The Historian Who Wants to Imagine an Alternative to Capitalism
On November 5, 2008—the nadir of that year’s eponymous financial crisis—Queen Elizabeth II visited the London School of Economics to celebrate the opening of a new building. In a moment that made headlines around the world, she asked her hosts about the market crash: “Why did no one see it coming?”
To historians, at least, the answer appeared to be that few had been looking. Whereas the study of capitalism had once been the province of some of the profession’s most celebrated practitioners (including Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, to name two), several observers have argued that things shifted in the 1980s. In the outside world, avowedly capitalist politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were on the rise and the Soviet project was collapsing; within the academy, poststructuralism, literary theory, and the so-called “cultural turn” turned would-be scholars of capitalism away from the old study of structures and firms. “At the very time when multinational corporations were reshaping the global economy and nations were embracing neoliberal policies,” the business historian Kenneth Lipartito has written, “the economic found scant space in historical writing.”
The financial crisis changed all that. Newly visible and vulnerable to critique, capitalism once again found its chroniclers. In the United States, a class of scholars began writing what has come to be called “the new history of capitalism” in now-classic works like Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, and Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, which linked slavery and empire to the present economic order. An ocean away, a French economist named Thomas Piketty marshaled centuries of data to argue that unchecked capital accumulation invariably yields inequality, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, an academic doorstopper that became an unexpected bestseller. Subsequent works convincingly yoked capitalism to the origins of global warming (Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital), the erosion of democracy (Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy), and the surveillance state (Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism).
Today, almost a full generation after the turbulence of 2008 and all the scholarship that emerged in its wake, a new cohort of truly massive texts is hitting shelves and straining eyes, synthesizing so much of the literature, old and new. Late last year, Beckert—one of the deans of the field—released Capitalism: A Global History, a formidable, nearly 1,100-page brick of a book, drawing on archival collections from six continents. Beckert’s tome arrived just months after Capitalism and Its Critics, a 624-page contribution from the journalist John Cassidy, narrating the history of capitalism through the lives and works of its strongest detractors. These books, in turn, joined newly released editions of classic syntheses, like Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (640 pages) and a new translation of Marx’s Capital itself (944 pages).
The latest of these grand narratives of economic history is The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World by Trevor Jackson, an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley (and a trenchant contributor to the New York Review of Books—his recent pan of Abundance, in particular, is worth reading). Like Beckert and Cassidy, Jackson is a lucid and engaging writer, demonstrating a mastery of this fast-growing field. But unlike his fellow synthesists, Jackson has produced a book that is positively svelte—just over 300 pages.
What truly sets The Insatiable Machine apart from a crowded field, however, is the incisiveness of Jackson’s analysis. Wry, knowing, and with little patience for too-neat explanations or just-so bromides, Jackson darts nimbly from epoch to epoch, crisis to crisis, bringing sense and satisfaction to some five centuries of history. To Jackson, capitalism is neither destiny nor certain doom. Instead, it is “a kind of machine,” obeying “dumb, inhuman logic,” incapable of disregarding the command to expand, even at the risk of consuming the entire planet. Over half a millennium, the operation of this machine has enabled an undeniable, immense increase in average living standards, yet it has done so by burning through countless lives and ways of living and trillions of tons of carbon.
“The world I live in will be destroyed within my lifetime,” Jackson writes. “The question of what kind of world will follow is entirely a question of whether we all manage to kill capitalism or it kills us first.”
There is, of course, the thorny underlying question: What is capitalism? At the macro level, it is an economic system in which, Jackson writes, “individuals can buy and sell the things that produce all other things”—that is, land, labor, machinery, etc.: what Marx and Engels famously called the “means of production.” At the individual level, capitalism is not merely the pursuit of profit but rather the reinvestment of profits in pursuit of ever greater profits. It’s about using “money in order to turn it into more money,” as the historian Steven Stoll put it in his 2017 book Ramp Hollow. In other words, capitalism is not commerce, not the kinds of exchange that have existed since time immemorial; capitalism is growth, relentless, limitless growth.
