A Global Storm in a Capitalist Teacup? Jeremy Adelman on Why There’s No Exit to the Market

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Back in November of last year, I had the distinguished Harvard economist Sven Beckert [ed.: Beckert is a professor of history at Harvard] on the show. He had back then a book called Capitalism: A Global History. It's turned into a bestseller, very ambitious book about, of course, the global history of capitalism. Big subject, big thinker. And we have another big thinker on the show today, Jeremy Adelman. He's a professor of history at Cambridge. He was also a professor of history at, Princeton for many years, and he has another book, a big book out, which in some ways, I think, complements, this the Beckert book. It's called The Capitalist Era: The Making—and Unmaking—of the Global Mind. Jeremy is joining us from Cambridge in England where he teaches. Jeremy, is that the key to understanding how your book might be compared and contrasted with the Beckert book that you're interested in the global mind or the capitalist mind as opposed to the economics of capitalism?

00:01:41 Jeremy Adelman: Well, in a way, yes. In that, capitalism is also a concept, and it's and the experience of capitalism involves mental processes, which I'm sure we'll talk about. So in contrast to Sven's book, which I admire a great deal and I reviewed in Foreign Affairs, my concern is not just with the material structures of capitalism, but how we think about them because it's how we think about them that sets the policies and creates our attachments and fuels the wars and the efforts to create new institutions that govern capitalism. So it's really it's to push more into, the mental and philosophical and even the representative systems that govern our capitalist world. So it's it just has a very different spin than Sven's book does.

00:02:35 Andrew Keen: When we look up capitalism on Wikipedia, of course, we come to some very technical definitions. It's always seemed to me that capitalism comes so naturally to con—to us contemporaries. We just take it for granted. It's inevitable that we were—we live in a market system, and we all want to extract profit of one kind or another from the system. But it's hard to sometimes imagine a pre-capitalist era. But, of course, your book, like Beckert's and so many others, reminds us that capitalism is a relatively modern invention. Is that fair, Jeremy?

00:03:11 Jeremy Adelman: I think so. I mean, there are some people who claim that capitalism has been around since the very beginning that we were, you know, ever since we learned to walk and accumulate, we became proto-capitalists, and that was all we did around. I don't agree. I think it's really a product of the eighteenth century. Sven, argues that it comes along much, much earlier. But capitalism or arguments about what capitalism really dawns with Adam Smith in my view, and Adam Smith's view that what capitalism that he has used the term, he uses the term commercial society, integrates people across borders in ways that all the previous economic systems simply don't do. And that's what's characteristic of it and its appetite for expansion once it starts to do that. So it's global from the very start. And that's what's new about it. It is the first global economic system, that ties strangers from very distant parts together into one integrated system that becomes as it becomes more integrated, interdependent. And that I'm sure we're gonna wind up talking a lot about that, but that's the defining feature of the system.

00:04:22 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Smith. Of course, the—many people consider the founder of the modern discipline of economics, an enormously influential, and eighteenth century Scottish thinker, philosopher, moral philosopher. Was Smith, though, observing something, Jeremy, that had already come into being, or was he imagining something that hadn't evolved yet and he was predicting it in one kind—in one form or another.

00:04:55 Jeremy Adelman: Well, that's a really good way of posing the problem of Adam Smith. I mean, he is a prophet, and he can see things coming—

00:05:03 Andrew Keen: And that's p r o p h e t, without making jokes about capitalist profit.

00:05:09 Jeremy Adelman: That's right. And he can see profit-making coming on a new—a gigantic scale. But profits always require something. There are ingredients that he can see happening. And one of the things that he does in one of his famous texts is invites the reader to engage in a thought experiment. And he asked the reader to imagine, a gentleman of humanity, that's the term he uses, who's, let's imagine this gentleman of humanity drinking a cup of tea, reading the news about and which is something that begins to happen in the late eighteenth century, about an earthquake far away in China that's killed thousands of people. And he asks the reader to imagine, whether this man of humanity would, think as much about the suffering of the Chinese peasants as the pain he has in his little finger. And so he identifies the problem that as the world becomes more integrated and we have a self-interest in others, not least because we're drinking the tea that's produced in China. So we have a self-interest in what's happening in China. Can our sympathies keep pace with those? And, that really obsesses, Adam Smith. So he sees the predicament coming, but it's an imaginative one, right, to your question. But he can see the implications of what happens when the marketplace expands to a global scale.

00:06:45 Andrew Keen: Smith, of course, thought of himself, and he was considered a moral philosopher. Of course, many critics of capitalism, and Marx comes to mind most of all, saw capitalism as an immoral system. Is that how you're going about telling the story of capitalism in The Capitalist Era as a moral system, but you're being more imaginative or at least less critical than the Marxist tradition of thinking about it in terms of relationships of strangers and this new global mind that you describe in the subtitle?

