Like most of my fellow Americans, I first learned economics in my high-school civics class. In the waning days of détente, when the Cold War seemed to be in permanent thaw, Mr. Schnure—a tall, bearded, bespectacled gent who favored sweater vests and brown suede shoes—informed us, first, that economics was the “science” of production and distribution. Second, that “scarcity” and “self-interest” were its fundamental assumptions. Third, that barter preceded money, which preceded credit. Fourth, that money is both a “store of value” and a “means of exchange.” And fifth, that there are “command” economies—characterized by centralized government planning, top-down control of prices and wages, and little if any freedom to buy or sell what you want—and “market” economies, in which autonomous individuals freely dispose of their labor, money, and goods, nonviolent competition sets prices and wages, and self-interested personal choice determines one’s job and purchases. Epitomized by the Soviet Union, command economies languished in repression, lack of “initiative,” and material scarcity. Represented by the United States, market economies fostered freedom, innovation, and abundance. One particular marvel, Mr. Schnure pointed out, is that market economies operated with little if any conscious coordination of interests and resources; governments might tax people or regulate markets, but they seldom “intervened” in the mundane affairs of work, production, and commerce. The shelves were stocked and the lights came on without any deliberate plan.
To be sure, Mr. Schnure conceded, no “purely” command or market economy has ever existed; even the most meticulously planned economies must respond in some way to price mechanisms, and even the freest market economies set limits on what can be bought or sold and who can buy or sell. Governments intervene in moments of crisis (the Great Depression, the Second World War) and regulate business activity to some degree; some of them fund welfare states with varying degrees of generosity. But ordinarily, the state refrains from intervention in otherwise “free” markets. (Mr. Schnure, we eventually learned, was a Keynesian—a mark of the beast to classmates infected by the pathogen of Ayn Rand.) Along with democracy and religion—which religion didn’t seem to matter, so long as you believed in something—“free enterprise” formed the civic trinity of American life, the tripartite deity composed of Mars, Mammon, and God.
Precocious little commie that I was, I’d already read The Communist Manifesto, so I was partially inoculated against what Mr. Schnure was peddling. (I had encountered the word “capitalism”—more exotic, compelling, and informative than the anodyne “free enterprise.”) And as I grew older and wiser, I discovered that much of what he taught us was, to use the polite invective of Marxism, ideological obfuscation. Some of it was just plain wrong. As the late David Graeber reminded us in Debt (2011), anthropologists and historians have known for at least a century that credit preceded money, that barter has seldom if ever been a form of exchange, and that ancient empires created money not to facilitate trade but to provision armies and temples. Economics is not a “science”; it’s the beatific vision of capital, a paradise of avarice draped in the raiment of secular reason. “Scarcity” is a political creation, not an ontological reality; “self-interest” is a reductive and slanderous form of humanism; “value” means, in capitalist societies, what something will fetch in monetary terms, not an intrinsic, irreducible quality independent of pecuniary measure. The value of an apple is its taste and nutrition, not the money you pay for it.
One might acknowledge all this and still maintain that capitalist societies are the freest and wealthiest in history, and that, despite all the greed, injustice, and inequality that have marked capitalism from its inception, capitalism has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for resilience, ingenuity, and self-reformation. Unfettered from the accumulative restrictions of tradition, capitalism partook of the revolutionary spirit that kindled science, liberal democracy, and various liberatory social movements. Both its champions and its critics have attested not only to capitalism’s unprecedented productivity but also to the emancipatory energy by which, as Marx put it in the Manifesto, “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away.” (Lest the reader think Marx was being hyperbolic, consider the judgment of Michel Chevalier, another nineteenth-century French visitor to America: “An irresistible current sweeps away everything, grinds everything to powder, and deposits it again under new forms.”) Capitalism is anything but “conservative”; it triggers incessant novelty and dynamism, the protean and promethean sense of possibility that defines and animates modernity. Even for Marx, capitalism bore a promissory note of freedom—an emancipation not only from poverty but from the blinders and shackles of a poor, benighted, and tyrannical past.
