For as long as this thing we call “capitalism” has existed, it has had its fair share of critics. (You’ve heard more than a few of them on this very podcast.)

On this episode, Mark talks with someone whose new book makes clear that when it comes to understanding this globe-spanning economic system - where it came from, how it’s shaped our world, and where it’s going – those critics might be some of our best guides.

John Cassidy is a staff writer at The New Yorker covering politics and economics, and his new book, “Capitalism and Its Critics: A History from the Industrial Revolution to AI,” tells the story of capitalism in a way you haven’t heard before.

Learn more about and purchase “Capitalism and Its Critics: A History from the Industrial Revolution to AI”

[MUSIC PLAYING] MARK BLYTH: From the Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at Brown University, this is The Rhodes Center Podcast. I'm the Director of the Center and your host, Mark Blyth. For as long as this thing we call capitalism has existed, it has had its fair share of critics. And indeed, you probably heard more than a few on this very podcast.

As our guest on this episode explains, when it comes to understanding this globe spanning economic system, where it came from, how it shaped our world, and where it's going, those critics might be some of our best guides. John Cassidy is a staff writer at The New Yorker covering politics and economics. And his new book, Capitalism and its Critics-- a History From the Industrial Revolution to AI, tells the story of capitalism in a way you haven't heard before. It's an epic history filled with fascinating characters and big ideas.

So I had him on the podcast to talk about it. We started with an insider whistleblowing critic of the Dutch East India Company in the 18th century and ended by discussing someone who questions capitalism's compatibility with democracy in the 20th century. So buckle up. Let's go.

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John, Welcome back. I guess, we didn't do a podcast last time you were here, but welcome back to Watson.

JOHN CASSIDY: Thanks very much for inviting me on.

MARK BLYTH: So with a book like this, it's hard to know where to jump in. Luckily, John just gave us a talk here at Watson where he said, "Let's organize it." And he gave us some themes: globalization, technological disruption, inequality, capitalism, and democracy.

This book, basically, John, does a kind of biographical, historiography, and substantive accounting of the ideas of pretty much anyone who's worth listening to about capitalism, basically since its inception. That's why it's a big book. So it does make sense to organize it in themes.

The first one you brought up was globalization. It's always been there. Capital has always been global. You start off with a brilliant telling of a whistleblower. Tell us about the whistleblower. Why did you decide to start there?

JOHN CASSIDY: William Bolts, who was a Dutchman who moved to England and went to work for the East India Company, which was a royally-sanctioned monopoly, which had a monopoly on all the trade East of the Cape of Good Hope, was a huge company, big multinational corporation, with headquarters in Eastcheap in London. The reason I started with them was because the book is basically about industrial capitalism, but I wanted to show that industrial capitalism was built on the form of a pre-existing capitalism, mercantile capitalism. And the East India Company was an exemplar of mercantile capitalism.

And in fact, it had a whistleblower, William Bolts, who had basically fallen out with the company because they fired him, because he was privateering too much, making too much profit himself. And they sent him back to London. So he said, you've screwed me. I'm going to screw you. And he wrote a tell all about how the company had exploited the native population in India for centuries.

So, as I said, I thought that was a good way to start the book because number one, one of the big themes in this book is that a lot of the fundamental traits of capitalism, and also the fundamental contradictions and faults, which have given risen to criticisms all through the years, go back to the very beginning. And you see that in the East India Company itself. It was basically an exemplar of imperialism.

It would sort of also self-dealing. And actually at the start of my book, it's getting bailed out by the government because it had overextended. It had a private armies in India, which were very costly. And it spent so much on wars that it ran out of money and had to go back to parliament and say, look, we're bankrupt. We need bailing out.

And some people said, well, why should we bail you out? And the reason they bailed them out was the same one used in Two Thousand and Eight , largely that they were too big to fail. So that's how I start the book, showing that globalization has been intrinsic to capitalism from the beginning.

And then I have one chapter on the end about high globalization in the Nineteen Nineties and Two Thousands. But the theme runs through the book from the Communist Manifesto of Eighteen Forty-Eight-- Marx and Engels have famous ringing passages about globalization-- to the critiques of high imperialism in the late 19th century, from people like John Hobson, the English liberal, and Rosa Luxemburg, the German Communist. And through the 20th century, when globalization retreated in the '20s and '30s and then was reconstructed in a limited way in the Keynesian post-war system, the Bretton Woods system, and then in a massive way when capitalism truly went global in post-Cold war, when China and India joined the global economy. So that's one of the themes which runs through the book from start to finish.

