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- [00:00]
KPFK Radio Host
Your Monday host of Global Village. Join me for an exploration of Afro Cuban rhythms from next door and around the world, with other musical stops along the way. That's every Monday on Global Village from 11am to 1pm on KPFK Los Angeles, 90.7 FM.
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Ralph Nader
Hello, this is Mumia Abu Jamal and you're listening to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Enjoy. Stand up. Stand up.
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Professor Sven Beckert
You've been sitting way too long.
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Steve Scrovan
Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Wire. My name is Steve Scrovan, along with my faithful co host, David Feldman. Hello, David.
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David Feldman
Hello, Steve.
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Steve Scrovan
And our trusty producer, Hannah Feldman. Hello, Hannah.
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Hannah Feldman
Hello, Steve.
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Steve Scrovan
And the man of the hour, Ralph Nader. Hello, Ralph.
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Ralph Nader
Hello. We're going to devote a good part of the hour to the history of capitalism, past, present and foreboding future.
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Steve Scrovan
That's right, Ralph. You know, it is said that people can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. We live in a world that presents capitalism as the only obvious way to structure society, almost like an inescapable law of nature. In his book, A Global History, our guest historian and professor Sven Beckert, presents the story of capitalism as it has evolved over the centuries. And Ralph, as one of the leading reformers of 20th century capitalism, has a unique perspective on this topic and will engage Professor Beckert in a way that he has probably not been engaged before then. In closing, Ralph has a few choice words about Donald Trump and a call to action for the rest of us. As always, somewhere in there, we'll check in with our indispensable corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhyber. But first, the evolution of capitalism.
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David Feldman
David Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell professor of History at Harvard University. He has written widely on the economic, social and political history of capitalism. His book Empire of Cotton won the Bancroft Prize and was finalist for the Pulitzer. His latest book is Capitalism A Global History. Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.
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Professor Sven Beckert
Sven Beckert, thank you so much. It's great to be here.
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Ralph Nader
Welcome indeed. Sven, you wrote a huge book on capitalism, and I'm looking to find out an answer to the following question. Compared to what other system?
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Professor Sven Beckert
Yeah, that's a really good and really important question that in some ways goes to the very core of this entire project, this entire book. Because one of the most important arguments I think the book makes is that capitalism is historical. It is a drastic departure from other forms of organizing economic life. And because it is so different from other Forms of economic life. It can only be understood from a historical perspective. And just to say a few words about the kind of world out of which capitalism emerges, two important different logics to the organization of economic life were, for one, subsistence economies. Most people on planet Earth for most of human history engaged in subsistence production. They grew food and manufactured, let's say, clothing for their own use, for the use of their families and for the use of their communities, but not with the purpose of selling those goods and accumulating capital. So this is one economic logic that was dominant on planet Earth before the advent of capitalism. And the other one were tributary economies like feudal Europe, in which tributary rulers, feudal lords, expropriated the surplus, the meager surplus that peasants produced. They took it away from them, and in that way they accumulated wealth. This is a way of accumulating wealth that is completely different from the capitalist logic, because the core logic of capitalism, and thus also what defines capitalism, is the investment, the productive investment of privately owned capital for the purpose of creating and accumulating further capital. And this is a drastic departure in human history. And so the book starts with these merchant communities in Aden, in present day Yemen. And it describes a world in which this logic, this capitalist logic, already existed, but was very limited to small, what I call small islands of capital. It was marginal to economic life on earth. And today this logic obviously structures almost all economic life on planet Earth, you know, maybe outside of North Korea, pretty much everywhere. And it also structures not just the largest economic processes we inhabit, but it also structures very much the parts of our very intimate lives. And the book basically explains how we did get from a world in which the capitalist logic did exist, but was very marginal to a word today in which the capitalist logic structures almost everything about our lives.
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Ralph Nader
Well, this is the point I'm trying to make. When I looked at your book, I said, aha. He's going to compare capitalism with socialism, capitalism with communism, capitalism with fascism, the corporate state that is Mussolini's PhD thesis, and capitalism with cooperative forms of economic organization, co ops and mutuals. I didn't see any of that except references to a co op system in the Netherlands. So let me ask you some quick questions. Can there be capitalism without freedom of contract?
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Professor Sven Beckert
Probably not. I think that is kind of a core feature of all capitalist economies. But of course, any kind of economic relationship within a capitalist economy is also embedded in legal relations within a legal system and rests to a significant degree on state power. And of course how that exactly is enforced and how the legal boundaries of contracts are Drawn is certainly something that is within the realm of the state and within the realm of the legal system. And thus we cannot think about contract as being outside the sphere of the state as well. But if you ask me, is there capitalism conceptually imaginable without contract? I think probably not. It's not the only feature of capitalism, definitely not, as the book shows in great detail, but it is still an important feature of capitalism. But let me just say, I mean, the book's starting point is basically the observation that we live in a world that is structured deeply by the capitalist revolution as it unfolded over the past couple of hundred years. And the book wants to help readers understand how this word, which is such a radical departure from prior human history, how this word emerged over several centuries, how it changed over time, how very different kinds of capitalism emerged, and to help them navigate the present. I think it is a story of such great importance for understanding where we are finding ourselves right now. And I think it's also kind of an entertaining read. So it's in a world in which increasingly we communicate on things such as Twitter or Blue sky or whatever. This is really a kind of counterpoint to thinking deeply about one of the most important facts about our lives today.