Perhaps the greatest service provided by Sven Beckert and Trevor Jackson is to remind us just how unfree, repressive, and cruel capitalism is, was, and must be. Coming in at just under 1,100 pages of text, Beckert’s volume is a truly magisterial account of capitalism’s global rise and apparent triumph. In its intellectual scope and ambition, it is as broad and expansive as its subject. Though smaller in scale and more restricted in scope, Jackson’s book is no less sweeping in its presentation of relentless and now cataclysmic aggrandizement. The ambience of capital has been ubiquitous and implacable: “No religion, no ideology, no philosophy, has ever been as all-encompassing as the economic logic of capitalism,” Beckert observes. Thus, both scholars exemplify the historian as moralist: it’s evident that neither thinks that any humane and rational person would ever have deliberately constructed a way of producing and distributing goods so mean-spirited and so perverse in its understandings of freedom, wealth, and flourishing. For all the liberty and wealth it has afforded (some of) us, capitalism has its own peculiar imperatives and compulsions, which now threaten the very biosphere itself. (“The world I live in will be destroyed in my lifetime,” Jackson fears.) While its earliest champions spoke of what Montesquieu called le doux commerce—the sweet and moderating influence of market interaction—capitalism has long possessed a diverse portfolio of rampage. Conscripting all of us into its forced march of progress, capitalism is the command economy of freedom.
What is capitalism, exactly? The word itself didn’t appear until the 1830s, in French—capitalisme. (The word “capitalist” originated in the seventeenth century—capitalisten was a tax category in the Dutch Republic.) In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith described “commercial society” or “the system of natural liberty”; Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital (1867)—not Der Kapitalismus—as a critique of “political economy” in the service of overthrowing “bourgeois society.” In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber chided those who reduced it to mere avarice; such a notion, he scoffed, belonged in “the kindergarten of cultural history.” During the Cold War, American business and government preferred to praise “free enterprise,” as “capitalism” sounded too combatively left-wing. (Though Forbes cheekily proclaimed itself a “capitalist tool.”) Both Beckert and Jackson dismiss the old and moldy platitude that capitalism is a “free market” that has generated wealth almost entirely without assistance from political authority. Such a shibboleth is, in Beckert’s words, “a figment of scholars’ and ideologues’ imaginations.” Capitalism is not a “system of natural liberty,” a trucking-and-bartering passion that simply follows the grain of the universe. It arose within history, and, presumably, it will end within history.
The problem of defining capitalism is inseparable from the question of what makes it historically distinct from other forms of social and economic life, so historians rather than economists are better situated to tell us what it is. Beckert—the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard—is a seasoned chronicler of capitalism. His first book, The Monied Metropolis (2001), traced the evolution of New York City’s late-Victorian bourgeoisie, the gilded world fictionalized by Edith Wharton and Henry James. In his next book, Empire of Cotton (2014)—like Capitalism, a sprawling “global history”—he charted the grisly expansion of the nineteenth century’s most important industry from Asia to Africa to the Americas. With this new book, he becomes the foremost representative of “the new history of capitalism,” a scholarly movement that coalesced in the early 2010s out of dissatisfaction with conventional liberal and Marxist accounts of the system’s rise and (ostensible) triumph. Jackson is a historian at Berkeley whose first book, Impunity and Capitalism (2022), showed how, during the eighteenth century, European financial crises came to be understood not as the fault of greedy or incompetent individuals who could be held to moral or legal account but as the natural results of impersonal market activity. Crises, in this view, are like storms or hurricanes: you can take cover or clean up in their wake, but you can’t prevent them.
Both Capitalism and The Insatiable Machine exemplify the achievements and limitations of “the new history of capitalism.” Pioneered by Beckert, Seth Rockman, Julia Ott, Edward Baptist, Jonathan Levy, and other scholars, the “new history” exhibited a principled reluctance on the part of its practitioners to define “capitalism.” As Rockman once put it, they have tended to let the word “float as a place holder.” This conceptual agnosticism allowed them to widen the historical lens to encompass new actors (office workers, entrepreneurs, slaves, women), new subjects (credit, debt, currency, insurance), and new emphases (business culture, transnational flows of capital, labor, and commodities). The danger of this approach is that if “capitalism” is a cipher, then it can become anything and everything.
