretty brutal. I mean, they were basically sweatshop conditions, we would call them. these days. But that those conditions under which many, many people are working, selling their labor for an ownership class that just sort of sits back and collects, that's the system that we still live under day. And that class division is like really embedded within our society.

When I think about, I don't know, even just like the show Shark Tank, right? What is that show? But workers going to the capitalists saying, please allow me to become one of you, right? Allow Allow me to join the ranks of the capitalist, this sort of beneficent aristocracy that owns and doesn't have to work. They just get to sit back in their cufflinks while the rest of us toil away for them, unless we are so lucky as to one day join their ranks. Yeah, well, I mean, I guess the defense of the system has always been, especially in the U.S., that it was a relatively open system, that if you had a good idea, there was so much

capital in the U.S. if we're thinking of financial capital, that you could get somebody to invest in it. I mean, that's what the whole startup economy and Silicon Valley is based on. You don't have to have your own capital. In the beginning, you certainly did. I mean, there was no way, if you were a factory worker in 1850s, Manchester, that you could, you know, you could set up your own factory and go into competition with your employer. You just didn't have the money, and there was no way. There were no real financial markets then. So things have changed over the years, but yeah, you're basically right. Even now, the number of people who move from the short floor to creating their own company and being successfully. It's still pretty minute in the scheme of

things. Most people spend their lives working for a corporation, or maybe they start a small business, but most small businesses don't become huge, obviously. Yeah. Honestly, not to dwell on Shark Tank too much, but one of the reasons I love that show is it's capitalism's best advertisement for itself. It's the best version of it where it's the fantasy version where if you you have a good idea, you build a better mouse trap, you raise 10 grand from your friends and family, you put in 100 hours a week. You too can be Mr. Wonderful or whatever. And they show that happening on the show, but in reality, this never occurs. Well, I mean, practically. And statistically, your chances aren't. Yeah, no, I mean, it is

fascinating. I mean, obviously, of course, Trump himself was an another reality show which sort of glorified modern capitalism, The Apprentice. having tanked three or four companies himself and it's pretty hard to run a casino into bankruptcy you would think but he managed to run several of them into bankruptcy in New Jersey and at the plaza hotel in New York and then so he had a terrible record and basically had been sort of shunned by Wall Street for a decade and it took NBC who came along and thought

well he might not be a great businessman but he's a great showman and so we'll put him on the apprentice. And all that basically saved his political career and ultimately his financial career too. And taught him how to do everything that he did in the future. One of the pivotal events in American history, who knew was what was happening on network television at that time of the evening.

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For a limited time, you can get 40% off your first box, plus get a free item in every box for life. Go to Hungarroot.com slash factually and use code factually. That's hunger root.com slash factually, promo code factually, you get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. Hungarroot.com slash factually, promo code factually. So you said since the beginning, there have been criticisms of capitalism as being unfair to workers, unfair to consumers, environmental degradation.

There's also been arguments in favor of it that it's produced, you know, great prosperity, created the middle class, created technological innovation, you know, everything around, you know, this clipboard was created by capitalism. The technology that I'm talking to you on right now was, you know, created by startups, which were venture funded, blah, blah, blah, right? So how do you, how do you view those arguments? Well, as I said, this is, you know, this is a history book. So I try to present both sides. It's a history. The book is basically a history of capitalism told through the eyes of the critics. That was this sort of motivating idea. So obviously, you know, most of the book is criticism. But you are exactly right. Of course, capitalism. The great defensive capital has always been there. It delivers the bacon. And it has done, as you said. So I've only got a couple of charts in the book. but one of the charts shows basically world GDP going back to the year dot. And it's basically a flat line along the bottom zero, basically, for millennia until 1800,

and then it shoots up like a hockey stick and is still shooting up. So certainly capitalism is, I mean, Marx and Engels, to their credit, recognize the incredible productivity of the system, even if you read the Communist Manifesto, which I did when I was writing the book, which was written in 1848, first part of it is sort of a hymn to the productivity of capitalism, and it says the bourgeoisie, as they call the capitalists, have created miracles that have never been seen out doing what the Egyptians did with the pyramids, etc. So they recognized it was a very productive system. The argument against it has always been, or certainly going back to them,

was that, sure, it's incredibly productive, but it's also incredibly unequal, so the workers aren't sharing in the GDP may go up enormously, but workers' wages weren't going up enormously. In fact, in Britain, until by 1850, they went up barely at all. So that was the sort of basis of the Marxist theory of revolution that the system as a whole was immensely productive. So it would create a lot of wealth, but it would just go into the pockets of the capitalist, the workers wouldn't get to share. And eventually, Marx and Engels thought that would be unsustainable because the workers would rise up as a revolutionary class, the proletariat, as they called it. And that was their theory of history and theory of revolution. And people say, well, it didn't work, obviously, never

happened. It happened in the Soviet Union and China, but in industrial countries, it's never really happened. And obviously, the main reason it hasn't really happened is because wages took off, starting in about 1850 in Britain, then in the US too, wages actually did start to follow productivity and income upwards. And even though it's been a very unequal, um, distribution and more and equal now than it was during much of the 20th century, the general trend of wages and living standards has been up puts. There's no doubt about that. And it's also been upwards in a lot of the global south, particularly in China and India in the last 20 or 30 years since they joined basically global capitalism. So it's always just two-sided

