John Cassidy
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
John Cassidy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, I mean, that's actually a pretty complicated question. Most of the book which I've written about is industrial capitalism. And we do have a start date for that. It's usually dated to about 1770 in England in the cotton industry, where a series of inventions led to the rise of the factory system. Now, that arose on top of another system of capitalism, which was called mercantile capitalism.
What's the difference? Well, it's actually very timely. Prior to Adam Smith and prior to 1770, The government and the economy were pretty much intertwined a bit like they are now under Trump. Protectionism was the order of the day. I mean, Britain and Holland were the sort of empires in the 17th and 18th centuries. And they fought wars over it.
They basically were competing for the colonial trade, the Spice Islands, England. in what is now Indonesia, the trade in India, cottons, all sorts of goods came from the East.
Right, right. Now, there's a bit of a conceit there because, of course, you know, Adam Smith is the hero to a lot of capitalists and conservatives. I remember when I used to be a correspondent in Washington covering the White House in the late 80s, people used to walk, the Reaganites all walked around with their Adam Smith pins on. Right. Trump people wouldn't do that? I don't think so.
Not most of them. I mean, they reject some of the – you know, protectionism is – Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations to critique the mercantile system that we just mentioned and basically defend free trade. He said that protectionism was harmful. It led to corruption. He had these huge corrupt companies like the East India Company, which was actually bailed out by the British government. So –
In his time, Adam Smith was a critic of the existing form of capitalism at the time, mercantile capitalism.
No, no, it's a very good question. Number one, he said that, you know, we depend on other people for our livelihoods. Basically, you know, you depend on the butcher to provide you with food. You depend on the tailor to, you know, to clothe you, etc. And he said the market is this mechanism which sort of coordinates all these different forms of economic activity.
And if there's competition, also fairly because things sell for pretty much the cost of producing them with a little profit margin. But, you know, Adam Smith didn't have Google and, you know, sort of Amazon.com to contend with.
No, exactly. He viewed the great colonial companies, they were actual monopolies. They had monopoly grants from the government. A lot of government ministers invested in the East India Company, so it was sort of crony capitalism. It wasn't, again, very contemporary. At the moment, the monopoly aspect is front and center.
At some points in the 2008 crisis, this instability question was front and center. That was front and center when Marx and Engels were around thinking that financial blowups in New York were going to end capitalism.
I take two things from them, basic things. Number one, you know, the Communist Manifesto was the first book about globalization. You know, they have these great... ringing phrases about the bourgeois going to the ends of the earth and, you know, destroy every all that is holy is profane. It's a global system which sort of rips up everything in its path.
And, you know, I think that is a very profound and correct analysis. The Marxism, if you boil it down to one sentence, classical Marxism, is that the most important divide in society is between the people who own property and the people who don't. Ownership of property is dominated by the capitalists, especially industrial capital. Workers, the only thing they have to sell is their labor.
They have nothing to lose but their chains in the famous phrase.
Well, I think what's happened is, you know, capitalism itself has, you know, put its worst face forward in the last 20 or 30 years through capitalism. The growth of huge monopolies, which seem completely beyond any public control or accountability.
And young people, they look through the capitalism and the economy through the prism of environmentalism now in a way that they didn't in our generation.
Bernie always calls himself a socialist. But his view of socialism, unless I'm very much mistaken, I've interviewed him a lot of times, I haven't seen him recommending socialism. of the means of production, what Bernie's in favor of, higher taxes on the rich, control over monopolies, public health care, public education. That to me is Keynesian social democracy in the European context anyway.
But in the US, there's always been such a sort of mythology surrounding the... The free market and the sort of small businessman.
To some extent, the American economy for a long time did live up to that. There was the idea in the U.S. there was more social mobility in the U.S. than there was in Europe. And people really did think that with hard work they could get ahead and do well for themselves. I remember when I first came to the U.S.
and I realized that quite a lot of sort of working class, what you'd call middle class people, have second homes. There were all these modest cottages out in Montauk where – What I would call working class people went for the summer. Now, of course, they can't afford it now, but now we're talking 40, 30, 40 years ago.
So I think, you know, there was some material basis for the American idea that, you know, there was American exceptionalism. This was a land of opportunity. And obviously a lot of people still believe that, especially a lot of immigrants. The more cynical sort of leftist take on it would be that, well, of course, because it's always been manufactured consent.
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