THE INSATIABLE MACHINE

An economic historian examines a system that’s not just insatiable but intractable.

It’s easier to imagine the end of the world, the adage has it, than the end of capitalism. That is because, Jackson writes, it has become the dominant economic system worldwide, so much so that “most people alive have never lived under any other kind of economy.” But the economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley, says that system, characterized by the buying and selling of “things that produce all other things,” is also a historical artifact shaped by many forces. One was the development of private property rights, another the rise of wage labor, “the capitalist mode of labor par excellence,” and with it the steady monetization of the economy. The rise of finance and banking furthered capital concentration, allowing entrepreneurs to bankroll long expeditions from, say, Britain to China that would not be able to return a profit for years, given the distances involved in the first steps toward globalization. Readers familiar with terms such as the “price revolution” and the economic concept of rent as something much beyond simply what one pays a landlord will benefit most from Jackson’s deeply researched and accessibly written study. In it, Jackson turns up some surprises, many small but telling, such as that the cotton economy of the American South actually grew after slavery ended, “which suggests it could have increased if slavery had ended earlier, and that in turn suggests that, if anything, slavery held back cotton production.” More central to American and thus world capitalism, in Jackson’s opinion, was the post-Civil War “vertically integrated, capital-intensive corporation,” with its introduction of automation, the managerial class, mass production with interchangeable parts, and undisguised class warfare against its discontents. That leads us to today, when, Jackson concludes, “capitalism is more dominant than it has ever been,” and unlikely to go away.

A lucid history that invites readers to consider how human life might be organized otherwise—no easy task.