Industrial Capitalism & Marx: Crash Course World History

hi I'm John Green this is crash course world history and today we're going to talk about capitalism yeah Mr Green

capitalism just turns men into wolves your purportedly free markets only make slaves of us all oh God Stan it's me

from college me from the past has become me from college this is a disaster the reason he so unbearable Stan is that he

refuses to recognize the legitimacy of other people's narratives and that means that he will never ever be able to have

a productive conversation with another human in his entire life so listen to me from the past I'm going to disappoint

you by being too capitalist and I'm going to disappoint lot of other people by not being capitalist enough and I'm

going to disappoint the historians by not using enough jargon but what can I do we only have 12 minutes fortunately

capitalism is all about efficiency so let's do this me from college Randy rigs becomes a best-selling author Josh rner

stars in a great sitcom it is not going to work out with Emily and do not go to Alaska with a girl you've known for 10

days okay let's talk [Music] capitalism so capital ism is an economic

system but it's also a cultural system it's characterized by Innovation and investment to increase wealth but today

we're going to focus on production and how industrial capitalism changed it Stan I can't wear these emblems of the

Bourgeois while KL Marx himself is looking at me it's ridiculous I'm changing very hard to take off a shirt

dramatically so let's say it's 1200 CE and you're a rug merchant just like Merchants today you sometimes need to

borrow money in order to buy the rugs you want to resell at a profit and then you pay that money back often with

interest once you've resold the rugs this is called mertile capitalism and it was a global phenomenon from the Chinese

to the Indian Ocean trade Network to Muslim merchants who would sponsor trade Caravans across the Sahara but by the

17th century merchants in the Netherlands and in Britain had expanded upon this idea to create joint stock

companies those companies could Finance bigger trade missions and also spread the risk of international trade but the

thing about international trade is sometimes boats sink or they get taken by Pirates and while that's bad if

you're a sailor because you know you lose your life it's really bad if you're a mertile capitalist because you lost

all your money but if you own one tenth of 10 boats your risk is much better managed that kind of investment

definitely increased wealth but it only affected a sliver of the population and it didn't create a culture of capitalism

industrial capitalism was something all together different both in scale and in practice let's use Joyce Applebee's

definition of industrial capitalism an economic system that relies on investment of capital in machines and

technology that are used to increase production of marketable goods so imagine that someone made a St Machine

by the way Stan this is a remarkable likeness and that stand machine could produce and direct 10 times more

episodes of Crash Course than a human stand well of course even if there are significant upfront costs I'm going to

invest in a Stan machine so I can start cranking out 10 times the knowledge Stan are you focusing on a robot instead of

me I am the star of the show stb but you're going behind the globe so when most of us think about capitalism

especially when we think about its downsides long hours low wages miserable working conditions child labor

unemployed stands that's what we're thinking about now ad L this is just one definition of industrial capitalism

among many but it's the definition we're going with all right let's go to the thought bubble industrial capitalism

developed first in Britain in the 19th century Britain had a bunch of advantages it was the dominant power on

the Seas and it was making good money off of trade with its colonies including the slave trade also the growth of

capitalism was helped by the half century of civil unrest that resulted from the 17th century English Civil War

now I'm not advocating for civil wars or anything but in this particular case it was useful because before the war the

British crown had put a lot of regulations on the economy complicated licenses Royal monopolies Etc but during

the turmoil it couldn't enforce them which made for Freer markets another Factor was a remarkable increase in

agricultural productivity in the 16th century as food prices started to rise it became profitable for Farmers both

large and small to invest in agricultural technologies that would improve crop yields those higher prices

for grain probably resulted from population growth which in turn was encouraged by increased production of

food crops a number of these agricultural improvements came from the Dutch who had chronic problems feeding

themselves and discovered that planting different kinds of crops like Clover that added nitrogen to the soil and

could be used to feed livestock at the same time meant that more Fields could be used at once this increased

productivity eventually brought down prices and this encouraged further innovation in order to increase yield to

make up for the drop in prices lower food prices had an added benefit since food cost less and wages in England

remained High workers would have more disposable income which meant that if there were consumer goods a ailable they

would be consumed which incentivized people to make consumer goods more efficiently and therefore more cheaply

you can see how this positive feedback loop leads to more food and more stuff culminating in a world where people have

so much stuff that we must rent space to store it and so much food that obesity has become a bigger killer than

starvation thanks thought bubble so this increased productivity also meant that fewer people needed to work in

agriculture in order to feed the population to put this in perspective in 1520 80% of the English population

worked the land by 1,00 only 36% of adult male laborers were working in agriculture and by 1850 that percentage

had dropped to 25 this meant that when the factor started humming there were plenty of workers to hum along with them

especially child laborers so far all this sounds pretty good right I mean except for the child

labor who wouldn't want more cheaper food yeah well not so fast one of the ways the British achieved all this

agricultural productivity was through the process of enclosure whereby landlords would reclaim and privatize

fields that for centuries had been held in common by multiple tenants this increased agricultural productivity but

it also impoverished many tenant Farmers many of whom lost their livelihoods okay for our purposes capitalism is also a

cultural system rooted in the need of private investors to turn a profit so the real change needed here was a change

of mind people had to develop the capitalist values of taking risks and appreciating Innovation and they had to

come to believe that making an upfront investment in something like a stand machine could pay for itself and then

some one of the reasons that these values developed in Britain was that the people who initially held them were

really good at publicizing them writers like Thomas mun who worked for the English East India Company exposed

people to the idea that the economy was controlled by markets and other writers popularized the idea that it was human

nature for individuals to participate in markets as rational actors even our language changed the word individuals