it's a Janus-face system, the capitalism. On the one hand, it's incredibly productive, as you said, incredibly innovative, produces all these technological marvels, and in turn, produces a great deal of wealth and income. At the other side, it's extremely unequal, especially if it's left alone without many sort of government intervention, and wealth tends to, if you just do leave it to his own devices, the wealth does tend to pile up in heaps rather than being sweat around. Well, it seems to me that if the entire criticism is that it's unfair and unequal, that criticism opens itself up to the counter argument. Well, hey, life's not fair. You know, yeah, it would be great if things were fair, but it's not. And, you know, okay,

let's make capitalism a little bit fairer and, you know, call it a day. But the argument that capitalism has internal contradictions that will lead to its collapse inevitably is, if you make that argument, it's a lot more inescapable. It sounds like Marx and Engel were making that argument according to you. Of course they were. I mean, I mean, this book, I did an interview with Jared Bernstein, who is the former Biden's former economic advice. He read the book and he liked it, but he said he made a distinction, which I know he was all the time in my presentations because it was very clever. He said you've got two types of critic in this book.

There are critics of baseball and critics of zoos. I said, what do you mean, Jerry? I would love to do what you mean by that. He said, well, critics of baseball, they love the sport. They grew up with it. They love it, you know, they love spending time with it. Well, they think it's gone to hell. They think the shot clock, you know, the timing, it's got too long, they don't like

the designated hitter, they, whatever, you know, they don't like the shift, various things about the game of ruined it for them. So they want to reform it and, you know, make baseball great again, whatever you would say. So they're critics of baseball. On the other hand, there are critics of zoos, and they just think they're morally, you know, terrible and irredeemable, and it's just completely cruel to lock up wild animals, so we should just shut down all the zoos and return them to wildlife and have no zoos at all. They want to get rid of the system. So it is true in my book. I've got a lot of critics in there, in those 28 chapters.

They are split into critics of baseball and critics of zoos, and the critics of baseball, as you call them, basically want to ameliorate the system and make it work better, make it fairer, as you say, make it less environmentally destructive. And the critics of the zoos want to overturn it and replace it with some new systems, socialism, cooperative communities. I have chapters on the early cooperative theorists in Britain and France, who their idea was to replace industrialization with sort of self-governing, self-sufficient small communities

where they grew all your own food and then they'd have artisanal industry, et cetera. There's always been a strain of critics who want to, you know, completely overthrow the system and replace it with something new as well. And which set of critics has had success, if any? Well, I mean, I come from the sort of critics of baseball camp. I grew up in the post-war United Kingdom, where the sort of European social democracy was, if not born,

So it was certainly developed to a large extent with the National Health Service, free education, higher taxes on the rich. That system I grew out of, and I came from a very working class background and managed to do pretty well for myself. That system was basically a sort of system, what I call managed capitalism. They didn't nationalize all the industries like they did in the Soviet Union. So you still had basically ownership, private ownership of most of the means of production. But there were high taxes, a very strong social safety net, free education, free health care, old age pensions, et cetera. That sort of takes the rough edges off the system.

And it seemed to work very well for sort of 30 or 40 years from the 1940s to the 1970s or 80s. And then we had the sort of inflationary crisis then of the 70s and 80s. And then Thatcher and Reagan came to power with a whole new, you know, conservative free. market philosophy and that whole, the system which I grew up in was basically dismantled, and we've been living through the consequences of that for the last 30 or 40 years. Yeah. And I would look at American history and say that so much of it is made up of the baseball critics, of the reformers. You know, I look at, you know, the New Deal era through the Reagan era was basically that, right? Well, hey, we'll bust the trusts and we'll end the monopolies

will regulate capitalism and will build a better society. And they did it, you know, they did it for about, for about 50 years, 50, 60 years or so until that regulatory regime collapsed. And then in the time since then, since the 80s, the reformers have been trying to rebuild the regulatory state, rebuild the reforms. And with the Trump taking power, it looks like they have just utterly failed, that like the attempt to put those reforms in place again has. just been rejected by the public, by the markets, that capitalism defeated the New Deal era

once and for all. Yeah, I mean, I think you're basically right. I mean, how I would explain it is that there's the new, what you call New Deal sort of social democracy. I call Keynesian social democracy. It basically sort of discredit itself in the 70s because it couldn't deal with inflation and stagflation. In the Keynesian system, you're supposed to have either high.