00:07:22 Jeremy Adelman: Yeah. Well, yes. I would say that I'm trying to reach back to this eighteenth century tradition. In fact, to reach back to a figure who's often been seen as the founder of free market ideology.

00:07:35 Andrew Keen: This is Smith, of course.

00:07:36 Jeremy Adelman: Adam Smith. Exactly. And so I'm I applaud you for recognizing that Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, because he never would have—

00:07:45 Andrew Keen: But he was. I mean, I'm not—you—that's not my term, Jeremy. I mean, that's how people thought of him, and that's how he defined himself.

00:07:51 Jeremy Adelman: People don't know that. Right? They think of him as an, quote, unquote, economist, right, who believes in homo economicus. But he thought of us all as moral creatures. But the marketplace entangles our moralities. Right? It makes us dependent. We are both seeking our individual utilities, but in so doing, we are also becoming interdependent with each other, and that raises ethical obligations to each other. So that's how he—that's the tradition I want to put in motion, and we're living with it still. We just don't—you know, we—by the time we talked about globalization, it was the market was over here. We lived in a market-integrated world, and then we had these humanitarian languages over on the far, left side over there, and these weren't entwined. And Smith would not have recognized that way of arguing about capitalism.

00:08:44 Andrew Keen: Smith, of course, didn't exist on his own. He was part of the Scottish Enlightenment, other remarkably influential figures like David Hume. Does, in your view, The Capitalist Era, is it defined by, if not the Scottish Enlightenment, certainly, Enlightenment values of individualism, liberalism, rationality, science that not just Smith, but guys like David Hume thought about, wrote about, and admired?

00:09:19 Jeremy Adelman: Yes. I mean, I think they set—as a bundle of arguments—moving. And those arguments, what will constitute the global mind, sort of, are you know, in a way, the world becomes a battleground from the beginning of economic integration. Capitalism integrates societies, but also separates and segregates them. But those kinds of battles are also going on inside our heads. And so what Smith and Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment are not the only ones to do this, but they clustered it together in a remarkable set of insights. Those arguments carry through the nineteenth century right through the twentieth century, and so the book is an effort to try to chart these big debates that have, governed the making of the institutions that have pulled the world together and pulled it apart in wars. And so they just got—that's that big global debate going. Mill makes his appearance as you alluded to.

00:10:25 Andrew Keen: He always does. He always pops up one way or another. This is the younger Mill, the John Stuart.

00:10:31 Jeremy Adelman: John Stuart Mill. Alright. And they both—most—Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill will be writing by the late eighteen forties about the same problem. Right? When we become interdependent, what are the obligations between strangers? So that in a sense, the arguments get deeper and thicker and more complex. And they involve a lot of people from Japan and Argentina and South Africa along the way. It's not just a European debate.

00:10:57 Andrew Keen: Your—some of your earlier scholarship, I know, is focused on Latin America. You've lived there for a while as well. This idea of obligations between strangers, Jeremy, I mean, you use the example of the gentleman drinking a cup of tea and reading his newspaper. But most gentlemen who don't—who drink cups of tea, who read newspapers in the eighteenth or twentieth or twenty-first century, it doesn't occur to them that whatever they're reading about, Chinese earthquakes or civil wars, that there's a connection between their cup of tea and what was happening overseas. So why should we also make that connection?

00:11:40 Jeremy Adelman: Yeah. That's a good question. I think that's one of the key challenges here. You know, should we bother keeping our sympathies attached to our self-interests? Right? And, I think one of the ways to think about this is, that, if you do not at least think morally about, the relationship between strangers, you wind up in situations in which you dehumanize the very stranger that you depend upon for your survival, for your recognition, for your security, and that gets you into self-defeating traps. And we can go through the many episodes in history and what's happening these days in, in the wider world. So it's about thinking of a more enlarged, encompassing, and, dare I say, enlightened conception of the economy that's at stake that would make things more sustainable.

00:12:46 Andrew Keen: So in a way, you're arguing in the book or you're suggesting that we're all Adam Smith. We all, by definition, living in a capitalist system, in our capitalist era, we're all moral philosophers, or at least we should be. Jeremy, people are gonna be watching this and thinking, who is this guy? Is he for or against capitalism? And I know that's probably a vulgar question. On the one hand, of course, there's a rising tide, don't need me to tell you this, of anti-capitalists, as we speak. There's the emergence of socialism, democratic socialism, and whatever that means in the United States. Lots of elections fought around that theme. But are you and I'm gonna say and I use this word carefully. I don't mean in an accusatory way. But in contrast to somebody like Beckert, who seemed to me at least, we entitled our conversation "From Feudal Lords to AI Billionaires", which gives away his own moral critique of capitalism. Are you in a sense, Jeremy, an apologist for this? Are you suggesting that the good thing about capitalism is it makes us all moral, that we're all morally obliged to strangers. So is that the argument in your book, or is that too vulgar? Would it be unfair to either call you, an anti-capitalist or a pro-capitalist?