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Ralph Nader
Well, I'm trying, as you can see, to find boundaries. And I'll ask you a couple of quick questions in that vein, because boundaries are important as an ideological weapon against other forms of economic organization. And that's true right up to the present time. Retail consumers have pretty much lost the freedom of contract. It's all fine print contracts, take it or leave it, sign on the dotted line or click on. And the vendor dominates. And most of this fine print is enforceable, although some are being challenged, such as compulsory arbitration and unilateral modification. So let me ask you the next question, which is, can you have capitalism when there is an inherent understanding among the big corporate capitalists that they're too big to fail and they can go for government guaranteed capitalism bailouts out of Washington D.C. as has happened.
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Professor Sven Beckert
Yes, great question. And you know, I think that illustrates quite beautifully that capitalism can take on a whole variety of shapes. It is always embedded within the state. And the state, as this book shows in great detail, matters to every moment in capitalism's history. But of course, how the state matters and how the state interacts with private capital and how the state interacts with things such as corporations, how the state regulates corporations, how states support certain kinds of economic activities and certain kinds of corporations, that changes drastically in the course of the history of capitalism. But if I would say, if I look at a thousand years of history and then I'm asking myself, okay, what is the megatrend in the relationship between the state and capitalism? Then I would say that the state matters ever more, it becomes ever larger, its scope of activities becomes ever greater. And of course, a situation as you describe it, in which corporations become just so important to economic life and to the well being of a particular political community that they cannot fail and therefore need to be propped up by massive state spending is a particular moment in the history of capitalism. And this is certainly something, I think we saw especially in 2008, that globally there was a massive insertion of tax money basically into the corporate world in order to stabilize capitalist economies. And I think that the kind of massive, the particular form that this intervention took in the 2000s is kind of peculiar to this particular moment in the history of capitalism.
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Ralph Nader
Back to you, third question. If the owners are rendered powerless and controlled by the managers, like large corporations, the separation from ownership and control. Going to Berlin means pioneering books in the 1930s. It's quite clear that the shareholders of these giant corporations, especially the more recent version where someone like Zuckerberg controls everything, he structured it that way, that the owners have no power over their managers. They are basically said, you don't like it, sell your stock. So can you have capitalism where the owners are rendered powerless under existing corporate.
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Professor Sven Beckert
Law in reality, I think that's a historical question. And you know, since this is the word that we are living in partly today, I think yes, we can have a capitalism that is organized along these particular lines. Do we like it? Maybe not. But I think this is again, one needs to see that capitalism is not just one thing that exists unchanging throughout the history of the past few hundred years, but it's something that is quite substantially changing. If you look at the 19th century, most businesses, both industrial as well as mercantile businesses or banks, were very much controlled by the owners and managed by the owners who kind of decided on the day to day activities of these businesses. That changed drastically in the course of the 20th century in which we see the emergence of managers and the division of ownership and control of businesses as you describe. So a whole variety of forms of business organization and a whole variety of forms of the organization of ownership are possible under capitalism, but these are not like laws of nature. These are historically specific and they emerge out of particular kinds of distributions of political power, social movements and all these things. So I think in a way the book tries to not make us to be just powerless Cogs in a machine, not powerless cogs in the unfolding of history. But the book very much emphasizes that the particular shape that capitalism has taken at any particular moment in time has a lot to do also with questions of the state. It has a lot to do with questions of political power. It has a lot to do with questions of social contestation. And sometimes capitalism has been reshaped drastically by the actions of people with very little power. And I show that in particular when I look at the end of the plantation slave based plantation economy in the Americas, which is very much driven by the collective mobilization of some of the poorest and most exploited people on planet earth, namely the enslaved workers who grew all that sugar and all that cotton or that tobacco in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
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Ralph Nader
Well, we're talking with Professor Sven Becker, the author of the new book, Capitalism A Global History. The reason why I'm asking you these questions, Professor Becker, is if capitalism is everywhere and everything, it loses its definitional meaning and rationale. What we're concerned now in the struggle against the corporate supremacists in the United States and other countries in the world is that it's used as a political weapon. When Mayor elect Mamdani talked about some of the social safety nets he wanted for New York City residents which have been in place for years in Western Europe, as you know, such as childcare and free public transportation, Trump called him a communist lunatic. But you see, we don't have a hypocritical critique of the giant capitalist. It becomes a political weapon, even against the kind of economic social safety net that you describe as part of the history of capitalism. Now, I grew up as the son of a small businessman, and so I learned to distinguish between small corporations and giant global corporations, which are not just a distinction in kind, but also a distinction in equality of power. He ran the restaurant, bakery, delicatessen in a dining room, and nobody was going to bail him out if he was heading for bankruptcy. And so he developed some interesting observations, and I'll share two with you. To distinguish between small manpa capitalist and the giant corporate capitalist, he defined socialism conventionally as government ownership of the means of production. But then he defined capitalism as corporate ownership of the means of government. And he said on many occasions that capitalism will always survive because socialism will always be required to save it. What's your reaction to all that?