MARK BLYTH: So there's a couple of the names that you picked up there I want to highlight because we don't highlight them enough, Hobson. So Hobson is basically not talking about mercantile capitalism. He's talking about imperialism, but he sees them as almost like the same thing, but different.

JOHN CASSIDY: Linked. Yeah, linked. Hobson was a fascinating character because he saw himself as liberal. He mixed in liberal circles in England. The reason he went to South Africa, which gave him material for his book on imperialism, was because the Guardian, the great liberal British newspaper, hired him as a special correspondent. That was just before the Boer War. And he went over there.

And his basic version of imperialism was very much framed on the British South African model Cecil Rhodes. But he of tried to link it to a more theoretical basis, that capitalism, because it's so unequal, produces these great surpluses which pile up in the hands of the capitalists, people like Rhodes, and need an outlet. So he sees the scramble for Africa as a outlet for surplus capital, which they then invested in gold mines.

That was the basis of the Boer War. The British wanted access to the gold mines, which were in a Dutch-run region. And it eventually led to war.

So Hobson makes the argument that this wasn't just a South African phenomenon. Capitalism always produces massive surpluses. So it was a theoretical basis of imperialism, that it wasn't just all based on racism or jingoism. There was an economic rationale for it.

And that proved incredibly influential in left-wing circles. Rosa Luxemburg and others picked up on this and produced versions of similar versions, not identical, but the economic version of imperialism. A, that you need-- surplus capital always plays a prominent role, but also the need to develop overseas markets and to get raw materials for the system. They're the two versions, 1, the surplus capital and 2, the demand and supply needs that it fulfills.

MARK BLYTH: So let me jump forward from there and link to something else that those set of arguments are around. They fall into abeyance for a little bit and that golden age period. But one place where they are alive in that period and come back strong was the dependency arguments in Latin America. And you made a point of actually singling that out, which I thought was interesting. What was your thoughts on that?

JOHN CASSIDY: Well, one thing is I wanted to make the book a global book because capitalism is a global phenomenon, and there have been critiques all over the world. Part of it was just a journalistic thing. I wanted to include South America in some way. But also the dependency theories of the postwar era were actually very influential in their time, and they linked in to, as you say, the earlier critiques of capitalism, especially on the left.

The dependency theory basically came in two forms. Two, there was a left Keynesian version of it who I associate with Raul Prebisch, the Argentinian economist. And then there was a full on Marxist version of it, which I associate with Andre Gunder Frank and his followers. But they both shared the idea.

They both shared the basic model of global capitalism of center and periphery, core and periphery, and that the core is basically exploiting the periphery in various ways and preventing it from developing fully. One of the famous books in the dependency movement was called the development of underdevelopment, i.e. the global system wasn't there to develop developing economies. It was there to exploit them in various ways. And even when it did allow some development, that was always very limited and couldn't form the basis for truly independent and nationalist development. So it was a very pessimistic view of the world and of the possibilities of developing countries doing anything really well under capitalism.

And it was extremely influential in the '60s and '70s, not just in Latin America, but it also spread to Africa, too. I mentioned Samir Amin, the very prominent African Marxist. And it only really got challenged on the left or with the rise of China and India when they integrated themselves successfully into the capitalist model. It was obviously a brutal process involving a lot of sweatshops, et cetera.

But it did show that there is more possibility for countries to develop within global capitalism and then move up the value chain than the dependency theories had allowed for. Now, there are still people who still believe strongly in dependency theory and would argue with me there. But again, it's another example of how these theories bubble up and then disappear and come back in various similar forms.

MARK BLYTH: Let's pick another area that you highlighted or we could run through the book, which is inequality. And I want to start with an unusual one because again, this is not someone you hear a lot about. Everyone knows one phrase, and that's about it-- Carlyle

JOHN CASSIDY: Yeah. Well, again, that was part-- Thomas Carlyle, I partly early 19th century to mid-19th century British writers, Scottish writer, which is maybe why Mark brought him up. And a great literary figure, of course, but he also was a great critic of early capitalism, but from the right.