“It wasn’t always this way,” Jackson opens The Insatiable Machine. In the early 1500s, capitalism as such did not yet exist. Most of the world’s inhabitants were rural, agricultural workers; poverty was severe but stable; unfree labor was common but rarely permanent or heritable; wage-work was atypical; trade was mostly small-scale; communities functioned on “mutual indebtedness,” as “many people seldom used money at all”; the market was “a literal, physical space.” There was significant inequality within societies but relative equality among societies. Even as late as the early 1800s, Jackson notes, Britain and the Netherlands (the world’s richest countries) were just three to five times richer than the world’s poorest countries: “Today the gap is more than a hundred to one.”
Everything began to change during what schoolchildren now euphemistically call the “Age of Exploration.” European sailors ventured west and south, founding colonies and commencing the extraction of first gold and then silver via various forms of free and unfree labor. All of this new metal started circulating globally, which led to a worldwide monetary system based on Spanish silver, the consequent standardization of currency, an increase in global trade, and recurrent cycles of inflation and deflation. As prices rose, many began abandoning traditional subsistence lifestyles and tentatively entering “the market,” bartering away their labor on rest days to pocket some “extra cash.” A new class of merchants benefited immensely, winning money and influence in the New World mining economy and seizing power in increasingly autonomous New World colonies.
By this point—the early seventeenth century—the merchants were capitalists, but neither the era nor the state was yet capitalist, Jackson argues. He compares the situation to the modern U.S., in which there are certainly communists and anarchists but not communism or anarchism.
The money that emerged from colonial mines was a precondition for the global spread of capitalism (and also for wars of conquest), but it was banks, corporations, and the stock market that “solidified and expanded capitalism.” Such innovations originated in the Netherlands, a state unusual within Europe for its highly capitalized farms and the big cities that the export of agriculture enabled, and matured in England, which carried primitive capitalist institutions to its swelling sac of colonies.
New forms of labor emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the burgeoning European capitalist class enclosed farmlands that had once been held in common, displaced agricultural laborers decamped for the cities or for the New World, where many began working for the promise of land. When these laborers proved insufficient to facilitate the desired degree of colonial expansion, the capitalists began relying on slavery—which transformed into a racialized, fixed, and heritable system. This development escalated the seizure of Indigenous lands and led to the creation of massive, monoculture plantations, further alienating people from traditional models of farming.
Slavery soon became “the engine that powered the entire Atlantic capitalist system,” and not without contestation, Jackson argues. Indeed, the first New World slave revolt was launched by Muslims from Senegambia brought to sugar plantations on Hispaniola, “which alerts us to the fact that Muslims were in the New World not only before English Protestantism but before the existence of Protestantism itself.” Such uprisings terrified the capitalists. Late in the 1600s, as colonial officials and plantation owners began to fear that white settlers and indentured laborers might ally with free and enslaved Africans, they created slave codes that designated Black people—and Black people alone—as chattel. “For this reason,” Jackson notes, “some scholars argue that capitalism itself invented modern racism.”
As the European imperial powers—soon joined by the fast-growing United States—claimed more and more of the globe, they took the tactic of enclosure with them, turning former common lands into “private property.” Displaced farmers cast about for other ways to support themselves, and the ranks of those doing labor in exchange for wages (a historically novel arrangement) swelled. So did the workdays. According to one estimate cited by Jackson, medieval peasants worked 150 days per year, while the average laborer in 1800 worked more than 300 days per year; workdays grew from four or six hours (outside of harvest or planting seasons) to 10 or 12 hours. One reason for this sea change—what Akira Hayami and Jan de Vries have labeled the “industrious revolution”—was coercion, with an increasingly muscular state compelling commoners to abandon ancestral fishing, forestry, and grazing rights for work in the fast-growing cities. Another was that people needed money to be able to purchase all the new consumer goods on the market.