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Professor Sven Beckert
I mean, that is really fascinating and I think this is exactly in order to have better conversations on these issues, we have to have a better understanding of capitalism and we have to have A more nuanced understanding of the history of capitalism. And what we need to start out with is the observation that capitalism has changed drastically in the course of the past couple of hundred years. And if you just look at the kind of arguments that Mandani is a communist, I mean, this is just complete bogus. This is just a reflection of somebody who doesn't really know what Soviet communism was really like. And it's also a certain ignorance about 20th century history and also the history of the United States, because in the 20th century, we have seen that capitalism has taken on that the capitalist economy emerged in Western Europe, but also in the United States that provided much greater social safeguards to workers, that guaranteed income in old age, that provided unemployment insurance, that regulated businesses to a much greater degree, that, thanks to partly to your activities, also became much more concerned and protective of the natural environment and of consumer safety and other such things. This is perfectly imaginable within capitalism. I mean, Sweden is very much a welfare state, but Sweden is still fundamentally a capitalist society. So capitalism can take on very many different shapes and forms. And certainly what Mondani seems to be engaged with in New York is not some kind of social building a socialist society, but it's to build a different kind of capitalism with much greater social safeguards. And so I think we can see that from the study of history. And then second, I think what you said about your father, that's also a very interesting observation because I think markets and market activities have existed in all human societies. That is not particular to capitalism. And the few efforts in world history in which people have tried to get rid of the market in its entirety have been pretty much economic disasters. So there is a place for the market. There has been a place for the market in all human societies. But in capitalism, the market takes on an importance that it didn't take on in other forms of economic life. And that goes back to a question you asked very much earlier, namely about the outside to capitalism. I think this is so important to think about this because as I said earlier, capitalism is not natural. It's not the only form of economic life on planet Earth. Indeed, it's the opposite. It's a revolutionary departure from older forms of the organization of economic life. And throughout the past few centuries, until the 20th century, many parts of the world, even though there was a kind of global capitalism, there were many parts of the world in which economic life was still not organized along a capitalist logic. And even in a country as capitalist as the United States, there were many spheres of life that were not yet organized along this capitalist logic. And then as you also observed so well, within this capitalist civilization, there are spaces and places that remain outside this logic to this day. So for example, family life is still largely organized outside the logic of capitalism. And of course the entire welfare state or the cooperatives that you mentioned, these are ways of organizing economic life that are outside the logic of capitalism. So I agree with you very much that capitalism is not everything. Capitalism has a particular space and a particular place in the economic life of humanity and of course, in the economic life of the United States as well.
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Ralph Nader
Well, I want to do justice to your book by quoting some descriptions of it for our listeners so they don't prejudge. This is no Chamber of Commerce apology listeners, so listen to the descriptions. Quote the book begins with medieval and early modern merchants, 12th to 17th century, who created islands of capital and port cities and trading hubs using credit networks and state chartered companies to accumulate wealth. European states and merchant elites used war chartered monopolies and colonial expansion to establish plantation zones, mining regions and trading enclaves. Early environments where market logic dominated all aspects of life. Beckert places colonial slavery and coerced labor at the center of capitalism's big bang quote, arguing that Caribbean plantations, American slave labor and extractive colonies in Latin America in the Indian Ocean financed the Industrial Revolution. These systems turned land, raw materials, especially human labor, into commodities, allowing European industrial centers to leap ahead in production and to reorganize hinterlands worldwide about the needs of distant capital. End quote. Now, taking all this into account, I want to move our discussion into the present day because the corporate structure has mutated in dramatic fashion in the last 40 years. Before we get there, could you describe why you paid attention to the Galicia Tenets revolt in Europe many centuries ago?
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Professor Sven Beckert
Okay, you're the first one who noticed that, and that is a truly wonderful. I mean, maybe I should preface this by saying that many people have written about capitalism, but almost all of our thinking about capitalism has been from a purely European perspective. So people have written about capitalism in Florence as originating in Florence or Genoa, Venice. They've written about Amsterdam, they've written about London, they've written about Manchester, and then maybe they wrote about the United States. This book is totally different in the sense that it really tries for the first time to tell the history of capitalism in the only way I think it can be understood, namely from a global perspective. It brings all the world's people into this global perspective. And of course, one thing that we learn from that global perspective is that too Much of our thinking about capitalism has been focused on industry and on cities and not enough on the countryside in an agriculture. And that is an important observation because throughout much of human history, most people on planet Earth worked in the countryside and engaged in agricultural pursuits. And so I write about the peasant uprising in galicia in the mid 19th century because I observe that in the middle of the 19th century, a whole bunch of rebellions are taking place in the global countryside against the increasing pressure that the capitalist revolution brings into the countryside, the increasing pressures to produce ever more wheat for export, for markets, to produce ever more cotton, to produce ever more rice, to produce ever more tobacco and other such things, sugar, especially in the Caribbean. And that pressure bears down, especially in the wake of the Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century. It bears down ever more on the world's countryside. Rural cultivators get ever more exploited and often coerced into the production for world markets. And in the mid 19th century, there is a kind of global uprising that is occurring in the world's countryside, from, you know, the slave plantations of the Caribbean to the enslaved people in the United States during the Civil War, which has been called by W.E.B. du Bois, quite correctly, as a form of general strike. And then, as you mentioned, also the ever more exploited peasants of Galicia as well.