Although only Beckert mentions him (once) by name, both writers are shadowed by the specter of Robert Brenner, the UCLA historian who, in the 1970s, offered perhaps the most cogent and persuasive Marxist account of capitalism’s origins. Rather than locate its emergence in a kind of supercharged commerce or finance, Brenner explained how and why capitalism arose out of early-modern agrarian England. For Brenner, mere accumulation of wealth through trade or finance is not capitalism and does not explain its genesis. Neither profit-seeking nor market activity constitute its essence. By the sixteenth century, a very large proportion of land was owned by landlords and worked by tenants whose tenure took the form of leases. The rent they paid was set not by law or custom but by market conditions. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the labor of a growing number of tenants was subject to market imperatives, which forced them to specialize production for the market and to work competitively. This set in motion a historically unprecedented dynamic: self-sustaining competitive pressures to increase productivity, innovate technologically, and, gradually, to enlist wage labor—workers whose access to the means of production was similarly mediated by market forces.
Brenner’s historical account provided a template for understanding capitalism as a system in which the access of both producers and appropriators to the means of production is determined by the market. At the same time, capitalism is the first form of production in which direct producers are both propertyless and legally free; unlike chattel slaves, whose laboring bodies are themselves commodified, wage workers gain access to the means of production through the sale of their capacity to labor for money. Unlike chattel slavery or serfdom, there is no overt coercion in the capitalist relationship between owners and producers. Because everything in capitalism is mediated by competitive markets, it possesses inherent structural imperatives to maximize profits, improve labor productivity, reinvest surpluses in production, promote technological development, and reduce labor costs.
Both Jackson and Beckert treat capitalism much as Brenner and other Marxists have, but their histories—very similar in broad chronological outline and trajectory—differ insofar as their definitions diverge. For Jackson, capitalism is a system “constituted by markets in the factors of production, which are labor, land, and capital”; individuals “buy and sell the things that produce all other things.” Both emphasize the system’s sheer accumulative ravenousness and propulsive velocity. For Beckert—who, despite his affiliation with the “new history,” actually offers a definition—capitalism is “the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital” whereby wealth is deployed to make ever more wealth; it tends to “grow, flow, and permeate all areas of activity.” Capitalism “cannot stop growing or expanding,” Jackson declares. Akin to a machine, “it obeys the dumb, inhuman logic” of pecuniary reason. Land, labor, resources, and technology are all sold in markets; wage labor is its distinctive way of mobilizing and exploiting workers. But this is where Beckert makes a crucial pivot in line with the “new history.” Capitalism, he argues, “has been perfectly compatible with other forms of labor commodification”—especially, and notoriously, slavery. Thus, he continues, “what defines capitalism…is the commodification of labor across a spectrum of forms” (my italics).
Though written in clear and often elegant prose, the loose and capacious quality of Beckert’s narrative derives from this all-embracing definition of capitalism—one that Jackson eschews. The tales they tell are roughly similar, even though Beckert takes us up to the present while Jackson ends in about 1933, with the rise of Nazism. Both write of “capitalists before capitalism”: Jackson focuses on fourteenth-century Italian and Belgian merchants, while Beckert opens more boldly in twelfth-century Aden, in southern Yemen, the hub of a multicultural and multireligious trading network that reached from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Capitalism, Beckert claims, was “born global.” Both books describe the gold and silver mines in what is today Mexico and Bolivia, and how their enormous output led to the monetization of daily life in the north Atlantic over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: kings needed money to fight wars (Beckert dubs this preindustrial era “war capitalism”), while more farmers, artisans, and landlords sloughed off custom and tradition in order to produce vendable surpluses for the market. Most of the Spanish Empire’s loot went to wages for soldiers and interest payments to bankers; most of the silver mined in the Americas wound up in China to pay for silk, tea, and porcelain. From Barbados to London to Bruges to Florence to Jakarta, the coffers brimmed with the lucre from sugar, tobacco, spices, coffee, and slaves.
