Gerhard’s Reviews > Capitalism: A Global History > Status Update

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.

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.

The many consequential social, economic, and institutional departures of the golden age also accelerated the basic impetus of the capitalist revolution as capital owners pushed the logic of commodification into new areas of the world and new nooks and crannies of society.

Thanks to better feed and the use of antibiotics, a cow in Germany produced 3,800 liters of milk per year in 1970, compared with just 2,500 liters in 1950, and hens laid 216 instead of 120 eggs annually.

As wages increased during the 1950s, Japanese workers were able to purchase durable consumer goods such as televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines, collectively known as the “three sacred treasures.” By the 1960s, these “treasures” were replaced by the “three Cs” (color TVs, coolers [air conditioners], and cars).

For all the disappointments, shortcomings, and failures that would surface (especially after 1970), decolonization ignited significant economic growth of 2 or 3 percent per year throughout much of Asia and Africa after many decades, or even centuries, of no growth at all.

...decolonialization would shift inequalities of wealth and power, reverse some of the effects of the Great Divergence, allow for the emergence of new businesses and new forms of business organization, shift power within commodity chains, and radically alter the world’s competitive environment.

War was a likely outcome of quickening economic nationalism—and when such economic nationalism mixed with authoritarian and fascist rule, war was almost always the result.