inflation or high unemployment, you weren't supposed to have both of them together. In the 70s, we had high inflation and high unemployment. That phrase was stagflation. Reagan and Thatcher ran to office saying, look, this system you've had since the Second World War, it's failed. You know, there's too much, you put too many restrictions on the capitalist, too many restrictions on business. We need to dismantle all that. So that's what they systematically did in both countries, dismantled labour movement, dismantled regulation, and then in the 80s and 90s, including democratic governments in the US, dismantled financial deregulation as well. So the question is, how do you put it back together? And I think the difficulty is what we've seen and what I didn't

appreciate when I was younger when I was a sort of Keynesian in the UK is it's not just an economic sort of policy debate. The actual political system has been basically bought by the wealthy in the U.S. political system by a wealthy interest, especially after citizens united. So the political system itself is sort of part of the problem. In the old days, we sort of, you rely on the political system to fix things. But if the political system has basically been captured by people who don't want to fix things, then it's very difficult. And that's, I think that's what we're, you know, that's what we're living through. Yeah, I mean, look at the last election where the tech elites, the the richest, most powerful people in the United States currently, as soon as there was a whiff

of regulation, Lena Kahn's FTC, a couple of other departments under Joe Biden, with the beginning of a little bit of regulation of their industry for the first time, they said, oh, well, we have to stop this. They donated collectively billions of dollars to get Trump elected, and now they are running the country. And I guess my question is, does this discredit the critics of baseball? and does it make the critics of zoos seem like they have a better point if we tried to reform the system for a hundred years or so, and now we are facing the catastrophic failure of that and the sort of seeming impossibility of rebuilding those regulatory reforms at all?

No, I mean, I think it does. I mean, as I said, I came out of the critics of a baseball camp, but certainly over the last couple of decades developed more respect for the more sort of critics of zoos approach, because one thing the far left always did have was this sort of critique of the system as as sort of politics subservient to economics, you know, the sort of base and superstructure argument, whatever you want to call it. The Communist Manifesto describes the, you know, the political system as the tool of the ruling class, basically. So they had a very dark view of democracy and didn't think it really worked.

So I'm not willing to give up on that, my view. but I think you have to have more respect for the critiques of certainly of political economy and of how the system has been captured because it just certainly has been captured. Now, the question is, can you get over that without completely overthrowing the system? I think you can if you have good enough politicians

and a sort of mass movement. It's just been very difficult. that's been very difficult to create because the right has been very clever in sort of exploiting cultural issues and immigration issues like that to sort of create fissures within the sort of working class and the lower middle class, et cetera. So it's a sort of diversionary tactic, but it's been incredibly successful. Well, that's been the strategy of capitalism since at least the beginning of this country that, you know, to divide people along racial lines or other lines in order to. No, sure, but I mean, it didn't work during, I mean, it didn't work during the

Great Depression, right? I mean, Roosevelt did manage to produce an enormous popular coalition and, you know, would have been re-elected forever if he'd live forever, probably, and if they hadn't changed the Constitution. So, I mean, I don't know, do we just need a new Roosevelt? I think we certainly need political reforms. I think, you know, somebody has got to run for office saying, we're going to control money in politics. And I think maybe I'm a utopian, but I think that would be a popular plank if somebody could put it together properly. Certainly, if they were able to win is another question.

When I was referring to racial division, you know, capitalist exploiting that, I'm also talking about in the post-Rosevelt era that racial divisions were used to weaken unions, for example, that the labor movement of the United States was divided along racial lines for many years and in ways that that weakened its power. It's one of the dark stains on the labor movement here. Talk to me a little bit about the labor movement during this period because there are critics within the labor movement of capitalism of both categories, right?

Both reformers and people who want to do away with it. The labor movement had a huge amount of success for about a century, but again, it's at a very low ebb in both the UK and the United States now. That's a theme running through the book. I mean, the second half of the book really is a sort of history of the rise and fall of the sort of social democratic, Rooseveltian state, whatever you want to call it. And as you said, that was largely built on labor. The British labor, I mean, in Britain and most of Europe, you know, the parties were called

Labor Party, the Labor Party in Britain was built on the trade unions. It was always an alliance between unions and sort of liberal intellectuals. Democratic Party in the U.S., it wasn't quite as formal as that, but that was the basis of it. And if you'd go into the post-war era, the so-called sort of treaty of Detroit, where the labor unions, the car unions, did a deal with the management that they would basically give the managers the right to manage and to introduce new machinery and, you know, make the decisions about what type of cars to make, etc. But in return, the management agreed to share the profits with the workers in the form of higher wages every year.

That was the sort of social contract. And that social contract existed, you know, throughout the sort of industrialized world for 30 or 40 years after the Second World War. And as I say, it was largely based on the labor movement. Now, when Thatcher and Reagan basically undermined, destroy the labor movement, and not just, I mean, we've also had deindustrialization, obviously, globalization, The labor movement was built on heavy industry, basically. A lot of the industry has gone abroad because it's much cheaper, labor arbitrage, of course.