00:14:25 Jeremy Adelman: No. That's a fair it's not an unfair question at all. I would say, you know, that there are, there's obviously a long tradition of arguing that in a capitalist system, the moral, the moral weaknesses will ensure that there will have to be an economic system that surpasses it. That runs through the—many traditions, the most important being, of course, the Marxist tradition. And in some senses, we're all heirs to the Marxist tradition as well, Right? Including Sven, and me and you and, you know, that we think about inequality and exploitation and that those are inherent to the system of interdependence as well. The propensity to be predatory coexists with the propensity to be empathetic. And that's just a reality. Reality is what I wanna bring to the picture. That one of the I think we have to acknowledge is, and this is part of the trap of capitalism, when you live in an interdependent system, there's no way out. There's no exit in capitalism. To leave a capitalist system is so punitive and so punishing, and I'd say this is one of the awful cunning logics of Donald Trump's administration, and we can get into that if you want, is that there isn't and, actually, you can't break away from capitalism without paying a very, very high price, and we've seen this over and over again in the history of socialist revolutions. But to say that there isn't an exit doesn't mean there aren't alternatives. And I think what we need to be having a discussion about is what form, for instance, of globalization, should we have? What's the globalization we need? Not the globalization that was dumped on us, you know, that created was created in the nineteen eighties. And so the book is really trying to reformat the conversations through this language of interdependence, retrieving the tradition from the eighteenth century for the present.

00:16:31 Andrew Keen: I'm talking to Jeremy from San Francisco. Lots of my local stores boast about selling tea or coffee produced in more, quote, unquote, humane ways and cooperatives. I'm sure you have similar sorts of stores in Cambridge. Is that one of the moral implications of your history, of your argument that we should all be much more aware of as you say, there's no exit in capitalism. We have to go and buy our coffee or tea from a local store. That's just the nature of things.

00:17:05 Jeremy Adelman: We know that we live [ed.: overlapping speech]

00:17:06 Andrew Keen: in a subsistence economy. So we should be much more aware, for example, that the tea we drink or the tea we buy has to be produced by someone. So we should, like Adam Smith, be more morally aware and buy stuff that is produced in a decent kind of way.

00:17:26 Jeremy Adelman: Well, that would be one way to format it. And in fact, the existence of that kind of coffee, is a testament to people's search for, a way to think of themselves as being moral by living in the marketplace. Right? So, you know, some people criticize that as banal. Well, it's the only the consumption is the only way we can possibly exercise our moral agency now that humanitarianism is dead. And, I would like to think, though, it's a little deeper than just, you know, consuming our way to a slightly better world than the one we live in. And there are ways of thinking about cooperative institutions and practices, that we're going to need, to get us through because we are interdependent. And that's what's being stress tested right now. And the fact is, you know, we live in a world that was created, in some senses after 1945, after the dropping of the last bomb on Nagasaki. And the institutions that pulled the world together, and that evolved and adapted are now being stress tested. And they're being stress tested in part because there's more competition between the very players, that designed the system. Never before had a hegemon like the United States, which had really served as the helm for this system after 1945, now feels challenged, and is challenged, frankly, by, by China. What is important to underscore about this is being stress tested, but China and the United States are also interdependent. And that's why these allusions to things like the Thucydides Trap and we're caught in declining America, rising challenger, they're silly metaphors because Sparta and Athens were never as interdependent as China and the United States are. And that's the dilemma we face. Our old institutions are exhausted, but we were there's too much rivalry to produce new ones.

00:19:37 Andrew Keen: So I think—right, it's the—

00:19:39 Jeremy Adelman: —what—that's historic.

00:19:40 Andrew Keen: It's, what did Gramsci say about it? The interregnum?

00:19:44 Jeremy Adelman: Yes. It's the time for monsters.

00:19:47 Andrew Keen: Time for monsters. Although, of course, he was a Marxist, not too keen on capitalism. Smith has been claimed by both camps, both capitalist camps, the Hayekian and Keynesian camps, Jeremy. But are you suggesting really that they're basically the same camp? There's no exit from capitalism. So this ongoing debate between the left and the right, between the Keynesians and the Hayekians, between Thatcher and Reagan and Keynes and all the rest of it, that it's really just a bit of a family squabble, using extending your teacup thing, a storm in a teacup.