“Wage labor was a weird thing to invent,” Jackson writes, “but it became the global norm, and it still is today.” Hence the decidedly uncomfortable system under which workers are free to quit their jobs but not free enough “to not sell their labor for wages,” the specter of poverty generally being sufficient to compel us into grinding, undemocratic acquiescence. “That strange and anxious condition of being both free and not is the distinctive experience of life under capitalism.”
Late in the eighteenth century, a great many of the new wageworkers arrived at their terminal workplace: the factory. This was the dawn of the industrial revolution, the inflection point in the history of capitalism. Instead of one skilled shoemaker making one pair of shoes per day, Jackson notes, suddenly there was “an underpaid teenager run[ning] a conveyor belt powered by fossil fuels, continually producing thousands of shoes every day.” And not just teenagers: children as young as 5 years old began working in the mines or the mills.
The factory owners, seeking the ability to easily fire troublesome workers, jettisoned older labor models like apprenticeships, indentured servitude, or bondage. Paradoxically, however, such freedom cost workers their autonomy, as artisans and farmers and proprietors of household manufactories were shoved en masse into routinized, boss-surveilled jobs. “People hated it,” Jackson writes. They resisted, most flamboyantly by breaking machines, a practice immortalized in mythic figures like Ned Ludd and Captain Swing.
The factories kept producing, and their output was truly revolutionary. By the 1830s, Jackson notes, a single spinning mill could produce enough thread in one 12-hour shift to circumnavigate the earth twice. The sheer profusion of stuff, and the speed with which it was fabricated, and the increasing distances it could travel, enabled tremendous advances in consumption and nutrition. As a result, the planet’s population has ballooned from about one billion people in 1800 to more than eight billion today—“most of them living longer, healthier, richer lives than the one billion did.”
But the industrial revolution also reoriented our species’s relationship to the earth. Human population centers encroached on more and more land and habitat and became cloaked in suffocating smoke, saturated with stinking effluent, and assaulted by black snow and “acid rain,” a term coined in Manchester in 1872. Perhaps most pivotally, the industrial revolution entailed the widespread adoption of fossil fuels, which led directly to the present climate crisis.
It cannot be said—as The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus recently did of Beckert’s new history of capitalism—that Jackson “minimizes the role of technology.” He fluidly covers the advances in coal and steam power that enabled industrialization; such advances were themselves responsive to widespread deforestation in England, which had reduced the utility of wood as a fuel source. Yet he also notes the consequences of technological innovation. “Coal did not mean the end of deforestation,” Jackson observes, “but rather its intensification.”
By the second half of the nineteenth century, he continues, capitalism had become “the dominant form of economic life on the planet.” The machine, never sated, whirred even faster. The corporations and factories grew bigger and more complex, with management and workers increasingly separated from ownership; the most powerful capitalist states (Britain, the United States, Japan) became even more so, with much of the world (especially below the equator) becoming a site of extraction of labor and raw materials. The logic of the market now demanded growth for the sake of growth, which, the essayist Edward Abbey once wrote, “is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Resistance likewise metastasized. The workers grew more combative, as strikes proliferated around the turn of the twentieth century (Jackson notes French mass strikes in 1890, 1899, 1900, 1904, and 1906), and states dispatched armed forces to battle the unionized workers in the streets. Anarchists bombed Wall Street and assassinated the Russian tsar, the French president, the Spanish prime minister, and U.S. President William McKinley. For decades, Jackson notes, “elites feared anarchist violence more than socialist revolution, and certainly more than they fear terrorism today.”
Still, the revolutionaries were on the march, and anti-capitalists overthrew the government of Russia in 1917, later followed by Mongolia, China, and several states in the Balkans. Similar attempts almost succeeded in Germany, Hungary, and many other countries. “Between 1917 and 1933, capitalism faced its greatest crisis and came the closest it ever has to being destroyed,” Jackson writes. Indeed, at the start of the 1920s, “it appeared very likely that some form of communism or socialism would spread throughout Europe and perhaps the world.”