While the merchants and traders supplied the capital, the state provided legal infrastructure, financial stability, and military muscle. In England, the state assisted landlords by expropriating monasteries and selling them the land (the dissolution of the monasteries during the Henrician Reformation) and enforcing enclosures (the ending of feudal rights to common land and the eviction of serfs and tenants). Capitalists bankrolled war and imperial adventurism, then used their leverage over monarchs and aristocrats to extract charters, low taxes, and protections that enabled them to secure control over trade routes to Africa, Asia, and eventually the Americas. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch capitalisten invented the joint-stock corporation, with saleable, transferable shares, which quickly became the salient mode of marshaling capital—Jackson calls it “the archetypal organizational structure of modern capitalism.”
Although the profits from trade and finance garnered by capitalists were obviously indispensable, capitalism itself appeared most definitively with the emergence of wage labor as the most prevalent form of mobilizing workers. Until the seventeenth century, wage labor had been unusual in world history, even “weird,” as Jackson remarks. But as Dutch farmers and English landlords moved to profit and capitalize on burgeoning commercial activity, wage work became the only option for laborers displaced from agriculture and thrown into a swelling agrarian and urban proletariat. While Beckert insists on the irreducibly global character of capitalism—“the whole globe is the space where capitalism emerged and developed”—Jackson plays Brenner’s game and identifies the Dutch Republic as the first truly capitalist society, one characterized by a mass of free farmers who produced for the market and by a large urban workforce of wage laborers in shipbuilding, papermaking, and sugar and tobacco processing.
Wage labor served as the basis for the industrial stage of capitalism—“the most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of the world,” as Eric Hobsbawm once observed. Besides unleashing a permanent technological revolution, industrialization fragmented the work process, deskilled labor, urbanized populations, destabilized gender relations, and mandated the use of coal and other fossil fuels with all their horrendous ecological consequences: global warming, deforestation, and reduction of biodiversity. Displacement from agrarian life triggered massive and ongoing migrations from Ireland, Italy, Russia, India, China, and Latin America. By the early twentieth century, the industrial juggernaut had spawned what Jackson calls a “global division of labor” from the intractable pressures of market incentives and imperial hegemony. On this score, Beckert says remarkably little about imperialism, while Jackson debunks the still-common belief that it served to open up markets for goods and surplus capital.
Jackson ends his book with a brief excursus on the period 1917–33, from the Bolshevik Revolution through the Great Depression to the triumph of fascism in Germany, while Beckert stops at the Great Recession of 2008 and the ongoing crisis of legitimacy it provoked. “If capitalism was ever going to collapse and be replaced by a newer rival,” Jackson thinks, it would have happened after World War I; alas, Lenin and the Soviet Union ignited no worldwide revolution, and so “the machine survived.” Beckert takes us through the machine’s survival at this “time of monsters” and lavishes some of his most buoyant prose on its trente glorieuses after World War II—the halcyon days of the welfare state, steady and vibrant growth rates, strong labor unions, and the most equitable distribution of wealth in modern history. (Beckert describes the prevailing mood of this period by quoting the Swedish rock band ABBA: “Shining like the sun / Smiling, having fun / Feeling like a number one.”) The era that began in the 1970s witnessed yet another metamorphosis: the decline of manufacturing in the Global North and its move to the south, the demolition of organized labor, sluggish growth, the supremacy of finance capital, the disassembly of the welfare state, and the hegemony of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is perhaps the most thoroughly capitalist phase of the whole history of capitalism, suffused by a thoroughly mercenary moral imagination. As Beckert explains, the premise of neoliberalism is that “all goods and services—indeed, all human interactions—were essentially the same, could be reduced to their cost, and should be regulated by the market.” Neoliberals such as Friedrich Hayek realized that, unlike economists, ordinary people might not take kindly to the marketization of things and people they cherished, and so neoliberalism entailed an often-tacit aversion to democracy. When General Augusto Pinochet and his junta instituted a battery of neoliberal reforms in the 1970s—they called it el ladrillo, or “the brick”—they knew that, as one U.S. embassy official wrote unironically, “sound economic measures” had to take precedence over democracy. The rapprochement between democracy and capitalism embodied in the welfare state turned out to be all too fragile and contingent. Neoliberals insisted that—as the history of slave revolts, worker strikes, union mobilization, and socialist and anarchist movements demonstrated—capitalism must be insulated from popular dissent and democratic supervision.
