Status Updates From Capitalism: A Global History

By the twenty-first century, the capitalist revolution had arrived almost everywhere and impacted virtually all spheres of life. Expansive and radical, it remains the most consequential revolution in world history.

“Marginalist revolution” in economic thought represented “the intellectual enclosure” of European thought about Economics (particularly Marshall’s development of microeconomics and partial equilibrium.) Dehistoricized, mathematized, and ostensibly immune to the machinations of politics economics moved to place itself in the company of the Natural sciences.

America achieved such integration by “relentless war with the continent’s Indigenous people.” European colonial powers meanwhile achieved similar ends via conquering peoples and lands of Asia and Africa. Landlocked Germany - late to the colonial party - would need to achieve similar ends in Europe itself

Interesting insights on German motivation for WW1 with explication of A.D. Chandler’s idea that German industrialists sought “horizontal and vertical integration of their businesses through military means” as a response to the “American danger.”
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As the world’s most influential neoliberal, Friedrich Hayek, put it in 1981: “I personally prefer a liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking liberalism.”

Attacking the giant bureaucratic machine of the university, Berkeley students pronounced that “I will not be folded, spindled, or mutilated,” a play on the Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate punch cards that fed data into computers at the time.

Not only did the golden years end, but so did the whole order of industrial capitalism that had risen since the 1870s. The 1970s were no mere blip—they were an epochal break in capitalism’s history.