The capitalists struck back. The Americans, Japanese, and several European nations sent troops to contain (and seek to bring down) the new Soviet state, and many of these countries embarked on domestic “red scares” to crush left-wing organizations and parties. Jackson echoes canonical Marxist analyses in situating the rise of Hitler in 1933 within a broader global crackdown against anti-capitalist forces. (In brief, scholars from Trotsky to Mandel have argued that the Nazis in Germany were not unique but rather were one manifestation of a worldwide offensive against revolutionary and workers’ movements that had arisen from the dislocation of World War I and the Depression. The Nazis “came for the Communists” before they came for other groups, as Martin Niemöller famously wrote, as did the fascists in Italy, the militarists in Japan, the red-baiters in the United States, and European imperialists across the colonized world.)
And then, abruptly, The Insatiable Machine ends. Because “there has never again been a serious, credible threat that global capitalism would be overthrown and replaced by another economic system,” Jackson’s history concludes there. Indeed, even his foray into the twentieth century is a very brief one: The Cold War, the modern military-industrial complex, neoliberalism, and the internet are all absent. Such framing necessarily leaves unexplored what many have taken to calling capitalism’s “late” stage, an era of permanent and ubiquitous crisis and the accelerating commodification of just about everything. This is, obviously, Jackson’s prerogative, and it’s hardly fair to critique a book by asking for it to be a different book. But The Insatiable Machine is the rare volume that could stand to be 50 or even 100 pages longer.
On November 4, 2008—the day before Queen Elizabeth visited LSE—Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election. Famously, his campaign had promised “change”—but not, of course, the kind of fundamental change that Jackson rightly describes as unimaginable for most of the last century. “I believe that our free market has been the engine of America’s great progress,” Obama declared weeks before the election. “But the American economy has worked in large part because we have guided the market’s invisible hand with a higher principle,” which is to say, mild governmental regulation.
To many observers, Obama’s victory seemed to mark the realization of what the political scientist Francis Fukuyama had called the “end of history”—that is, the permanent triumph of liberal capitalist democracy over its competitors. With McDonalds populating the former Soviet Union, and with the arrival of the Olympics to Beijing heralding international cooperation in and from China (that Games’s motto: “One World, One Dream”), the future of capitalism seemed bright.
Things haven’t quite worked out that way. In the United States, a rapidly shrinking share of the populace views capitalism favorably, while young people prefer socialism by a widening margin. Such trends have analogues around the world, and a loss of faith in the prevailing economic order appears to have contributed to the global rise of far-right movements. Capitalism has thus far proven unable to meaningfully slow, much less reverse, global warming, and indeed about a quarter of all the carbon dioxide emitted by humans since the dawn of the industrial revolution has been produced since 2008 alone. Capitalism has long promised dynamism and innovation, but a recent report in Nature suggests that “progress is slowing in several major fields,” while the only apparent technological paradigm shift since 2008—the rise of generative AI—could constitute one-seventh of all carbon dioxide emissions by 2040 and, in any event, sure looks like a bubble. Alarmingly, much of the U.S. economy now depends on that bubble not bursting anytime soon.
“Even a cursory look at the world around us gives the clear impression that things can’t stay this way forever,” Jackson writes early in The Insatiable Machine. “An economy predicated on infinite accumulation, mass consumption, and fossil-fueled industrialization is not reconcilable with a finite planet.”
His project, therefore, is to make clear that the world wasn’t always this way, and to thereby help readers imagine a different world. Remarkably, given the bleakness of the foregoing account, Jackson appears to retain hope in the power of history: “Learning that nothing about the world around us is natural, permanent, or inevitable” is “a radical, emancipatory, imaginative act.” Capitalism is, after all, a relatively recent invention; it can yet be transformed, perhaps even unmade.