Beckert and Jackson are absorbing and illuminating on the way to their disheartening conclusions. Beckert’s prodigious research (and travel: he mentions standing at dawn in front of a factory in Phnom Penh) unfolds in colorful vignettes, copious statistics, a wide range of subtopics (from merchant networks and factory discipline to mass merchandising and postcolonial insurgency), and unlikely references (Robert Musil, Pope Francis, and Pablo Neruda all get a nod, along with ABBA). Yet what Beckert gains in narrative breadth and detail he sometimes loses in interpretive coherence and clarity; in his telling, capitalism often becomes everything, everywhere, all at once. Jackson’s volume is tighter and less lavish, as well as more sardonic (“As everyone knows, in 1492 Native Americans discovered Christopher Columbus”) and more pointed in its moral energy. (His brief discussion of the concept of “productivity” confirms that economics is indeed one of the most dismal forms of sophistry in intellectual history.) Although he concentrates on the capitalists rather than their antagonists and critics, he does remind us that “the struggle of people against capital is immortal.”
Jackson’s admonition about popular resistance to capitalism, along with Beckert’s reminder that Chilean neoliberalism pitted democracy against “sound economic measures,” underscores the violence and rage for domination that have characterized capitalism throughout its history. The enslavement of Africans, the liquidation and displacement of Indigenous peoples, the starvation of Irish and Indians, the shooting of strikers and protesters, the enlistment of children to mine the lithium and cobalt for our computers—the annals of capitalism are rife with homicide, dispossession, intimidation, and exploitation, all enveloped in the sanctimony of “freedom” and “progress.” What Marx once called “the civilizing force of capital”—the material comforts, the medicines, the scientific and technological breakthroughs, the cosmopolitanism—has lavished its benefactions at a steep cost in lives, hopes, and natural resources.
Both Beckert and Jackson follow Martin Scorsese’s directorial dictum: the more you show the money, the more you have to show the blood. The most naked and ferocious forms of cruelty were, of course, the conquest and forcible eviction of Indigenous peoples in North America and the racialized chattel slavery that blighted Latin America and the antebellum South. “Indian removal” was the foreign policy of settler colonialism; “westward expansion” is the epic story of imperial annexation for capitalist lebensraum. What Herman Melville called “the metaphysics of Indian-hating” was embedded in American capitalism from the beginning. As a group of cotton merchants said of President Andrew Jackson, “He found one half our territory occupied by a few wandering Indians. He will leave it in the cultivation of thousands of grateful freemen”—“and their slaves,” as Beckert adds. The relationship between New World slavery and capitalism has long been a contentious issue among historians, from Eric Williams’s groundbreaking Marxist work of the 1940s to today’s proponents of the “racial capitalism” thesis. New World slavery marked the extremity of a spectrum of unfree labor that included serfdom, conscription, the enslavement of convicts and prisoners of war, the mita and encomienda systems, and indenture. Drawing on the voluminous literature generated by recent scholarship on the subject, Beckert and Jackson offer hideous examples of slavery’s horrific role in the rise of capitalism. The Potosí mountain range in Bolivia, source of enormous troves of silver ore, was called “the mountain that ate men,” and as Beckert remarks, “the mountain that ate men provided one of the essential fuels that powered capitalism’s emergence.” “Free markets” needed subjugation; the “system of natural liberty” required the sword, the gun, and the bullwhip.