00:20:27 Jeremy Adelman: To some extent. And I would say the reason why to some extent is because what they all agree upon is that we live within a capitalist system. I know that some people seem to think of Keynes and Keynesians and regulators as anti, you know, anti-market. That's just simply not true. And they just have different arguments about how to live in an interdependent world. And that's the key. That's why it's the story is about the making and the unmaking of the global mind. We've had these meta arguments all along. Now the question that you've posed is, does the arguments really matter? You know? Are they just quarreling over, you know, is, over the scraps? No. I think they're really quarreling over fundamentally different kinds of models for interdependence. And, and sort of missed those arguments. We've not really had, for some quite some time, a fundamental globally scaled argument about the world we wanna live in, and I think we need to recover that if we're going to get out of this mess.

00:21:39 Andrew Keen: Your book is about the making and unmaking of the global mind. You mentioned John Stuart Mill, of course, also worked, I think, for the East India Company as well as being an economist and a moral philosopher. Who are the best examples of this global mind that you describe in The Capitalist Era? Who would you use as exhibits? Who do you write about in the book?

00:22:04 Jeremy Adelman: So it really they take different, incarnations and expressions. You know, the book includes stories about artists, trying to find a new aesthetic for, for capturing this interdependence, the public Picasso, photographers, photojournalists, creative photographers, who represent interdependence in some way. Because how we think about strangers who affect our lives is mediated literally through the media. And so that's how the questions of representing strangers through art and especially photography. There's a lot on the history of photography in the book. It's really important for understanding our attitudes to strangers. So lots of philosophers, lots of poets. Borges makes his appearance. I have a hard time writing any book without putting—

00:23:01 Andrew Keen: Oh, you got the Latin American thing. I know.

00:23:03 Jeremy Adelman: I got my—my Latin Americans are smuggled in. And there are ecologists and scientists. There are the ecologists and scientists who worry in the late nineteenth century about the world running out of resources. And they say it's a world crisis, that we are going to run out of resources. It comes back in the nineteen thirties. It comes back in the nineteen seventies. And so I tell the story about the thinking around the global environment as a condition that closes the planet. So not only is there no exit, but we're stuck together on this planet. And, you know, some will say we're gonna have to find collective solutions. Others say, screw that. It this is a nasty, competitive world, and justify, and this was really the case in the nineteen thirties, out and out predatory policies and exterminations of people because they sit on the resources that we need to survive. Right? So the global mind has it's sort of amorphous, but it includes scientists, photographers, philosophers, economists, and poets. It's a very internally heterogeneous group, and it's global. I mean, that there are Africans and there are Japanese and there are Asians and Mexicans involved in this debate about what it means.

00:24:24 Andrew Keen: So let's think a little bit more about these photographers. They're the kind of photographers, On the one hand, you have people like Ansel Adams photographing nature, reminding people perhaps that is endangered by capitalism. And then, of course, a whole generation of photographers, particularly in the nineteen thirties, who went out and photographed the suffering of people, the experience of living in the Great Depression. Is that an example in your mind of this new global mind? I mean, in the nineteenth century, writers like Dickens and Zola were writing about the suffering of people in this new system. So it wasn't entirely revolutionary, was it? But, of course, photography is a in its own way, a revolutionary, technology.

00:25:13 Jeremy Adelman: That's right. No. And it runs throughout. And so those writers are also looking at photographs or images of photographs. In the case of Dickens, these are line he would be looking at the line drawings, that were kind of re—that were done off of the prints because they hadn't yet figured out how to stamp photographs onto cheap paper. That doesn't come along till the beginnings of the twentieth century. But Zola is definitely looking at photographs. Zola was fascinated by photography. And, yes, because it has two incredible features to it. One is it's you can reproduce the image cheaply. Right? And, so you can take a shot from far away, reproduce it inexpensively, and that it makes a claim to realism. If the shooting, the reality out there, somehow removes a veil between strangers. Now we can see each other through printed media or eventually as the image moves on to screen televisions and then the screens are our computers. And so the lens and, and the screen become the ways in which strangers, including the people who are watching this, this program and this recording, are going to think about people that they don't know. And that's very important for driving. Now, of course and you alluded to the image of destitution. By the late nineteenth century, there's a whole photographic genre about what we would now call street photography, that portrayed New York and London as cities of vice and of—extreme poverty and so on. And so the kind of misery that one that was going on far away is suddenly part of the news cycle that we're living in. And it's very important to think about the role of that. That creates an attachment between the suffering strangers, but it also creates detachments. People feel and worry that far too many images might turn us—make us indifferent about the plight of strangers, and that's also part of the debate. I think it's very relevant now, as we get supersaturated with digital hype and now infinitely reproducible, you know, artificially constructed images of strangers, And whether that is going to tax our ability to empathize is, I think, an open question. Many early doubters would have said, yeah. This is going to be a big problem. We have market interdependence, but growing indifference between interdependent people, and that's a recipe for calamity.