One thing I wanted about the book, I didn't just want it to be a litany of left-wing critiques. Obviously, most of the critiques of capitalism have come from the left, but they've also been a strain going back to Carlyle and even before the romantic poets of critiques from the left of the right of capitalism. So what are those critiques?

One of them is a moral argument that capitalism is based on selfishness and greed. So it can never be a moral system. And a lot of the right-wing critics were religious, and they saw it as contrary to the rules of going back to, I guess, Jesus throwing the rich people out of the temple.

They argued that it was basically a damned system. That was very much Carlyle's basis. He thought it was an immoral system.

But he also focused on how it gave rise to inequality and has passages which read as if they could have been written by Marx or Engels or some of the British and French pre-Marxist socialists, and basically just pointing out the basic dividing line between people who own capital and people who don't. Because these days with 401(k)s and everything in developed countries, rich countries, the basic class dividing line has been blurred somewhat in that the workers have at least a bit of a stake in the system. Obviously in the US, whereas massive inequality, they don't have much of a stake.

But in the 19th century, the dividing line was very rigid. You were either a worker who had only his labor to sell-- remember the proletariat-- or else you're a capitalist. And Carlyle just saw this as immoral.

And his solution, of course, was protofascist basically. He was a great defender of the great man theory. Frederick William the Great was his great hero. He had no time for democracy, and he basically wanted a great man dictator to come along and impose morality from above.

MARK BLYTH: So someone else who pops up later on also has a kind of moral critique, even though it is much more of an economist moral critique. And this is Veblen, the whole notion of conspicuous consumption, which is only possible when you have great inequality. And then he levers this into a very unique way of thinking about these problems.

JOHN CASSIDY: Yeah. I mean, Thorstein Veblen is a great figure, but these days get studied more in terms of sociology departments, I think, than economics. But he was an economist, always viewed himself as an economist, and had economic appointments at various leading universities.

He was a very controversial figure. He eventually got fired from several of them, not for anything he'd written, but because he had a predilection for having affairs with his colleagues wives, which tended to get him drummed out. He got drummed out of Stanford for that. And he ended up in the University of Missouri.

I mean, his background, he came from a rural background. His parents were Norwegian farmers in Minnesota. So he came from a Plains radicalism, Great Plains radicalism, populist background. And that suspicion of great centers of economic power and of industrialization and of what he called the captains of industry, ran through all his work.

So in my account of Veblen, I basically focus on two things. One, I do mention his critique of capitalism and GDP as worthless in some sense because a lot of consumption is just trying to keep up with the neighbors conspicuous consumption, as he wrote about it. In those days, this was the era when the great oligarchs of the late 19th century were busy building the Rockefellers--

MARK BLYTH: Mansions at Newport down the road from here.

JOHN CASSIDY: Exactly. Mansions at Newport, down the road here, the mansions on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. So he focused on that.

And he's a very funny writer. And that was in his book, The Theory of the Leisure Class.

But he also followed that up with a book, Theory of Business Enterprise, in which he had a very modern critique of corporations, which he saw-- he wasn't anti-capitalist. The old school capitalist, the man who owned his factory and walked around the floor and have interacted with the workers and made sure that everything was working, to Veblen, that was a member of the productive class. He made a big demarcation between productive people, workers, and capitalists, or actual people who own the means of production and were there, and the unproductive class who were basically all the leeches. And he saw most of modern business accountants and the advertisers and the administrative staff, they were the unproductive class.

And as capitalism developed, he thought that class would get bigger and bigger. So his solution was not clear whether he was full on revolutionary, but he believed in a government of technocrats and engineers. Later in life, he wrote a book about the socialism of engineering. And he originally had high hopes for the Soviets in that sense, that they would run the economy on a rational basis and allow the engineers to take over. So he's a fascinating figure, Veblen. And there's much more to him than just conspicuous consumption.

MARK BLYTH: Let's round this out with the person you end up with to tie this thread up, which is Piketty. How does he fit into this chain of thinking about inequality for you?

JOHN CASSIDY: Well, I mean, there's this very strange hiatus in thinking about inequality inside economics. I mean, I think people and average people still thought of inequality. They still thought of rich people and poor people.