So globalization was another factor. So one of the central sort of political, political economy facts in the last 30 years is the decline of the labor movement. So if you're a reformer, if you're in the critics of baseball camp, but also if you're a, you know, a revolutionary, you're in the critics of zoos camp, you have to say to yourself, well, how can we get what we're we want. How do we either create a great reformist movement to reform the system or how do we create a great revolutionary movement to overthrow the system? And how do you do that in the absence of a strong labor movement is a very difficult question, which nobody in any developed country, I think, has answered yet. And that's why the sort of great sort of center-left parties, the Labor Party in Britain, the SDP in Germany, the Socialist Party in France, the Democratic Party in the U.S.

are in such terrible trouble because their sort of central core this sort of labor movement basis it's not totally gone away obviously there are still strong unions especially in the public sector but the sort of ballast of the parties has been kicked out from under them

and a lot of the actual union workers either have lost their jobs or in a lot of these countries have moved right and you know now supporting Trumpy parties like Trump himself or the ADF in Germany or the Reform Party in the UK. So I think it's a central question for anybody who's a sort of critic of capitalism,

whether you're a revolutionary or whether you're a reformist, how do you put together a mass movement without a very strong labour movement? Maybe the answer is creating a new movement. I'm not saying I have the answer. Maybe it's creating some different type of movement and a lot of sorts of different groups together, environmentalists.

That's the sort of democratic party approach. But it's just, I think the decline. of the labor movement is, you know, a central issue for all sort of critics of capitalism. I think, though, that the problem here, at least speaking with the Democratic Party, is that you're saying the decline of the labor movement is a problem for the Democratic Party because that was one of the premises of their coalition, except that the Democratic Party abandoned the labor movement in many ways during the Reagan era, because they bowed to the political consensus of the capitalist class. And if you look at, you know, what has been driving,

the Labor movement has, the Democratic Party has not fought for the labor movement for many decades, and their decline has sort of been together. It's happened, you know, in concert with each other. It's a little bit of a chicken and the egg problem. No, sure. Well, obviously, the Labor, that happened in the UK, too, the Labor Party and the Democratic Party, and even in Germany, the SPD moved to the right and sort of bought into the sort of neoliberal philosophy to some extent, you know, right to image globalization, free trade.

etc. All of those things were very harmful for the labor movement. So, of course, you're right. I mean, I think, you know, if you look at Biden, you obviously gets a lot of stick, but I think one of the things you can say in his defense that he was actually, you know, pretty pro-worker and did, he appointed pro-union people to the sort of National Labor Relations Board. He pointed Lima Khan at the, you know, and other sort of people who were skeptical of corporate power in the sort of antitrust industry. But as you said, it was so much has been lost that it was just a sort of nascent effort to sort of resurrect that tradition.

Yeah. It immediately produced, as you exactly said, completely correctly, this backlash, especially from Silicon Valley, and they poured in the money to, you know, to elect Trump. And Trump has repaid them by basically replacing Lena Khan and people like that. and in the late National Labor Relations Board with a pro-corporate people. Yeah, and again, this seems to discredit the urge to reform capitalism because if you look at what Biden did, he did the reformer wish list, you know, a lot of the things that I'm of two minds, you know, sometimes I'm one type of critic, sometimes on the other, right?

And, you know, because if you're the type of critic who's a reformer, you're bowing more to the pressures of today. We live in the world as it is. We want to make the world a little bit better versus trying to build a utopia or have a bigger rupture. Some days they feel like one, some days they feel like the other. If you look at what Biden did, it was the wish list of the things a reformer would want to do. There's only so much you can do in four years. I mean, I think it would take, you know, it took a generation to create the sort of Rooseveltian state. It took a generation to dismantle it and create the neoliberal

state or whatever you want to call it. It would take a generation of sort of, you know, reconstruction to reconstruct some sort of 21st century Rooseveltian state as well but what we thought he didn't he didn't there are lots of things he didn't do but he was heading in that direction in some areas but again the great problem now is you know creating a political coalition for it now he said maybe it was all because inflation went up and he got hit by the you know he got hit by the inflation crisis whatever it does show the scale of it now you know I mean, as I said, I'm more sympathetic to the more extreme arguments than I used to be because the sort of reformability of the system does look, you know, difficult to stick to you.

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That's ACA-C-I-A-Justice.org slash defend kids. We've described now two efforts to push back against capitalism, both within the political system via regulation, you know, the New Deal-style policies, and from the labor movement by mobilizing worker power directly, not necessarily through the democratic institutions, but just through strikes and economic struggle, right? And both of those had success for, as you say, 30 or 40 years, not that long on a historical scale before they were eventually crushed to such a degree that you and I are now sitting here going, God, how could these things possibly come back were sort of baffled to think about it? So given that capitalism has been criticized, you know, since the beginning, since the 1770s on these points, why is it that it has been so resilient and has ultimately been able to crush every one? fighting back against it, including, you know, the communists.

Right. Well, I think, you know, I think there's several answers to that one. One is that it has sort of, if you were an illiberal, you'll just, you've made the argument that it's because it's shown itself to be unrivaled in its productivity and its ability to produce innovation and growth, et cetera. And I think that is historical fact. the Soviet Union was very pretty successful for decades in dragging an agricultural country out of poverty and creating heavy industry, et cetera, to the extent that when I was young

in sort of 70s, the CIA used to say that, you know, the Soviets are leaving us behind. Now we've subsequently learned that they made up a lot of those figures to sort of justify the defense budget or whatever. But certainly it was, you know, sort of socialism in one country, I want to call it, was successful relative to the past, but it couldn't come, ultimately, it couldn't compete. You know, there's the famous, I actually, when Boris Yelsohn came to America for the first time and sort of saw an American supermarket, he was just staggered by the product variety, etc.