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Ralph Nader
Well, what's interesting about the mutation of the corporate structure and the Delaware Corporation syndrome, then, is that it has become a form of corporate government. We call it corporate socialism because the bailout and the corporate welfare so massively present in Washington, D.C. bailouts, handouts, giveaways, subsidies, gifts, you name it, is now expected. The richest industry in the country, the computer industry, expects the government, and they received it under Biden, to provide seed money to build plants in the U.S. $50 billion, for example, very profitable companies. So it's now a normal expectation. It's not simply an emergency request, such as the Lockheed Corporation presented in the early 70s to Washington, begging for a $250 million loan guarantee. And it created an uproar in Congress. Now billions of dollars are passed with scarcely public hearings through Congress. They're stashed into tax bills, appropriation bills. There's no catalog of the hundreds of billions of dollars of loan guarantees to corporations that are outstanding. How many have had to be exercised? And with the bill sent to the taxpayer, we don't have government reports for congressional reports of any measure in this area. So the evolution, let's say, of the corporate structure to become an instrument dominating the political economy, not just dominating the economy, has to be examined in Any history of capitalism. So let's talk about the present time when we have penetrations of social institutions that J.P. morgan and Rockefeller and Carnegie never even dreamt of. I'll give you an example. A psychologist at the Harvard Medical School, Susan Winn, wrote a book three, four years ago called who's Raising Our Kids? Big business, technology, etc. Now we have Zuckerberg and others out of Silicon Valley with the Internet and the iPhone that is destabilizing the American family. It is taking up to 6, 7 hours of 10 year old or 12 year old or 14 year olds, separating them from family, community and nature. This is revolutionary. This is the generation of youngsters that's become illiterate at best. They know how to read, but they don't. And they are exposed to nastiness, vicious messages, exploitive marketing, junk food, junk drink, leading to obesity epidemics, violent programming, undermining and circumventing family authority, parental discipline. This is all revolutionary. And the Congress is fiddling while Silicon Valley burns the country. It hasn't even developed a regulatory system. And now we have the most dramatic evolution in the history of, of the corporate structure. And that is the following. The original AI, in my judgment, is the corporate entity. It is an artificial entity called artificial persons, has limited liability and is now graced through political power plays with enormous privileges and immunities, privileges and immunities. And now it is the principal wielder of the emerging generative artificial intelligence tool that some critics can say can take our country through out of control robotics into global doom. So can you fit in, Sven, this kind of mutation, or some would call it metastasis of corporate structure, corporate coercion, corporate penetration, corporate immunity that's spreading extremely rapidly and it's not even the subject of electoral discussion. The parties don't even talk about corporate crime. They don't like corporate funding of campaigns, but they don't make it an issue during the campaign because they don't want to, quote, unilaterally disarm, end quote. But give us your views in the context of history here. Do we have a runaway system of political economic power that is beyond the reach of a underdeveloped democratic society and very weakened democratic institutions? In fact, as corporations have gotten more power in the U.S. the resistance by labor unions, by the organized church, by consumer groups and others has become weaker instead of stronger, which is a sign of a decaying democratic society underneath the power of these corporate supremacists. Take it from there, please.
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Professor Sven Beckert
Yes. Wow. There is so much to be said about that and I could easily talk a few hours about some of these points. But in a nutshell, I think you used the word revolutionary changes, and I think that is exactly true. And that's a kind of general characteristic of capitalism. As the book shows, the capitalism is a kind of state of permanent revolution. And many people think of capitalism as something that is conservative. But if you look at capitalism from a historical and empirical perspective, you see that capitalism turns our world upside down every given moment. It's a state of permanent revolution. And one of the things that are animating the capitalist revolution and that is propelling the capitalist revolution, is this thrust to expand ever further. And that's the kind of basic logic of capitalism. And of course, we can observe this expansion of this logic geographically. We can see how certain parts of the world that were not organized along this capitalist logic became organized along this capitalist logic. So there's a kind of spatial component to this expansion, but it's not just spatial. As you put it, this logic inserts itself into ever new spheres of our lives. And you mentioned education and you also mentioned family life, and you mentioned social media, and you mentioned how our personal preferences get accumulated and then packaged and sold on market, so they get commodified. So I think this is definitely, you can read that as part of this very long history of the social and geographic expansion of capitalism. And in some ways we are reaching a kind of extreme point now in which almost anything is commodified, almost anything is being bought and sold on markets. And of course, all of that has severe social consequences. It does change, you know, how we think about the world, how we experience the word, how we organize our family lives, how we think about our children. It pinges upon our lives in really radical ways. And that is perhaps novel, that is perhaps not something that goes back hundreds of years, but it's something that is relatively novel. So that's the first point I would make. The second point I would make is the question of political power and entrepreneurs and political power. And of course, there from a long historical perspective, you have to see that capital owners, entrepreneurs often enjoyed extraordinary access to political power. And as we also discussed that there have been this kind of merging of economic power and political power. Just think of the East India Company, which was an important enterprise in England in the 17th and 18th century. And, and they not only did they trade in goods that came out of south and East Asia, but they also became territorial rulers in these parts of the world. They had their own armies. They were indeed one of the strongest fighting forces in the early modern world. So there you see a complete merging of economic power and political power. And today you see some of