And we're still sort of some people are outraged by it. But in economics, in the post-war era, during the Great Keynesian era, inequality disappeared as a subject of study. When I was in college in the Nineteen Eighties, and I went to a couple of very elite institutions, you basically didn't study inequality at all.

Now, there are couple of reasons for that, I think. Number one, there was a theoretical reason in that the economists had persuaded themselves that you couldn't make interpersonal comparisons theoretically. I don't know how many listeners are economists, but this whole theory that it was impossible to make interpersonal comparisons of utility. So all you could concentrate on were trades which benefited everybody.

If you did welfare economics, you looked for Pareto improvements. And Pareto improvement is when you help somebody without damaging anybody else. And it's a useful concept. But Bill Gates, a future Bill Gates owning 90% of the world's wealth and everybody else owning 10 or even 1% of it, that's perfectly compatible with a parade of optimality. So the really economists didn't have anything really much to say about inequality for theoretical reasons.

MARK BLYTH: It was like, don't look here, look over there. Exactly right.

JOHN CASSIDY: Exactly. Exactly. But also, at the same time, the statistics show, and Piketty and his colleagues did show this, that inside Western countries, inequality had declined substantially over the course of the 20th century, up till about Nineteen Eighty, because of the Keynesian social democracy, which had strong trade unions, strong social insurance nets, and higher taxes on the rich.

The taxes in England, when I was a kid, top tax rate was 95%. The song "Taxman" by the Beatles is 5 pounds for me, 95 pounds for the taxman. That was an anti-tax song.

So as a result of that, inequality-- and there was also the financial sector was a great source of inequality was also squashed, what they call financial repression. So inequality wasn't as big a problem as it became after Reagan-Thatcher revolution when there was deregulation, lower taxes, assault on the labor unions, and globalization. And that all produced a massive increase in inequality. So Piketty's role-- and it wasn't just him. There are others who I mention in the book, including an American, Ed Wolff, who I studied with at NYU--

MARK BLYTH: Tony Atkinson--

JOHN CASSIDY: Tony Atkinson in the UK. But that movement, that group, the great thing they did-- and Piketty is genius in a way-- was put the development of inequality in terms that people could understand, especially in pictures. Those pictures showing the U-shape of the shares of the top 1%, the top 5%, the top 0.1% of wealth and income, they entered the political debate, not just the economic debate.

And you had the Occupy Wall Street movement, these terms like 1%, 0.1%, they became part of the popular debates, and they still are. That's very unusual for an economic theory or for an economic theoretician. And then Piketty himself, when he put it all together in a popular book, which everybody bought but nobody read was the saying, probably. I wish mine was the same. You can all buy it, and you don't have to read it-- that he was a celebrity for a while.

I mean, I start my chapter on him with an event in London, which was sold out at a theater. People were lining up around the block as if it was a rock concert or whatever. It was a good way to tell the story of how inequality became a huge issue.

There's also a international aspect of it, which isn't captured in the work of Piketty. But there were also some very important empirical work done there by Branko Milanovic and his colleagues at the World Bank. They did for global inequality what Piketty and his colleagues did for domestic inequality, I think. They brought it to the masses.

And also another very clever chart, the elephant chart, which Branko and his colleague first published in, I think, about Two Thousand and Ten and then produced various versions thereof, which shows in graphical terms how in the last since the high globalization era, the gains in income have been concentrated in the middle classes of the developing world, basically China and India. At the same time, the further up the elephant, the middle classes of the developed world have stagnated. We knew that, but to see it on one chart, I think, was extremely influential. Piketty was a way to tell the story of how inequality made a comeback in economics.

MARK BLYTH: It came back in here. So let's round it out with the discussion of capitalism and democracy. What I've tried to do is avoid Keynes and avoid Marx, and avoid Hayek and Friedman, because they're the ones that everyone always takes as their touch point.

So we're going to assume that people the broad contours of that. A couple of things I want to say. The treatment of Hayek and Friedman in the book and the neoliberalism in general is it was a critique of capitalism. It wasn't capitalism, ra, ra, ra. It was a critique very much of Keynesian capitalism.

But there were other people who were on the left who were critical of Keynesian capitalism. They don't get enough air time. One of my personal favorites, of course, is Michal Kalecki. So let's start with Kalecki.