Yeah. The, you know, the communist system just couldn't rival that. No, you know, it had free health care. He had a very good education system. It had social benefits, et cetera. But he couldn't produce product variety. Didn't have a dozen types of Cheerios. Exactly.

Exactly. So, you know, I think that would be that argument. I mean, the other, if you're, you know, you come in from the extreme left, you say, well, it's obvious why the system has survived because the capitalists control the system. So all efforts, you know, they, as you sort of hinted earlier, if there ever is a sort of serious effort to impinge upon their perquisites and power, they're just going to crush it, which is what happened in the 80s and 90s. As I said, I've still got some sort of hope for us. sort of center-left middle ground. Another complicating factor is globalization because so many of these, it's much easier to build a sort of social democratic state in a sort of homogenous world where everybody's sort of roughly alike and at roughly the same standards of living. When you've got, when the global economy is basically everybody in the world or nearly everybody in the world and, you know, half, more than half the world is basically still in either very poor or in poverty, there's always going to be a threat of labor arbitrage and

moving everything around. And how do you build a sort of social system in the advanced world when you've got that sort of, you know, threat of labor arbitraris and globalization, et cetera, and not just of technology, but also of capital, capital can move very freely, obviously. I mean, that's a great problem that, you know, all the advanced countries are now facing that if they try to raise the corporate tax rate, the corporation has just moved their headquarters to Dublin or wherever where it's 12% and park all their profit there. So any effort to sort of build a sort of new social democratic sort of managed capitalism,

as I call it, has to be done on a global scale for lots of things, things like wealth, wealth taxes and things like that, because otherwise the capital will just move to where the tax is low. Well, and the prospects for international political coordination don't seem good considering when you look at the effort to fight climate change, which, you know, most countries in the world do agree on, apart from the United States and a few other, you know, oil-based states, everyone else pretty much agrees. And even they are not, you know, take the United States out of it, you know, we're not meeting our targets. So, you know, international cooperation on giant issues like this about one of the most difficult things you can ask. especially when, again, corporations, capitalist corporations, and people are powerful in every single country. So I guess I have to ask you, you have an encyclopedic knowledge of the critics of capital and the arguments that they've levied. We've gone through every possible, you know, reformist approach towards capitalism and why it hasn't worked and, you know,

the immense power that capitalism has to stifle such reforms. Why do you still have hope for a center-left consensus? Like, what is the hope for, you know, a center-left approach rather than, you know, again, the abolish the zoo approach? Well, I mean, I think one argument I would make is what's the alternative? You know, if you abolish the zoo, I think, you know. The animals run free. They live in the forest. Easier to say about the zoo than about capitalism, I understand. But, I mean, I think the sort of Marxist left-wing critique is a very powerful engine of sort of criticism of capitalism, and that's something I've come to appreciate more, as I say, over recent decades, sort of the power of that analysis. But I think the central question of

what do you do if you get rid of capitalism was something which the Marxist tradition never really provided a good answer to going back to the late 19th century even. You read Marx and Ingalls, and it is a critique of capitalism and a very, very powerful one. But when you ask, well, what's the alternative system you want to set up? Soviets, when they came to power in, you know, in 1917, they basically had no blueprint whatsoever. They had to start from scratch. So that would be my sort of critique that there's really no, I don't say there's no alternative. Maybe there is a, I'm not God, you know, maybe there is an ultra-utopian, maybe there is an ultra-utopian, maybe,

be not utopian, a system which could be created, but I don't see it myself. I'll also add the Soviet Union and China, which are, you know, the two major communist countries, the economy that they had beforehand was not capitalist in the sense of like the American economy today. I don't know what I'm saying, they created socialism from agricultural economies. Right. Nobody's ever really tried it. So, you know, I would like to see somebody give it a go and see, see how to do.

It would be a fascinating experiment. But, I mean, you know, I think, you know, you're sort of critical, you're criticizing my sort of central left. I'm poking at you and trying to get you to tell us more about it. Just to defend them a bit. I mean, I think the sort of, you know, if you're thinking maybe the sort of Scandinavian model of sort of social democracy, that's a long, long way from the sort of Reaganite neoliberal model, which we've sort of descended into in a lot of ways.

So I think it's easy to belittle the sort of center-left parties because they're in such big trouble now, electorally, because their electoral bases, as I said, being dissipated, partly due to counter-sort of union movement, partly due to globalization, partly due to their own mistakes, as you said. But, you know, the system they set up, I think, was a much better system than the one we've sort of ended up with 50 years later or whatever. So I am willing to defend it up to a point. And there is, you know, a movement now in the United States of people running as

socialists, which is not as explicitly an anti-capitalist position as, say, someone running as a communist, for example, like socialism is a social democracy, right? Yeah. Right. They're basically, I mean, Bernie Sanders and even to a lesser extent, I guess Elizabeth Warren, too, as a European, I grew up in Britain, you know, they're Europeans. Social Democrats. They're not communists. I mean, Bernie Sanders himself, you know, laughs of people when they say you're a communist. Mondami, the mayor of Canada in New York, where I live,

I just wrote a piece about last week. He said, I'm happy to work with billionaires if they, you know, if they support my policies and they're willing to, you know, build more housing and, you know, create free transport, et cetera. So he's not trying to overthrow the system, although obviously people on Wall Street are arguing that he is, that he's some sort of revolutionary. But he is trying to shift the system in a direction. It doesn't want to go. Yeah.