that again. And of course, what this points to, and maybe that's my third point, is that the capitalist revolution has a kind of ambivalent relationship to the institutions of liberal democracy. On the one hand, we can clearly observe that liberal democracy and the capitalist revolution unfolded, broadly speaking, simultaneously as a result, partly of the French Revolution and the American Revolution, of course. But we can also see that capitalism has existed within a whole range of political systems of organizing political power. And this includes authoritarian regimes, that includes fascist regimes, and this includes also liberal democratic regimes such as Great Britain and the United States. And you see this kind of tension emerging today within the United States in which there is a kind of concern, I think, among some capital owning elites about liberal democracy. They see that as being limiting to some of their business interests. But if we look back into history, we also see that this corporate power or this power of private capital has been curtailed at certain historical moments. And I think it's productive to think what these moments were like. And so, for example, the New Deal in the United States was a moment of kind of a massive expansion of the welfare state and the rights of labor and so on and so forth. And that was also, of course, a moment in which labor, trade unions became powerful participants in shaping the American political economy. If you think about your own work, you know, the environmental regulation, consumer protection and other such things. This of course also went hand in hand with the power social movement, the emerging environmental movement, the student movement, the women's movement, the civil rights movement, that all fed into these kinds of possibilities. And so, yes, the present sometimes looks dark and history also sometimes looks dark, as you mentioned earlier. But there are also, I think, lessons to be learned from history that other futures are imaginable, other futures are, are possible. And so while the book can sometimes make for depressing reading, I think I want readers to see the book also as a kind of appeal to think creatively and open endedly about our futures Again.
- [33:33]
Ralph Nader
Well, just to take our listeners to the present time part of your end of the book, you go from the 1970s and neoliberal retuned capitalism by deregulating finance, weakening labor protections and deepening global integration, culminating in the volatile, inequality prone world economy of the early 21st century. And then one of your reviewers said that Professor Becker, quote, concludes that the current crisis stem less from absolute scarcity than from how wealth and opportunity are distributed, suggesting that the capitalist revolution remains unfinished and its future politically contestable, End quote. Well, there are critics in our country who think that capitalist systems have failed. Half of the people in the United States, half of the families are either designated poor or near poor in the lexicon of economic assessments. That's quite a failure since the corporations pretty much control capital labor government policy. Is there a department in the US Government that has non corporate supreme power from the outside working on it now? Every department agency in the US Government, including the Department of Labor most powerful outside lobbying force are the corporatists. And they provide by far the greatest number of nominees for executive office positions in departments and agencies. So what do you say to people who say we need a different economic system, much more fluid, much more subordinating commercial values to civic values? Since the lesson of modern history is such as ending child labor is the subordination commercial interests, civic values. Children go to school, not work in dungeon factories, for example. And so I'm asking you, what do you see for the future here? You seem to continue the premises of the capitalist revolution as you call it, saying it remains unfinished in its future, politically contestable. What is going to be its future and who's going to politically contest it?
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Professor Sven Beckert
Yeah, okay, these are very important questions. And look, I can obviously not predict the future and I can only read the past and see if there are some patterns in the past that allow us to think creatively about the future. And you're absolutely right. Capitalist revolution has produced tremendous wealth, completely unprecedented in human history. And we live now in societies like in the United States. We live in a society in which all basic human needs could easily be met. There's no economic reason for people to not be fed properly. There's no economic reason for people not to have proper housing. There's no economic reason for people not to have access to decent education. And there's no economic reason for people not to have access to proper healthcare. If people don't have access to these things. As you mentioned, many people in the United States do live in great poverty, have little access to quality education and have difficulties accessing healthcare. If that is the case, this is a political choice. This is not an economic necessity. I think that is the discussion we need to start out from that. This is a question of politics, this is a question of distribution and not the question of our abilities to produce goods and services. And I think here, yes, I think it's important to listen to social movements. It's important to listen to civil society, which one of the main points of the book is exactly to do this, to write into the history of capitalism, social movements, and to write into the history of capitalism also people who usually don't appear in these histories, namely enslaved workers on American cotton plantations, or striking workers in Detroit in the 1930s, or rebelling students in the 1960s, all of these people have shaped distinctly the history of capitalism. And I think I show how they have done that. And presumably they will continue to do this into the future. And you know, often a certain moment in the history of capitalism is naturalized in public discourse, like during the neoliberal era in the 1990s, in the 2000s, we were told over and over again that the world we lived in was the perfect world. It was not only perfect, but it was the only imaginable world. But if you look at the long history of capitalism and if you look at it globally, you see that it can take on very different shapes and forms. Swedish capitalism of the 1950s is fundamentally different from American capitalism in the 2000s. And that gives you kind of a sense of the range of possibility. And we need to recover that range of possibility. And what we will clearly see is that if you leave capital owners to their own devices, if they are merging their tremendous economic powers, their tremendous technological powers with political power, then this creates a world that is not conducive to the interests and to the well being of most people in our society and in societies elsewhere.