JOHN CASSIDY: Well, one of the things I wanted to do in the book was exactly point out that Keynesianism, although it was hegemonic for 30 years, had critics on the left and the right. The right wing Hayek and Friedman are world famous names. But back in the Nineteen Forties, when the system was being put together, there were also some critics on the left who were Keynesians, in the sense that they believed in Keynesian macroeconomic policies using the government and deficits to offset recessions, et cetera, but they made broader arguments, Michal Kalecki and Paul Sweezy, an American Marxist, both very similar, but independently working in the Nineteen Forties.

And their argument was that Keynesianism looks great and works from a technocratic basis in that if we do have a system in which runs at full employment basically, and has strong labor unions and strong social welfare system, that could be a good system, could raise wages, could narrow inequality, and could take the rough edges off capitalism. They didn't deny that. Their critique was that it won't be sustainable in the long term on political economy grounds, because basically it will eventually lead to a revolt of the capitalists and the corporate class and writing, both because there there'll be a profit squeeze, but also because Kalecki made much of the fact that they lose their prerogatives in the workplace, et cetera. So it wasn't just purely economic argument. It was a power argument, that their status and their power in the workplace would be undermined and that eventually they wouldn't put up with it.

For 20 or 30 years, that critique seemed, if not redundant, at least in abeyance because Keynesian, the les Trente Glorieuses. as the French call it, the Great 30 years when we did have strong-- I'm talking we. I'm talking in terms of Western trans-Atlantic developed economies had strong, non-inflationary, equitable growth, basically shared rising prosperity. And that's the world I grew up in. And I'm sure you did, too, Mark.

But in the '70s, what did we see? We actually did see a revolt from the capitalist class, if you want to call it that in crude terms, the business classes and a profit squeeze. I mentioned the work of Andrew Glyn and others on Britain in the late '60s, where he saw profit squeeze.

There was also one in the US. So in a sense, the right wing counter-revolution of the '80s and '90s vindicated the left-wing critiques of capitalism right from the Nineteen Forties. And I wanted to tell that story because I don't think it's well known.

MARK BLYTH: I actually assigned Kalecki's Nineteen Forty-Four political quarterly piece. If anyone has the time to find this thing, it's incredible. He basically predicts exactly what you said, the politics of the late '70s in Nineteen Forty-Four, in seven easy to understand pages. It's quite a remarkable piece.

JOHN CASSIDY: No, it is a remarkable piece. And I do quote from it pretty extensively in the book. I mean, as I said, one of the goals of when you're writing a book like this, which is basically a history of the world or a history of economic thought from a critical perspective anyway, I think one of the keys is you have to write about certain people because they are just such an important part of the story, people like Keynes and Friedman and Hayek, et cetera.

But in writing the book, the most interesting stuff is the stuff you didn't know and coming across people like-- I mean, Kalecki's always been a cult figure on the left, partly because of his theoretical work. His early theoretical work is very mathematical, but is a sort of proto-Keynesianism. A lot of people say, oh, look, he wrote the general theory before the general theory, because his paper came out in Nineteen Thirty-Three or whatever.

So that's interesting. I'm interested in theory. But the political economy side of it, I didn't realize it was so strong. And I think that's what he should really be remembered for, because as you say, it was so far ahead of its time.

MARK BLYTH: Definitely. Let's bring it back to someone that we both like who doesn't get enough air time. But these days, he's getting more and more, Karl Polanyi.

JOHN CASSIDY: Well, Karl Polanyi, again, another figure I didn't know much about. I mean, when I was studying economics, he's not a sort of economic theorist. So he was largely was totally ignored in the curriculum. The fascinating thing about Polanyi, I think, is that his work reflects his experience and his intellectual apparatus in a way which comes together.

Now, that's true of everybody. We're all products of our environment and our upbringing. But Polanyi had such a dramatic and fascinating upbringing that I wanted to explain that. He basically came out of Hungary and Austria as an educated member of the Jewish Family.

Father was an industrialist and grew up in the fin de siecle society. His mother was a member of all sorts of artistic groups. And the height, a bit of an archaic phrase, but European civilization or whatever you want to call it in the pre-First World War era. And then he saw it all collapse.