Yet while both Beckert and Jackson leave no doubt about slavery’s importance to capitalist development, they differ about exactly what that importance was. Because Beckert contends that capitalism is defined by the commodification of labor in any form, he is almost compelled to identify slavery with capitalism; indeed, he explicitly states that it was “the foundation of the system of wage labor.” (Planters, he notes, were in the vanguard of modern management and accounting techniques.) Jackson is more guarded, claiming that while capitalism did not need slavery, it nonetheless flourished alongside it—and in part because of it. That is because Jackson distinguishes more clearly—and rightly, I think—between the commodification of labor and the commodification of laborers. This is important because wage labor, which is its own form of unfreedom, carries with it a consciousness of autonomy and agency that has been central to liberal and socialist politics. As difficult as it often is for lefties to say it, wage labor—exploitative as it is—marked a step forward in history.
Wage labor is its own kind of servitude, but that’s because capitalism itself is a latticework of coercive property relations. As Jackson writes, “we are free to choose within capitalist markets, but not free to live outside of them altogether.” To be sure, the vernacular of capitalism abounds in the language of freedom: we speak of “the free market,” the creation of “opportunity,” the proliferation of “choices,” the “opening” of countries to trade. Yet we also speak of “market forces,” and forces, we easily forget, entail compulsion. The distinctive and dominant characteristic of the capitalist market is not opportunity or choice but, on the contrary, compulsion. Despite the appearance of freedom and equality in the wage bargain, for instance—the worker is “free” to choose or reject the terms of employment offered by the owner—the owner’s complete control over access to and use of the means of production puts him at a decisive advantage. Under chattel slavery, your master chooses you; under capitalism, you choose your master.
By the same token, the capitalist imperatives of competition, accumulation, and profit maximization mandate that owners acquire and seek to enlarge their control not only over the means of production but also over workers themselves. As Andrew Ure, the first industrial consultant, wrote in 1835, the purpose of factory organization and mechanized technology is mastery over workers. “When capital enlists science in her service, the refractory hand of labor will always be taught docility.” Every capitalist firm is a private despotism—no matter how affable or cultivated they are, capitalists must resist or break unions; utilize technologies that render workers either obsolete, cheaper, or more pliable; and oppose any state effort to regulate the conditions under which they extract as much surplus as they can out of workers, regardless of how inhumane, socially irresponsible, or ecologically destructive those activities are. As even Milton Friedman once admitted, “socially responsible capitalism” is a category error. The only justice and equity that workers have ever achieved in capitalist nations has been acquired—painfully and often against great violence—through unions, left-wing movements and parties, and a generous welfare state.
Alas, as Beckert and Jackson remind us, the state has been much more than a “watchman”; it is capitalism’s most dependable enforcer, the gendarme imposing the rule of the market—now often described as the “rules-based international order.” Under Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans, the English state evicted Irish Catholic peasants and handed their land to Protestant landlords; two centuries later, their evangelical heirs starved the Irish while invoking the mandate of heaven. In North America, colonial and early republican governments tolerated the slave trade while massacring and displacing Indigenous peoples; from John Locke to Andrew Jackson and beyond, their justification hinged on “improvement”—the use of land for the production of profitable commodities. In an 1830 message to Congress, Jackson waxed philosophical about the genocide. “True philanthropy,” he mused, “reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another.” Both Beckert and Jackson highlight the atrocities of Leopold II of Belgium—whitewashed by the likes of Newt Gingrich—under whose murderous reign the hunt for rice, cotton, and copper claimed the lives of between five and ten million Congolese. Violence was necessary, His Majesty explained, to “shake their idleness and make them realize the sanctity of work.” Kurtz’s call in Heart of Darkness to “exterminate all the brutes” has a long and pious pedigree.
Conservatives or libertarians either ignore or dismiss all of this as performative wokeness or liberal guilt-tripping or, in the Trump administration’s words, “ideological indoctrination.” My hunch is that the more intellectually astute on the right know perfectly well that the history of capitalism is awash in a sea of blood and suffering; they just think the price was worth paying. An easy thing to say, of course, when that exorbitant price is paid in the currency of other people’s lives.