That's very difficult to do. But he's not trying to overthrow the server. Maybe I'm wrong. From what I read of him, I don't see him trying to. The proposals he's actually put on the table for a rent freeze and a experiment in city-run groceries and for free bus lines. I mean, that's pretty moderate stuff, really, in the scheme of things. Yeah.

I mean, you can ask, where will he get the money from? Would it work? They're all legitimate questions. But the idea that that would sort of turn New York into the sort of Socialist Republic of New York is just ridiculous. Well, and I see your point now, because if you look at Mom Dani that way, you know, in historical context and say the European tradition, he does represent a center-left consensus, just one that we have not seen in the United States in a long time, but it is one that he

actually built a coalition for. Like, he built an actual popular coalition for this. That's what I said. That's why I think he's a hope, you know, it's a hopeful sign that well, we'll see, he's only one of primary. And, you know, it's a democratic primary, so it's a relatively small part of the electorate, although he did get more votes in the primary than anybody else has ever done. But, you know, I don't think we can read too much into it, Let's see how he does in the general election. But I think it's an encouraging sign that he's been able to reach across and create this coalition. And also, you know, we, I don't know if it's, I don't know what age you are, but our generation,

there is a sort of world weariness and cynicism about, I think, a lot of us. And Mondami does seem to have offered hope and enthusiasm to younger people. And I think that's when I speak to a lot of people who are supporting him, it's not that they're supporting his specific policies, or they support some of them. They say, look, he's doing something. He's making an effort. Yes. And, you know, it's a positive message that we don't just have to put up with what we've had for the last decade or two. Yeah. So is there something about capitalism in the past few decades that has shown its internal contradictions more directly to us that's caused this? I mean, I look at...

I mean, I guess the great example, you know, you're in L.A. in California, the tech industry, right? I mean, the tech and the rise of tech monopolies. The whole argument, if you go back to Reagan, I mean, I remember I was, I reported on the Reagan at the end of the Reagan era for the London Times and the George H.W. Bush's administration. I was a Washington correspondent. And if you're back in Washington in those days, all the conservatives used to wear Adam Smith badges. The Adam Smith Society was the great sort of society of the time. And Adam Smith was the great defender of competition. He's seen as the great defender of capitalism, but actually he was very skeptical of individual capitalists and thought that if they gathered together, they'd try and raise prices on people. And he was a huge critic of big corporations like the East India Company.

That's why he wrote the wealth of nations to criticize mercantile capitalism. But he was a big supporter of free enterprise and competition. So that was, you know, the Reaganite argument. So we went through it all. We had the Reaganite Revolution, et cetera, and then we've had this great sort of, example of

capitalist innovation producing Silicon Valley and all these great companies and what has it left us with is left us with basically a stream of tech monopolies with enormous power of pricing power,

surveillance power, etc. And I think that's a contradiction and I think that is one of the big contradictions which has turned young people against capitalism because capitalism to them

if you ask them what it is, they say, well, it's the tech monopolies. It's the fact that I can't afford housing or I can't afford them, health care, et cetera. And the strange thing that's happened, the strange thing that's happened is that those tech companies have destroyed other parts of capitalism that people liked.

You said a big part of the reason capitalism has been supported is because it's been very productive. It's created prosperity and things that people enjoyed. And you can go down a list of industries, you know, Hollywood, publishing, manufacturing, all these other industries where people liked them. They liked what those things made, and now they say, where did it go? I used to like movies. I used to like reading websites.

I used to like music. I used to like all this stuff. And now it's all being generated for me by some algorithm. What happened to it? And it seems that capitalism has made itself more profitable, but less productive in terms of making, making the world around us a better place. That, to me, seems like a big part of the zeitgeist that is driving. That's sort of, I mean, obviously the individual examples are different, the technology is difficult, but that critique was also very strong in the early sort of decades of capitalism. People, you know, they said, there were still, you know, people used to come from all over the world to look at the sort of technological wonders in Manchester and Leeds where I'm from and the northern cities where the big factories were. They recognized it was, you know, this was modernity and it was incredibly sort of productive. But at the same time, they thought it was, you know, leading to a lower quality of life. Because, you know,

most people worked in factories 12 hours a day, barely earned enough to, you know, to eke out a living. And at the same time, they were living in, you know, hovels, etc. It was, it wasn't producing, you know, as you said, human satisfaction. I mean, I guess that's ultimately what the system is supposed to produce, right? Well-being and satisfaction. And I think a lot of people in 21st century sort of monopoly, tech capitalism, whatever you want to call it, it's not something people like. They don't find it attractive. They don't find it sort of creative.