- [38:52]
Ralph Nader
You mentioned housing, which leads me to reflect on the trends recently and what corporations are most innovative and paying attention to. And if you divide an economy between its needs, wants and whimsical, you can see that the capital, the innovation, the advertising, is moving away from needs to wants and to whims. You just have to look at the sports and entertainment worlds for an example that raised, of course, John Maynard Keynes observation, who back in the 1930s warned about Wall street putting more capital into speculation than investment. And now, of course, it's much more pronounced. Speculation is now towering over investment in realistic expansion on the ground that responds to people's needs. So that's, that's another way to look at, Yes.
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Professor Sven Beckert
I mean, yeah, we need massive control.
- [39:50]
Ralph Nader
The yardsticks by which progress is measured. You control the agenda. And so when the head of the Federal Reserve every year goes up to the Joint Economic Committee for a report, he says, well, economy is sound. No one says, what about child poverty in the US compared to Western Europe? What about child hunger? Why aren't you using these yardsticks instead of the yardsticks of profit, inventory, GDP measures, et cetera? So you have a great opportunity for banding in this area because you're getting a lot of proper attention at a level of intellectual analysis that is badly needed in our country. Thank you so much, Steve.
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Professor Sven Beckert
Thank you.
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Steve Scrovan
Professor, you talked about the possibility of capitalism changing and evolving. I guess I worry that, will it take a cataclysm, will it take a civil war? Will it take a Great Depression to get people to step back and say, oh, we need to reassess or reform this system?
- [40:55]
Professor Sven Beckert
That's a very good question. And of course, if you look, one of the most important shifts in American capitalism was certainly the end of plantation slavery in the American South. And of course, that went along with a very bloody civil war. And another important shift in the character of American capitalism was in the 1930s with the new Deal. And that, of course, was the result partly of the Great Depression. So there is certainly a kind of relationship between deep crises of what I call the old regime and the emergence of new ones, but not always. And so how I think about this problem is as follows. As we discussed, change in capitalism is continuous. Like every year we produce a little more, and there are new technologies, and we become more productive and all of that. But then the institutional order, the particular political economy in which capitalism is embedded, it doesn't change continuously year by year, but it jumps. It has relatively stable states for long periods of times, and then it changes into something else. And, you know, this was the case in the 1860s with the end of plantation slavery, and this was the case also in the 1930s with the rise of the New Deal state. But there are moments, you know, in which that state, regime change, this change of the order within capitalism occurs in different ways. And one is the one that Ralph was himself very engaged in, and that is during the 1970s, we see how the Keynesian economic order is replaced by what people call the neoliberal order. And again, this is kind of a shift of the order, institutional order in which American capitalism was embedded. And I think today we're living at a similar moment. The neoliberal order has really come to its limits. There have been economic crises. There have been a crisis of social inequality. There have been massive political pushbacks from the left, and there have been even more massive political pushbacks from the right. So my sense is that we are now living again at a moment in which this institutional order within. In which capitalism is embedded, in which this institutional order is beginning to shift. And that is scary. But I think this is also a moment of opportunity in which this new order can be defined in ways that makes it more conducive to the interests of more people.
- [43:13]
Ralph Nader
I know some of our listeners then are saying, what about Trump? Why haven't we talked about Trump? Well, Trump is the ultimate corporatist and he's ultimate promoter of the corporate state. He's putting ownership in companies like Intel, 10% ownership by the US government. He has attacked the social safety net, attacked the scientific research institutions, attacked and weakened our preparedness for climate violence or approaching pandemics. He's shutting down scientific labs, biggest NASA lab is being shut down in Maryland. On the other hand, he's privileging the big corporations with tax cuts, non enforcement of regulations and a thriving corporate welfare system. So we're going to see another chapter here of what we describe as the.
- [44:04]
Professor Sven Beckert
Revolution, or think about protectionism, tariffs, neocolonialism. You know, these are things that are all complete break to the neoliberal border. So I think, yes, he's propelling that regime change quite significantly. Yeah.
- [44:18]
Ralph Nader
Let's go to David.
- [44:19]
David Feldman
Could you speak about neoliberalism and the influence people like Milton Friedman and the Austrian school Hayek has on the neoliberals who meet in Davos? Because there seems to be this de evolution of capitalism. That's where it's morphed into a fetishization of the free market, the mythical free market, where they talk about this mythical free market as the ultimate democracy. Do these people really believe that? And then do they believe in democracy? And can government and democracy coexist with Davos's the neoliberal view of capitalism?
- [45:04]
Professor Sven Beckert
I think it's a difficult problem. And of course there's great diversity also within the neoliberal intellectual world. But as another historian, Quinn Slobodian, has shown, one of the animating impulses of the neoliberal ideologues or neoliberal intellectuals has been to be quite concerned about popular democracy because they feared that when people gain access to political power, they will use that political power to limit the freedom of action, of markets and of capital owners. And so what the neoliberal Revolution Party is, is to somehow insulate markets from political interventions to make them to be beyond the reach of the state, which in itself, by the way, is a very statist project. So it's wrong to think of neoliberals as anti statist. No, they are really quite insistent on the importance of the state. But the state is meant to insulate as much as possible markets from popular politics and from democracy.
- [46:03]
David Feldman
So that's fascism.