Can things be different? Can there be a world after capitalism that isn’t mean and destitute and authoritarian? Neither Beckert nor Jackson seems very hopeful; indeed, their attempts at hope seem strained and dutiful. Right now, Beckert asserts, “the domination of capitalism…seems absolute.” Although he reckons that “there will be a moment when capitalism ends,” he doesn’t appear to think that moment will arrive anytime soon. He notes the interest of capitalists such as Peter Thiel in sea and space colonies to avoid the coming ecological and political upheavals of the century—a sign that even the one-percenters are frightened. He surveys the Cassandran chorus of the left, from Nancy Fraser to Wolfgang Streeck, only to caution that brilliant prophets such as Marx and Joseph Schumpeter have called it wrongly before. But Beckert concludes his masterwork with a lame meditation on history as a way of knowing ourselves. Jackson is even gloomier: “It is too late to stop the catastrophe” that will result from global warming, he broods. Although he’s convinced that “things can’t stay this way forever,” he clearly believes that it’s going to stay this way for the foreseeable future. “We don’t know where we’re going,” he closes, “but we are not alone.” At least we’ll have each other in the dreadful tomorrow.
Both Jackson and Beckert are lucid, engaging writers, so the bleak banality of their conclusions stems, I think, not from stylistic ineptitude but rather from imaginative exhaustion. As Mark Fisher feared when warning of the triumph of “capitalist realism,” it has become difficult if not impossible to envision a different world; the future has been—or is being—canceled. Certainly, conceived as some seismic rupture with the established order that ushers in a classless, warless world, “revolution” is not in the offing; utopia has been postponed indefinitely, if not forever. With no opposition, capitalism will continue to take us—increasingly against our will—into a future made in the image and likeness of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. So perhaps we should begin thinking of revolution as Walter Benjamin did near the end of his life: not like Marx, as the locomotive of history, but as people “activating the emergency brake.” Pulling the brake on history would be the first step toward genuine liberation. What will we do if the train stops? We might disembark and ask ourselves what we want and where we want to go.
If we do, we might want to dissent from Beckert’s assertion that no religion or philosophy has ever been as all-pervasive as capitalism. If indeed it’s become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, perhaps it’s because we continue to think and hope within the parameters of the secular, the mind-forged manacles that Blake beheld in the Industrial Revolution. Pace Beckert, the next chapter of the utopian imagination might well belong to religion. For a long time now, religion has more often been employed as a sobering check on political hope; it’s well past time to put Reinhold Niebuhr and his minions out to pasture. As we confront a world that is being plundered and incinerated, their mannered stoicism now seems barren as well as tiresome. Their “realism” is dubious as well; as Jason Blakely and David Albertson remind us in their new book, Utopia for Our Century, “only utopia has outlasted the kingdoms of the earth.” Indeed, utopia has an impressive record of accomplishment; “history,” James Baldwin once observed, “testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.” Which means, of course, that it wasn’t impossible; someone just had to perceive the possibility latent or emerging in the given.
Rather than draw up yet another blueprint, Blakely and Albertson point to J.R.R. Tolkien’s notion of “eucatastrophe,” the good catastrophe, one from which something hopeful and regenerative can spring. “Christian utopianism,” they suggest, “sees in decline a catastrophe that might still be put to good use, a felix culpa.” It’s a sensibility rather than an imagination, I suppose, but it’s an invaluable counter not only to the reactionary futurisms of tech bros and nationalists but also to the pervasive and combustible stew of resentment and demoralization that neoliberal capitalism has wrought.
Given the extensive social and ecological damage inflicted by this latest, most rapacious phase of capitalism, ours must for now be a politics of reparation, a mending of the shredded and battered bodies of civilization and its biosphere. Pulling the brake, we can slowly, prayerfully, begin to reimagine the world after capitalism. Plans and sketches are necessary, to be sure, but what we need right now much more than policies is, as Jackson suggests, each other. Only love and solidarity will enable us to endure and flourish after the eucatastrophe that’s already in our midst.
Capitalism
A Global History
Sven Beckert
Penguin Press
$49.00 | 1344 pgs.
The Insatiable Machine
How Capitalism Conquered the World
Trevor Jackson
W. W. Norton & Company
$33.99 | 320 pgs.
We welcome your comments about this article. Please send your response to [email protected].