As you say, they just think they're slave to the algorithm, which to some extent we all are, of course. Yeah. And they themselves personally are less able to make a living. They're less able to afford a place to live. They're less able to afford. Yeah. I mean, I think that's key.

you know, the whole affordability crisis. And then going back to Mondami, I mean, that's the whole basis of his campaign, is the sort of laser focus on affordability, housing, health care, education, etc. I think that's certainly true. I mean, you know, if you can't afford, if you've paid $100,000 a year

or your parents have for a college degree and then you move somewhere and you can't afford rent, you have to pay sort of 50, 60% of your income in rent, You can afford health insurance, so you have to stay on your parents' health insurance, et cetera. And you're struggling, you're worried about even going to be able to find a job because the AI programs can do whatever you want to do. Yes.

The system is not an attractive system. So I think that explains a lot of the sort of turn against the system among, you know, the younger generations. Do you think that, you know, this turn is likely to lead to a change to the system in any point? I mean, when you talk about the labor agreement between the auto industry and the workers and, you know, capital and labor more generally in America, it was at the end of 50 or 70 years of violence where, you know, people rose up and fought in the streets in order to make a wage. And, you know, the capitalist finally said, okay, okay, we'll break you off enough

of a piece that you won't literally try to kill us. Are we going back to those days? But I think you do need a popular movement. I mean, the American political system only responds to crisis. So, you know, the mass demonstrations, things like that, people on the streets, you need countervailing power. John Kenneth Galbraith, who actually isn't in my book, but probably should be, who was sort of mid-century critic of baseball, he had this theory of countervailing power that, okay, we let the capitalist control the means of production, as you said.

they own most things but there's a rival power in the land which in those days was the union movement who can sort of restrain them and government as well supported by the people so you have a sort of balance of power in society now as you said there is a sort of element of threatening that I think you know the the sort of capitalist property earning classes have to feel somewhat threatened in order to be willing to make an accommodation so there has to be a strong countervail in power, I think. And that, again, goes back to the challenge of how do you build that? Yeah. Do you see that coming from anywhere in American society right now? Well, we don't know. Let's see how, let's see if Trump tanks the economy with these tariffs and,

you know, stock market is, you know, crazy. Yeah. How about the billions of dollars worth vice enforcement that's about to disrupt the economy by kicking millions of people out of the country using violent force? Right. Exactly. So I think, you know, if Trump does completely tank the economy and the financial markets, et cetera. I think there would be an openness to a sort of populist movement on the left or center left. Now, obviously, you know, that's sort of a hopeful analysis. A hopeful analysis that begins with if the economy goes in the toilet, then something good might happen. That's your hope.

Well, I think he is, we are heading in that direction. I mean, I don't think the stalemarks is going to go to infinity forever. The premise of capitalism is that it will, right? Is that it continues rising? Well, it goes in ups and downs, right? I mean, there are crises. Even the most bullish theorist of capitalism would admit that every 20 or 30 years ago, you have a huge crisis and, you know, things get cheaper because I say prices collapse.

So I think we are heading in that direction at some point. We haven't had a financial crisis for 17 years now, so there's probably one on the horizon. Is there any big lesson from the history of capitalism or its critics specifically that you think people should keep in mind right now to wrap us up here? Well, I think one of the sort of, again, I've tried to be optimistic. One of the themes which runs through the book is that capitalism is sort of an umbrella term and there are all sorts of different types of capitalism. It's not a sort of, you know, one-size-fits-all system.

system, it has proved very adaptable. And in the past, there have been examples where it's been pushed the system, not capitalism itself, but the economic system of which capitalism, in large part, has been pushed in a much more progressive direction. So it's not completely hopeless, I don't think. And it does go through cycles as well, in which one system tends to rise, and then its internal contradictions eventually arise, and there's a sort of interregnum period, and then a new a new version arises.

That's what we saw in the post-warier, well, after the crisis, after the sort of crisis of capitalism in the raw during the Great Depression, we then created Keynesian capitalism, whatever you're calling it, Rooseveltian capitalism. That ruled for 40 years or so very successfully. That had a crisis. Then we had the sort of neoliberal globalization, which has been, I guess, in power since sort of 80, so that had sort of 35 years of in power, produced. a counter reaction in the form of Trump and Bernie Sanders and the sort of result of the 2016

campaign, a sort of insurgent from the right, comes to power. I don't think he's got a stable, feasible solution to the problems which he inherited. So my hope is that he'll sort of discredit the right-wing populist model, and that will open the ground for sort of, you know, some sort of reconstruction on the left, a center left. So crisis might lead to revolution. We also have the brewing environmental crisis that was caused by capitalism. We haven't really talked about that at all. I mean, obviously, that's the sort of looming over the whole thing and has been increasing.

I do in the book sort of trace the rise of the sort of debates about sustainability and degrowth back to the 1970s. Again, these things all come around again. there was a big debate in the early 1970s about the limits to growth and whether the Earth could sustain endless sort of capitalist growth and sort of critics on the left, including one of the chaps I read about, Georgesco Rogan, there was an economist, Nikolai Jardesco Rogan, and the authors of a famous report called The Limits to Growth Report basically said we had to reorganize the whole system because the planet was reaching capacity and, you know, couldn't take it for much longer.