He saw the authoritarians take over in Hungary. He moved to Vienna, where he spent 10 years in Red Vienna, which people don't know enough about either, was a great experiment in municipal socialism in the Nineteen Twenties in Vienna. Very successful for a decade, but then was brought down again by the rise of Austrofascism and Dollfuss. And this obviously colored Polanyi's view of the world.

And in the Nineteen Thirties, when he moved to London, he had been a journalist. He'd turned into an academic and started writing about it in what I would call political economy. And his first major subject was this question of capitalism, fascism, and democracy and how they were interrelated.

Now, from the liberal perspective in which I grew up in, liberal accounting perspective, it was always automatically assumed. I don't think I ever heard very, very few people in that tradition question it. Obviously, on the extreme left, people have always questioned it, this equation between capitalism and democracy, that they were mutually supportive, maybe even mutually necessary. Keynes certainly believed that, and most of his followers did.

But Polanyi had a much darker view. His argument was that untrammeled capitalism both of the 19th century model and what he saw as the interwar period, his interpretation of the interwar period was that the great mistake was trying to recreate unfettered capitalism on a 19th century model. And his argument was that unfettered capitalism is basically completely unstable in the long term on political economy grounds because it produces such social stresses, such technological and political upheavals that democracy can't survive. You get radicalism on the right and the left.

So he wrote these pieces in the Nineteen Thirties saying, not just explicitly saying that the only conceivable outcomes in the long term were either one of the extremes, socialism on the left, which he called democratizing the economy, or fascism, which he called removing the economic sphere completely from democracy. And again, this is the Nineteen Thirties he was writing about. In the post-war era when Keynesianism was in the ascendancy for so long, these ideas were just completely forgotten.

And I would say were even really forgotten until the 21st century. But after the collapse of globalization and high globalization and deregulation in the global financial crisis, and the rise of both a substantial left-wing movement, like Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders campaign, but also more scarily, the right-wing resurgence that we hadn't seen since the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties, I think, that thrusts Polanyi and his pessimistic view of things back into the mainstream. And you have to consider it.

Now, of course, you also have to consider his later work, which you've written about at length, the Great Transformation, in which it's a bit more optimistic. I mean, after he moved to America, he became-- when he moved to Bennington College eventually and then taught and taught at Columbia for a decade, he became a bit more upbeat. He was a big fan of Roosevelt. He was also a fan of the post-war labor government for a time. And I think he came to be more optimistic of the prospects of social democracy. Although towards the end of his life, he became more pessimistic again.

But he had this theory, which you've written about framework. There's the double movement, which you've written about at length. I think that really is just such a helpful framework for thinking about things now because it ties the political and the economic together. And just for those of you who don't know what the double movement is, Polanyi said the first movement is the deregulation of capitalism, but that is so destructive and stressful to society that it produces counter-movements, the double movement, second movement, whatever, in terms of rising populist movements, trade unions, efforts to regulate finance, et cetera.

And the way I see things now is that we're in the second half of the double movement. We had the great deregulation again of the '90s and early Two Thousands-- '80s, '90s, early Two Thousands, which in many ways echoed what happened in the interwar period, where it was trying to recreate an idealized free market capitalism. Eventually it blew up in the Great financial crisis, produced massive inequality, wage stagnation, et cetera. And that has produced these incredible, alarming political ramifications in the rise of right-wing authoritarian movements across the developed world.

MARK BLYTH: He calls them re-embedding movements, trying to basically re-embed that disembodied economy back in society.

JOHN CASSIDY: Exactly. I mean, his view was that successful capitalism is always embedded in social institutions, and that attempts to disembed them, as we did in the '90s or whatever, lead to catastrophe. So, I mean, we don't have to accept all that. It's a very deterministic model.

The historian in me would say it's overly deterministic. But the point of models is to explain a lot by a little. And just as the original Keynesian model explained a lot about the economy with a relatively little, I think, the Polanyi framework gives you a way to think about these things, even if you don't think everything's predetermined.

MARK BLYTH: That's a good point to leave it. Let's hope not everything is predetermined. Thank you very much, John.

JOHN CASSIDY: Thank you, Mark. I enjoyed our conversation.

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MARK BLYTH: If you like this episode, leave us a rating and a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And be sure to subscribe to the show while you're at it. We'll be back soon with another episode of The Rhodes Center Podcast. Thanks for listening.

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