- [46:04]
Professor Sven Beckert
But I mean, it's not quite fascism, because again, fascism is in a way also a system of deeply politicizing markets. And the neoliberals, in a way are trying to move into the exactly the opposite direction, namely to insulate markets from political interventions and from political power. Obviously these ideas have been around for a long time, since the 1920s and 1930s. They were very marginal for a long time. They didn't make much of a difference to policymakers. But in the 1970s, they suddenly moved to the. Of this new order that I talked about, this kind of new ordering of capitalism. And they proved to be quite successful. But these are smart people, and in a way they built very coherent models about how to think about the world. I think one needs to acknowledge that. But how did they become so politically influential? It was not just because of the power of the ideas, but they became politically influential because, as Ralph himself wrote about, because powerful economic forces aligned with this particular way of thinking about how to structure the American economy, the British economy, and other economies elsewhere. So ideas mattered, but they only mattered in the context of also other forces that pushed for reorganization of the capitalist political economy.
- [47:20]
Ralph Nader
We've been speaking with Professor Sven Beckert at Harvard University, author of the new giant book called Capitalism A Global History. And prior to that he wrote the award winning book Empire of Cotton in similar depth. Let's go to Hannah.
- [47:38]
Hannah Feldman
My question's about externalized costs, and I promise of your book reminds me of the great capitalist scholar Dolly Parton, who said it costs a lot to look this cheap. Capitalism has worked really hard to make itself look real cheap. But can you talk about what it's taken to make capitalism look cheap and who's paying those costs?
- [47:59]
Professor Sven Beckert
Yeah, great question. And that actually relates to a discussion we had earlier about what is outside the capitalist logic. So the capitalist logic takes over ever more spheres of our lives and ever more areas of the world. Yes, but there's also always an outside to this capitalist logic. And one of the outsides to this capitalist logic is, for example, the family in general and reproductive labor in particular. So partly throughout the history of capitalism and to this very day, the mobilization of labor, for example, rests on the unpaid labor of especially women who make reproduction of labor and households and children make that possible. So there is a kind of logic outside the market that actually becomes constitutive of the capitalist market. And another one beyond the market is nature itself, because these kind of goods that are. But there are a lot of things on planet Earth that were provided by historical processes many hundreds of thousands of years in the past and the capitalist revolution very much dropped upon these so called free gifts of nature. The best example for that is fossil fuels. Since the mid 19th century, since about 1850, the capitalist revolution has become a fossil fuel revolution. It is unimaginable to think about the vast expansion of productivity, the vast expansion of economic output, without the constant use of ever escalating quantities of fossil fuels. And now we see obviously that these free gifts of nature weren't so free and that they have a significant impact on the ecology of planet Earth and maybe even of our ability to sustain human populations on planet Earth. So this is clearly very important to the capitalist revolution, both nature as well as forms of production that remain outside the market, like the reproductive labor mostly engaged by women.
- [49:50]
Ralph Nader
Before we conclude, Sven, what's been the reaction of your students and the students at other universities you're lecturing your book in front of?
- [49:59]
Professor Sven Beckert
I mean, I think there is a sense at this very moment that we are living at a moment of rapid and unpredictable change. And I think for, you know, no matter how you feel about the direction that this change takes, it's kind of scary to live in a moment in which the future seems suddenly to be quite unpredictable. And of course, there is also great concern about issues such as economic inequality and issues of environmental destruction and other such things. My sense is that students have a deep interest in understanding how we got to this point. And one of the things that they are then interested in is to understand better the economic history of the world, to understand better the economic history of the United States, to understand better the history of capitalism. So I sense that there's great interest and there's also a new kind of possibility to discuss these, because, as you know, during the Cold War, which is now deep history, and certainly none of my students remembers any of it, but during the Cold War, it was very difficult often to talk about capitalism because capitalism was so deeply embedded within this confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. And because this is now so much in the past, I think we have a new possibility to discuss and think about capitalism in newly productive ways. And I see that among my students, and I see that among audiences as hunger to think about how to navigate what is a disconcerting and stressful moment for many people.
- [51:34]
Ralph Nader
Well, thank you very much for the time and for discussing this important range of issues. To be continued, of course. And I hope you get many venues to stimulate penetrating discussions among the people in this country, because they're the ones who are going to make better things happen. It always goes back to the people when they're leaders fall by the wayside indentured commercial interests. Thank you.
- [51:59]
Professor Sven Beckert
Thank you so much. Thank you so much to all of you.
- [52:03]
Steve Scrovan
We've been speaking with Sven Becker. We will link to Capitalism A global history@ralphnaderradiohour.com when we come back. Ralph has a few choice words about the Trump regime and a call to action for all the rest of us. But first, let's check in with our corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhiber.
- [52:18]
Russell Mokhiber
From the National Press building in Washington, D.C. this is your corporate crime reporter Morning minute for Friday, January 30, 2026. I'm Russell Mokai Fiber. In the wake of last summer's catastrophic Boeing 7879 crash that killed 260 people, the nation's largest airline passenger group is demanding immediate inspections and fixes for a dangerous design defect in the popular commercial jet. In November 2025, Flyers rights formally called on the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration to order immediate 787 inspections for laboratory water leaks that could damage or short circuit critical electronics located below the laboratory. The unsolved air India Flight 171Boeing787 crash occurred after power to both engines was mysteriously shut off during takeoff. For the corporate crime reporter, I'm Russell Mulkheimer.
- [53:13]
Steve Scrovan
Thank you, Russell. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. I'm Steve Scrovin along with David Feldman, Hannah and Ralph.