They lost that debate in the 1970s. Things just carried on for another 40 years. But I think that sort of argument obviously has come back in the form of the, you know, dramatic climate change. Yeah. Because the, you know, the international cooperation of the governments has not been enough to stop capitalism from causing the temperatures to rise. And, you know, the size of the system is just getting so much larger

because now it is a truly global system. So the Chinese, India, and then Africa will be, is steadily joining the system too. So it does look very unstable. I mean, ultimately there will have to be some sort of accommodation. I think the only question is whether that follows or precedes a sort of environmental catastrophe. Yeah, you can almost look at Elon Musk saying we have to go to Mars as being a way to keep the fantasy of limitless growth alive, to say, hey, there's always going to be another frontier. I think it's a diversion, you're right.

Yeah. But without that other frontier, we presumably will reach a limit eventually, and the system will have to crumble and give way to something new. I think... The Silicon Valley argument, obviously, Mark Andreessen, people, their argument is that's not true. There'll be technological solutions. I don't know how, you know, shooting stuff into the sky or whatever to stop the

And pretty big assumption that, you know, modular nuclear reactors, whatever. But that's that, again, has always been the argument going back to, as I said, the limits to growth argument. The counter to limits to growth was always that technology would find a solution. And I think for a long time, people sort of believed in that. But I think that belief has also been questioned now. Let me end with this question. A lot of times when I look at human systems, we debate them.

They seem intractable. We have ideological arguments about them. But at the end of the day, they're just systems for organizing, you know, logistics, just like anything else. And sometimes when I look at, hey, look at our transportation system. Why do we use cars instead of trains? When trains are, you know, more trains would literally be more efficient. Cheaper, faster, better for everybody if we were to use that system.

In the same way that you could redesign a motherboard. It's more efficient if I do it this way and you just do it that way. but with human systems like capitalism, like our transportation system, they are so intractable because there are people benefiting from them, I think, is the fundamental reason that they're difficult to dislodge. Obviously, yeah, there's huge vested interests. I mean, if you ask why America hasn't got a proper rail system, it's basically because the auto industry and the airline industry lobbied against it for decades successfully.

Yes. I mean, it's insane that there's not a sort of bullet trains between L.A. and San Francisco and New York, Boston, and New York and Washington, et cetera, and New York and New York and Chicago. I mean, you just have to go to Asia to see what can be done very quickly. But it's sort of what economists call path dependence. Things get locked in in efficient systems from the past, and it's very difficult to overturn them. Yep. And so my question is, is there a way that you have seen or a thinker who has posed a way to escape that trap? Or is there a case of it having been done successfully when you have a, I think you said, path-dependent system, you have those vested interests? Because that is like the fundamental problem of humanity is how do we get out of an inefficient system that we know is inefficient, that we know is hurting us, and yet we are locked within. Yeah, I mean, I think it is difficult. I mean, I guess some people would say, you're looking for a democratic example. I guess some people would say

China got out of there. They were locked into their old system and they built this incredible new economy in 20 years. But it's a capitalist economy. No, it's state capitalism. But you're not sure and it's incredibly polluting and it's also incredibly

unequally of inequality over there. But it does have, you know, much more efficient transport systems. They did sweep away one system and put in something new. They're now building solar panels at a much bigger rate than we are, et cetera. But again, they have the benefit. It's a communist dictatorship.

So when Z says something happens, it happens, right? When you're in a democratic system, which can be captured by vested interests, it is, as you say, very difficult. And do I, can I think of anybody who's ever, you know, it's hard to think of a sort of, It's hard to think of an example in the sort of UK-US context, that's for sure. Yeah. Well, and you would know because you've surveyed it so fully. Well, your work is fascinating.

I can't thank you enough for coming on the show. The name of the book is capitalism and its critics. Folks can get a copy, of course, at our special bookshop, factuallypod. com slash books. Where else can people find it and where can they find your work, John? Well, I write a weekly column for The New Yorker. I'm, you know, on all the social media platforms or most of them. And so if you just look me up on Google, although even Google's been surpassed right by the AI bots.

Yeah, I've scroll past all the AI listings that are engorging your work for the purposes of capitalism and they might find a link to you. Thank you so much for being on the show, John. It's been fascinating talking to you. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me on. It was fun. Well, thank you once again to John Cassidy for coming on the show. Of course, if you want to buy a copy of his book, once again, that URL factuallypod.com slash books.

When you buy the book there, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you like to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad-free. For 15 bucks a month, I'll read your name and the credits. This week I want to thank Callan. Hey, look at distraction, Uber Elder, Avarro Eggberger, Tracy, Aaron Harmony, Joseph Mode, Rodney, Patton, Greg 0692, Marcella Johnson, and Matthew Bertelssohn, aka the Bunkmeister. Now, those are the most recent people who've supported, but let me just read out some names from the middle.

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