00:28:12 Andrew Keen: And, of course, some, quote, unquote, Marxist philosophers like Walter Benjamin were interested in the technology or the moral tech the technology and morality of reproduction. So, Jeremy, let me ask you this question. I know it's a bit of a weird question. Let's just imagine that time travel existed, and we could take images of suffering people in the nineteen thirties back to a peasant in the fifteenth century, somebody living in a pre-capitalist age in a village, had no experience or understanding of the outside world, and who had no that the idea of the global mind would be utterly foreign to. How would they respond to the images of suffering? Of course, back then, I guess, the art was much more allegorical, much more metaphorical in terms of suffering. Is the implication of your argument in The Capitalist Era that they wouldn't have been too bothered, that they would have been mystified—

00:29:20 Jeremy Adelman: You know, that's a very good question. I'm not sure I have a particularly good word to it, except to say, of course, in those days, if especially if you're live living in the Christian world, you would have been surrounded by images of suffering. But the suffering would not have been, predominantly of your fellow countrymen or distant countrymen. It would have been the suffering of Jesus Christ, and that was very important to Christian belief systems, that somebody, the son of God suffered on your behalf. But I think, you know, the thought experiment that you've invited us to that is, of course, the premise is that it was impossible to do that kind of thing before we had reproducible images like, photographs. So much so that actually in that story that I told you about Adam Smith and the gentleman of humanity in the line in which he asks us to engage, play with him in the thought experiment is he says, what if he could see the suffering Chinaman? And the verb is to see. Right? It's the invisibility of the stranger that was the problem. That's what distance created for Adam Smith. Right? We were interdependent. I get my tea from China, but I can't see these guys, so I can't possibly be attached to them. And that's what drives his concern. Of course, within fifty years, and particularly after the civil wars in China in the middle of the nineteenth century, photographers are gonna be all over China, taking photographs, and people are going to see those images. And the Opium War photographs that come back to London in the eighteen sixties are very controversial because suddenly you are seeing these suffering. And it's not just suffering from an earthquake. It's suffering because our troops are oppressing them. And those photographs were hugely debated, at the time about the morality of the British Empire and the residues of the East India Company. You alluded to that because, John Stuart Mill and his father were employees of the firm. And so this question of seeing, Smith thought would solve the problem if we could just see. But in fact, seeing, especially through photographs, just created a new kind of problem. Right? The problem of indifference because the images were not just reproducible, but they were, as you know well, and this is a source of a lot of the work that you've been doing, are sources of profit. Right? And, and so this multiplication of images that we have out there, the saturation of the marketplace for them, driven by the profit, motive is now part of the problem that we have to grapple with.

00:32:24 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I can understand how your interest in Borges would play a role in the book in the sense that Borges could imagine the absurdity of that fifteenth-century peasant staring at a photograph. Last week, we did a show with another Scottish philosopher [ed.: Crawford is a Scottish writer, historian and broadcaster rather than a philosopher], James Crawford. He has a new book out called The Vanishing Earth: A Journey Through the Last Days of Abundance. It's a book about the extractive nature of capitalism, which suggests that capitalism is essentially eating us as human beings. And in that conversation, of course, we talked about Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the colonial nature of capitalism. I'm guessing that, that, Conrad and his work, especially Heart of Darkness, which, of course, got turned into Apocalypse Now, as a movie, is another example of your global mind, is it?

00:33:26 Jeremy Adelman: It is indeed. In fact, the I would say, that argument about, let's say, we're cannibalizing the planet is such an old one. You know, it's been around. It was born with capitalism itself, and the concerns about exhausting and scrambling and carving and what's called earth hunger as a British economist called John Hobson coined the term [ed.: the phrase “earth hunger” is generally credited to the American sociologist William Graham Sumner; Hobson's Imperialism (1902) popularised the underlying argument] after he returned from South Africa. He was reporting for the Manchester Guardian and asked himself why are we sending troops to The Philippine we, the West—to the Philippines, to China, and he's just come back from the Boer War in South Africa. What's going on, this fever? And he calls it earth hunger, that we have this insatiable appetite to conquer and carve. So that's been around for a very long time. There has been a response to that argument to say, but it's our very togetherness that produces the solutions to the problem. And we could talk about what some of them have been now, but that too is a feature of the arguments that go on inside our heads, inside the global mind. And, Conrad makes in several appearances in this book, you know, because the heart of darkness is in part based on personal experience he's had traveling, and working on the Congo River, in the late nineteenth century. And one of the people that he works with, at the time is a man called Roger Casement. I don't know if you're familiar—he was Irish, a diplomat, who wound up writing some of the very first humanitarian reports about the ways in which the extraction of rubber in the Congo and then later in the Amazon was leading to the extermination. For the benefit of our need for tires, bicycles, and cars in Europe and North America, we were exterminating the native peoples of the Congo and then of the Amazon. And in some senses, the character of Roger Casement is in dark is in Heart of Darkness. And the two of them spend a lot of time traveling up and down the Congo River. And that's a good example of the urge that they feel in different genres through in Joseph Conrad's through the novella, that then becomes, put together as a single novel. It's serialized originally. And then Roger Casement as the first humanitarian activist. Right? Interestingly enough, Casement I mean and tragically, Casement is he's so appalled at the behavior of British interests at on the eve of the First World War. Then when the war does break out, he renounces his loyalty to the crown and joins the Irish rebellion, and he's captured and executed by, by the British government for treason. So these stories come back to—