- [53:19]
Professor Sven Beckert
Ralph. Ralph.
- [53:20]
Steve Scrovan
Before we conclude, you have some comments about the Trump administration you'd like to update us on?
- [53:25]
Ralph Nader
Well, I've been saying for months now it's only going to get worse, much worse. And Trump's outrageous illegal behavior, police state tactics and invasion of American cities, not to mention everything else he's destroying and wrecking, I think are confirming my predictions. But one thing happened in terms of breakthrough. You have all these powerful critiques of Trump by the editorial of the New York Times columnists. New York Times, sometimes in the Washington Post, they have these powerful critiques, but they don't conclude with the answer to okay, what are we going to do about this politician? In other words, they avoid the word impeachment because he doesn't have to worry about the Supreme Court. They've already immunized six injustices and he's got the gop at least until now. They're getting a little nervous about 2026 covering for his usurpation of congressional authority such as spending power and the war making power, etc. It's only impeachment The Founding Fathers provided impeachment a civil you're fired tool by Congress. It's quite interesting that while the Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are still asking their flock not to talk about impeachment, more Democrats are beginning to talk about it. But no one talks about it like Trump. Trump seems really concerned about impeachment because it's beyond his control. And he sees if the inflation, the economy starts going down, more unemployment up, up prices up, all his campaign promises, bogus polls going down. He fears impeachment. And I've yet to hear him say if he was impeached and removed from office, he wouldn't leave the White House while he's defied all other federal laws, constitutional provisions and foreign treaties. So it's important people to contact your members of Congress and say, enough of this Democratic Party. None dare call for impeachment. They've already been impeached twice on lesser issues than what has been going on in the last year or so. And more coming. It's only going to get worse. So ask your member of Congress to write you a simple letter. Do they favor the impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate? Remove Donald J. Trump in the White House. And if you think it'll never Happen because the GOP slimmed control of the Senate and House, remember the GOP abandoned Nixon after he won 49 out of 50 states in 1972 and he was 60% in the polls. He violated two congressional subpoenas. Trump has violated over 130 in his first term and he had one obstruction of justice article. And Trump's obstruction of justice is a way of life in the White House. So keep the pressure on and demand that they take a stand in a letter or email back to you listeners. Thank you.
- [56:35]
Steve Scrovan
Well, people, you got your marching orders. Thank you for that, Ralph. I want to thank our guest again, Sven Beckert. For those of you listening on the radio, that's our show for you podcast listeners. Stay tuned for some bonus material we call the Wrap up featuring Francesco de Santis with in case you haven't heard, a transcript of this program will appear on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour substack site soon after the episode is posted.
- [56:58]
David Feldman
Subscribe to us on our Ralph Nader Radio Hour YouTube channel and for Ralph's weekly column, it's free@nader.org for more from Russell Mokhyber, it's at corporatecrimereporter.com the American.
- [57:11]
Steve Scrovan
Museum of Tort Law has gone virtual. You can visit tortmuseum.org to explore the exhibits, take a virtual tour and learn about iconic tort cases from history.
- [57:20]
David Feldman
To order your copy of the Capitol Hill Citizen Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight. It's@capitol hillcitizen.com and remember to continue the.
- [57:29]
Steve Scrovan
Conversation after each show. You can go to the comments section@ralphnader radiohour.com and post a comment or question on this week's episode.
- [57:37]
David Feldman
The producers of the Ralph Nader Radio Hour are Jimmy Lee Wirt, Hannah Feldman, and Matthew Marin. Our executive producer is Alan Minsky.
- [57:45]
Steve Scrovan
Our theme music, Stand Up, Rise up, was written and performed by Kemp Harris. Our proofreader is Elizabeth Solomon.
- [57:52]
David Feldman
Join us next week on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Thank you, Ralph.
- [57:56]
Ralph Nader
Thank you. Take it from me, Someday we'll all be free.
- [58:21]
KPFK Radio Host
LA Theatre Works airs here on KPFK every Sunday evening from 10pm until midnight. Coming up Tonight, on the last night of his life, Henry Jekyll records the shocking story of his daughter, darker alter ego.
- [58:39]
Michael Taylor Gray
My senses were heightened, acute beyond any human capacity. Music started flooding my brain. Seductive music beckoning from blocks away.
- [58:48]
KPFK Radio Host
The confession of Henry Jekyll, MD. By David Rambeau. Next time on LA Theatre Works. That's LA Theatre Works coming up here on KPFK tonight at 10pm.
- [59:04]
Professor Sven Beckert
Wake up Monday mornings with Bike Talk. Join us Mondays at 4am for news and discussion of bikes as transportation for the health of the planet. That's Bike Talk Monday mornings at 4am on KPFK, 90.7 FM, Los Angeles, and online at kpfk.org.
- [59:33]
Michael Taylor Gray
Hi, this is Michael Taylor Gray, host and producer of imru, you, right here on kpfk. Join me and a variety of guests and topics Mondays at 7pm where we continue to amplify voices of the queer community since 1974. Tune in as we broadcast Out Loud and Out Proud every Monday from 7 to 7:30pm followed immediately by this Way out, the international LGBTQ radio magazine. From 7:30 to 8:00pm IMRU in this way Out.