“There’s no exit in capitalism.” — Jeremy Adelman

Is that ongoing quarrel of modern politics, the battle over capitalism, just a storm in a teacup? Economic historian Jeremy Adelman thinks it might be. In The Capitalist Era, Adelman argues that all camps — left and right, Keynesian and Hayekian, socialist and libertarian — accept the unavoidability of global capitalism. There is no alternative, as Mrs Thatcher used to annoyingly say. Although Adelman, certainly no Thatcherite, isn’t celebrating the apparent inevitability of our capitalist epoch.

What interests Adelman is the making and unmaking of what he calls the “global mind.” The revolutionary quality of capitalism, he says, is that we now think of strangers as somehow part of our community. So when Adam Smith, the moral philosopher father of economics, drank his Chinese tea while reading of a deadly earthquake in China, he recognized that capitalism inevitably entangled our moral thoughts with our self-interest.

It wasn’t just economists who began to think differently of strangers. Artists as varied as Picasso, Joseph Conrad, and the photography-obsessed Émile Zola all made this moral inquiry of strangers the heart of their work. Yes, Adelman is probably right to say there’s no capitalist off-ramp in our post-global economy. But capitalism’s octopus-like “global mind” and its (mis)treatment of strangers should turn all economists into moral philosophers and all artists into observers of economics.

Five Takeaways

• The Mind, Not the Material. Where Beckert charted capitalism’s structures, Adelman maps how we think about them. It starts with Smith’s gentleman of humanity: Chinese tea, a Chinese earthquake, and the pain in his little finger.

• No Exit in Capitalism. We’re all heirs to Marx — yet leaving is so punitive that every socialist revolution has paid. Keynes vs Hayek? A family squabble. No exit — but there are alternatives.

• The Veil Between Strangers. Smith’s verb was to see. Photography removed the veil — then the Opium War photos and today’s AI supersaturation revealed the new problem: indifference. “A recipe for calamity.”

• Earth Hunger. Conrad and Casement on the Congo: rubber for our bicycles, extermination for the Congolese. To Crawford’s vanishing earth, a friendly dissent.

• Hoard the Returns, Externalize the Burdens. No end-times: apocalypse breeds cynicism. The Thucydides Trap is “silly.” And Carney vs Trump: two arguments about needing strangers — one of them with a 1930s pedigree.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy The Capitalist Era: citylights.com

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: another doorstep history of capitalism
00:01:41 Against Beckert: the mind, not the material
00:02:35 Is capitalism natural? An eighteenth-century invention
00:04:22 Smith the prophet (p-r-o-p-h-e-t)
00:05:09 The gentleman of humanity: tea, earthquakes, and a little finger
00:06:45 The moral philosopher the economists forgot
00:10:31 Mill and Marx: obligations between strangers
00:12:46 For or against? “We’re all heirs to the Marxist tradition”
00:14:25 “There’s no exit in capitalism”
00:16:31 Fair-trade coffee: moral agency or banality?
00:17:26 Stress testing 1945: why the Thucydides Trap is silly
00:19:44 Gramsci’s interregnum: the time for monsters
00:20:27 Keynes vs Hayek: a storm in a teacup?
00:22:04 The exhibits: Picasso, Borges, and the photographers
00:24:24 From Dickens’s line drawings to Zola’s photographs
00:25:13 Street photography and the veil between strangers
00:30:12 The Opium War photographs that shook London
00:32:24 Conrad, Casement, and the Congo
00:36:49 Is the earth vanishing? A dissent from Crawford
00:38:54 Slavery and the global mind
00:41:40 Against end-times: the lesson of the 1930s
00:42:48 2008: the debate that got stifled
00:46:38 Is “neoliberalism” helpful? A mixed, messy hybrid
00:48:54 China: neither socialist nor neoliberal
00:50:41 Carney vs Trump: two arguments about strangers
00:51:29 Hoard the returns, externalize the burdens
00:54:29 China on the sidelines: an old game
00:55:20 September 1: t