00:36:49 Andrew Keen: Right. Jeremy, I'm—some people will be listening to this and thinking, oh, well, this guy's saying that it's always been the case. We've always imagined that capitalism is eating us and eating the world, and it never does in Crawford's book. And I think you'd find it really interesting. He's a wonderful writer and a great storyteller. He goes, for example, to the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile. I'm sure you're very familiar with that. I've been there. It's a remarkable place and talks about the way in which contemporary capitalism is essentially carving out the landscape for rare earth minerals. I'm not sure that Crawford is apocalyptic, but there is certainly an end-of-time quality to the narrative in The Vanishing Earth. Would you accept in terms of the extractive nature of capitalism, even if those arguments have always been around since the birth of capitalism, that capitalism is becoming more extractive and that the Earth is being more and more damaged, perhaps in a way that it's literally, as, as Crawford suggesting, vanishing?

00:37:59 Jeremy Adelman: Well, I don't think it's vanishing, but I do think that the accelerated and intensified ways in which we have to metabolize resources to sustain our lifestyles is creating is stressing the system. And, but I think I'd say this is what the stress points are on, the ways in which the resources are extracted in inhumane, ways for the people who have to live in those environments. And this is why I go back to there are alternatives, right, without having to exit.

00:38:40 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And to be fair to, Crawford, he—

00:38:43 Jeremy Adelman: That should be the debate.

00:38:44 Andrew Keen: Yeah. He provides alternatives of much more humane ways of extracting valuable minerals.

00:38:50 Jeremy Adelman: Yeah.

00:38:54 Andrew Keen: Jeremy, one of the things that comes to mind in terms of the argument you make in The Capitalist Era is how much do you look at slavery? Of course, there's the cliche that the slave South in the US was not capitalist, whereas the North was capitalist.

00:39:13 Jeremy Adelman: Mhmm.

00:39:13 Andrew Keen: And, therefore, in a way, the pre-capitalist or anti-capitalist nature of the South enabled in the minds of the southerners, moral minds—

00:39:25 Jeremy Adelman: Mhmm.

00:39:26 Andrew Keen: The justification of capitalism. Sorry. Not the justification of capitalism, the justification of slavery. Do you get into that in the book, in terms of this global mind and the Civil War in the United States in the nineteenth century, which was in many ways, I guess, a symbolic war between a global capitalism and an alternative system.

00:39:51 Jeremy Adelman: Yeah. I do. And I would put it in a, let's say, a longer term concern around, let's say, forced and coerced labor systems as a condition. In fact, the plight of enslaved people was on Smith's mind. It was very awkward issue for him and for British capitalism because the enslavement of many Africans in the creation of the plantation economy was central to the bonanza. And he could see this, and this is part of the dilemma that we become—but we have to dehumanize, the other as a condition for their enslavement. That's part of the word they used was extractive system. And interdependence, the condition for that form of extraction and extermination, we talked about that in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties, is to see in the stranger a person who is so subhuman that they have no rights. Right? All they are is property or sitting on properties that we want and need. And, and that's a through line. And that's just to come back to the dangers of—of detaching the sympathies from self-interest is that then just we become predators, and we're back to practices that we thought we had, surpassed, generations ago. And, again, this has been this argument about forced labor and the freedoms of all people has been something that has run through, like, a big river through the debates in the global mind.

00:41:40 Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier that we're living in difficult times. I'm not quite sure what language you use, but that's—everybody comes on this show seems to think so. But Marx thought in the nineteenth century that we were living in the end of the capitalist age on the verge of socialist revolution. Don't need me to tell you this. Couple of months ago, we did a show with another economic historian, Liaquat Ahamed, who has a fascinating new book out, 1873. Yeah. The First Great Depression and the Making of the Modern World. I'm sure you point to 1873, this great economic depression that lasted, I don't know, twenty years at the end of the nineteenth century. How do economic downturns, affect the capitalist mind historically? I mean, we I'm not sure we're living in one now, but many in economic terms, but most people are the more and more people seem to be thinking in apocalyptic terms about the end of history or the end of capitalist history.

00:42:48 Jeremy Adelman: I'm not very, persuaded by end-time arguments. I think they're overused, and they run the risk of doing exactly the opposite of what many end-time arguers want. So many end-time arguers want to mobilize us to do something about, solving this crisis. And in fact, apocalyptic scenarios often add to an increasing sense that we can't do anything about it and a cynical response. Well, we're gonna grab what we can while we can. And that's in fact what happened in the nineteen thirties. This the malaise and the crisis of the thirties led people to endorse policies that brought inhumanity to its highest, levels ever. So I'm always very cautious about end-time arguments. And now having said that, your question at the very beginning was, what's the effect of economic crises on our imaginations, on the global mind? And it's in those moments that we see revealed, yes, the big titanic debates over, over interdependence. From the late nineteenth century through the nineteen thirties and nineteen seventies, there was an enormous discussion about how and whether this capitalist system could survive. And there was something of a debate after 2008, but it got stifled, actually. There was an opportunity to, to have a reset and an open, globalized debate about how we were gonna pull things together. One of the paradoxes of the global system that was created after 1945 precisely to avoid backsliding into wars of the nineteen forties was a crisis management system that is surprisingly effective. It's exhausted, but it tends to diffuse escalations of conflicts. And now it's we'll see how effective it is since the tensions are rising. But it is remarkable how we've created an international cooperative system, to contain some of these escalatory forces. So in some sense, it's the crisis that we needed to have up to 2008 to spark a debate and new thinking and new institutions never happened.

00:45:17 Andrew Keen: Well, it happened in novel form. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the, the novel of, Alexander Starritt. It got shortlisted. It's the first novel, actually, that ever got shortlisted for the FT Book of the Year, Drayton and Mackenzie. [ed.: Drayton and Mackenzie was longlisted, not shortlisted, for the 2025 FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year — the first novel to make the list in fifteen years] And it's about that 2008 crisis. And, of course, it's about the way in which, at least in the minds of his generation, 2008 ruined everything. But, again, I guess for the generation of 1873, that recession or depression ruined everything. So that—seems that—

00:45:53 Jeremy Adelman: The—although, it is—important things began to happen after 1873. Important things started to happen after the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties. Important things happen in response to the crisis of the nineteen seventies. And I was—and you're absolutely right. But in some sense, it's the most interesting thinking about, about and source of fresh ideas came from, let's say, not the social sciences, but it came from the novelists and the artists and the photographers and the poets, you know, who saw an alternative, while the rest of the technocratic universe that we all inhabit was busy managing the crisis too effectively in a paradoxical way.

00:46:38 Andrew Keen: One of your ex-Cambridge colleagues, Gary Gerstle, has been on the show many times. He had a bestselling book, very popular book that still resonates, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. In the way that you tell the history of capitalism, Jeremy, is the word neoliberal does it have any value? You said there's no exiting, in capitalism. Neoliberalism is mostly used, not so much by, by Gary, but by many others as a kind of critique of capitalism. But is all capitalism neoliberal? Is that word helpful?

00:47:20 Jeremy Adelman: Well, the word is helpful to describe a particular kind of creed, and with that creed, a bundle of policies and understandings of the world. I think it's been overblown. If we were just to describe the creed, you've mentioned Hayek and others, it would be accurate. He—they use the term neoliberalism to describe their vision of what would happen to the world. I don't think we created the neoliberal world that many of the quote, unquote critics think we created. It's a much more mixed, messy hybrid. It's—it's, yeah, it's a mixed beast. It's not a single ism. And it's through that I think we can begin to think of alternatives rather than having to overturn an entire neoliberal, quote, unquote, system. And so I tend to try to reformat the conversation less around one big age, that's now ending, that's giving way to a whole new age. I know that's how Gary has tended to format, and it works pretty well for an American story. I don't think for a global narrative, it's it is as helpful as is for describing what happens in the nation-state, of particularly of the United States and the West. I do not think China is neoliberal. I do not think we can understand the nature of the world economy if we don't deal with the nature of the Chinese economy. So—

00:48:54 Andrew Keen: And what is that nature? It's not socialist. It's not quite capitalist. Is it state capitalism?

00:49:01 Jeremy Adelman: It's—and it's hybrid and it's shifting, and state-owned companies that used to dominate in one you know, twenty years ago are now being overshadowed by new forms of venture capital. It is a very dynamic system. And I think we're gonna have to think globally about China and the world, the world and China, America and China, and so on. And I don't know that, you know, these cyclical models necessarily help us. So in a way and I can imagine Gary saying back, well, but there are these constellations of ideas and institutions that set up, these moments. What I'm trying to recapture are some of the continuous and evolving arguments, for the last two hundred and fifty years that we need to pay attention to because and I think this is very important, because we have to understand that interdependence produces mixed emotions about needing strangers and strangers needing us. And if we don't come clean with our fears and anxieties and our exaltation and our hopes about that interdependence and be able to talk about them in mature ways, we're just gonna recycle these arguments over and over again. So it's really to look at this internal ambiguity within the global mind that we are both, you know, kind of celebrate the marketplace and interdependence, but we have enormous fears about what it means because to be dependent on strangers means giving up control, giving up some sovereignty. For all of his problems, Donald—there you go.

00:50:41 Andrew Keen: [unclear], I was gonna—you led me to our last question, of course, and I like to talk about it, but it's unavoidable. You're from Canada, so I know you've been watching this unfolding debate or maybe even war between Canada and the US, Carney versus Trump. Are these two versions of the capitalist mind in terms of how they think about strangers captured in the minds of Mark Carney and Donald Trump? Of course, Trump hates strangers. He wants to throw them all out of the country. He wants to create a capitalist system where he excludes strangers. Carney has the alternative vision of, friendly strangers or friendship towards strangers. Are Carney and Trump the best examples of these dualities in the capitalist mind?

00:51:29 Jeremy Adelman: Well, I don't—I think they do represent two very different arguments about the inside the global mind. Right? About how to live interdependently. Absolutely. And, of course, it reflects the differences. You know, growing up in Canada, it was very clear to anybody and it's very clear to Canadians now that Canada depends on the United States in a way the United States does not depend on Canada. It's simply a reality. And it was something that we grow up thinking about and talking about, but it means you can't make assumptions about the strangers in your lives in the same way that you can if you live inside a system where the asymmetries go the other way. The United States is not aware of how or not the I shouldn't say the United States. I should say the Trump administration. The ways in which their dependency on foreigners, because the United States does depend on the rest of the world, creates externalities that they force the foreigners to pay for while they capture the returns. Right? And that's what they're doing in this relationship between Canada and the United States. And so they represent two very different positions on sharing the burdens of interdependence as well as the returns. I think the Trump administration is very clear. They want to hoard the returns and externalize the burdens. And they can pick on societies that are asymmetrically dependent on the United States to do this. This has been known too since the nineteen thirties, right, that Adolf Hitler—that might be an uncomfortable comparison here, but Adolf Hitler knew this as well in striking trade and negotiating bilateral trade treaties, with, the neighbours to the east and south of Germany. And so there's a connection between imperialism and extraction and this kind of asymmetry. And it's one reason why Donald Trump does not like international treaties, multilateral systems. He wants all bilateralism, spontaneity all the time because it rewards a more predatory stance vis-à-vis interdependence. But it's not—let me just kinda end on one little ranting thing here. It's not anti-global. A lot of people thought that Trump is an isolationist. He's not necessarily an isolationist. It's a global vision. It's part of the argument about the global mind. He just wants to extract more and externalize the costs to the others. That's—and it's just one of the positions that you could take in this big debate.

00:54:17 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And in a way then, it puts, say, Carney and the Iranian government in the same camp too who are both pushing back on Trump's version of, capitalism.

00:54:29 Jeremy Adelman: Right. And I think we're seeing that. So I was gonna say in response to your duality. I don't think it's just Carney versus Trump. I think there are lots of positions in managing this, including the Chinese position. They're taking a very interesting stance in all of this as a kind of, standing at the sidelines because they have managed to avoid, a kind of standoff. But it increases their leverage in the negotiations with Canada because China would love to have access to Canadian resources of all kinds. And making Canada more dependent on China as a counterpoint is one way to sit on the sidelines and watch these two ex-friends duke it out. That too has been around since the nineteenth century. It's an old game on how to construct and divide markets.

00:55:20 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. The book is out in a few days. When's it out, Jeremy?

00:55:25 Jeremy Adelman: September 1.

00:55:26 Andrew Keen: September 1, an important new book in this one of these doorstep books about capitalism, The Capitalist Era, very distinguished economist—historian [sic] of the last three hundred years of history using all sorts of interesting ways of thinking about the capitalist mind. There's no exit in capitalism according, to Jeremy Adelman, but there are many versions of it. Thank you so much, Jeremy, and best of luck with the book.

00:55:55 Jeremy Adelman: Thanks. It's been a pleasure.