did not apply to persons until the 17th century and in the 18th century a career still referred only to horses racing

lives perhaps the most important idea that was popularized in England was that men and women were consumers as well as

producers and that this was actually a good thing because the desire to consume manufactured goods could spur economic

growth the main spur to trade or rather to Industry and Ingenuity is the exorbitant appetite of men which they

will take pain to gratify so wrote John kery one of capitalism's cheerleaders in 1695 and in talking about our appetites

he wasn't just talking about food that does doesn't seem radical now but it sure did back then so here in the 21st

century it's clear that industrial capitalism at least for now has won sorry buddy but you know you gave it a

good run you didn't know about Stalin but capitalism isn't without its problems or its critics and there were

certainly lots of shortcomings to Industrial capitalism in the 19th century working conditions were awful

days were long arduous and monotonous workers lived in conditions that people living in the developed world today

would associate with abject poverty one way that workers respond responded to these conditions was by organizing into

labor unions another response was in many cases purely theoretical socialism most famously marxian socialism I should

probably point out here that socialism is an imperfect opposite to capitalism even though the two are often juxtaposed

capitalism's Defenders like to point out that it's natural meaning that if left to our own devices humans would

construct economic relationships that resemble capitalism socialism at least in its modern incarnations makes fewer

pretenses toward being an expression of human nature it's the result of human choice and human planning so socialist

as an intellectual construct began in France how' I do Stan the border between Egypt and Libya

there were two branches of socialism in France utopian and revolutionary utopian socialism is often associated with

compan Simone and Charles forier both of whom rejected revolutionary action after having seen the disaster of the French

Revolution both were critical of capitalism and while forier is usually a punch line in history classes because he

believed that in his ideal socialist world the Seas would turn to Lemonade he was right that human beings have desires

that go beyond basic self-interest and that we aren't always economically rational actors the other French

socialists were the revolutionaries and they saw the French Revolution even its violence in a much more positive light

the most important of these revolutionaries was August Blan and we associate a lot of his ideas with

Communism which is a term that he used like the utopians he criticized capitalism but he believed that it could

only be overthrown through violent revolution by the working classes however while bany thought that the

workers would come to dominate a communist world he was an elitist and he believed that workers could never on

their own overcome their superstitions and their prejudices in order to throw off bgea oppression and that brings us

to Carl Marx whose ideas and Beard cast a shadow over most of the 20th century oh it's time for the open

[Music] letter an open letter to KL Marx's beard but first let's see what's in the secret

compartment today oh robots stand Bots two stand Bots one of them female now I own all the means of production you're

officially useless to me stand now turn the camera off turn the C I'm going to got to get up and turn the camera off

stand bot go turn the camera off hey there KL Marx's beard wow you are intense Carl marks these days there are

a lot of young men who think beards are cool beard lovers if you will those aren't beards they're glorified milk

mustaches I mean I haven't shaved for a couple weeks KL marks but I'm not claiming a beard you don't get a beard

by being lazy you get a beard by being a committed revolutionary that's why hardcore marxists are literally known

know as bearded marxists these days that's an insult but you know what KL Marx when I look back at history I

prefer the bearded Communists let's talk about some Communists who didn't have beards Maad dong Paul pot Kim Jong ill

Joseph freaking Stalin with his face caterpillar so yeah KL Marx's beard it's my great regret to inform you that there

are some poultry beards trying to take up the class struggle these days best wishes John Green although he's often

considered the father of communism because he co-wrote The Communist Manifesto Marx was above all a Phil

philosopher and a historian it's just that unlike most philosophers and historians he advocated for revolution

his greatest work do copy Tall sets out to explain the world of the 19th century in historical and philosophical terms

Marx's thinking is deep and dense and we're low on time but I want to introduce one of his ideas that of class

struggle so for Marx the focus isn't on the class it's on the struggle basically marks believ that classes don't only

struggle to make history but that the struggle is what makes classes into themselves the idea is that through

conflict classes develop a sense of themselves and without conflict there is no such thing as class Consciousness so

Marx was writing in 19th century England and there were two classes that mattered the workers and the capitalists the

capitalists owned most of the factors of production in this case land and the capital to invest in factories the

workers just had their labor so the class struggle here is between capitalists who want labor at the lowest

possible price and the workers who want to be paid as much as possible for their work there are two key ideas that

underly this theory of class struggle first mark believe that production or work was the thing that gave life

material meaning second is that we are by Nature social animals we work together we collaborate we are more

efficient when we share resources Marx's criticism of capitalism is that capitalism replaces this egalitarian

collaboration with conflict and that means that it isn't a natural system after all and by arguing that capitalism

actually isn't consistent with human nature Mark sought to empower the workers that's a lot more attractive

than blanes elst socialism and while purportedly Marxist States like the USSR usually abandon worker empowerment

pretty quickly the idea of protecting our Collective interest remains powerful that's where we'll leave it for now lest

I start reading from The Communist Manifesto But ultimately socialism has not succeeded in supplanting capitalism

as its proponents had hoped in the United States at least socialism has become something of a dirty word so

industrial capitalism certainly seems to have one out and in terms of material well-being and access to goods and

services for people around the world that's probably a good thing you keep falling over you're a great bit but a

very flimsy one actually come to think of it you're more of an8 bit but how and to what extent we use socialist

principles to regulate free markets remains an open question and one that is answered very differently in say Sweden

than in the United States and this I would argue is where marks still matters is capitalist competition natural and

good or should there be systems in place to check it for the sake of our Collective well-being should we band

together to provide health care for the sick or pensions for the old should governments run businesses and if so

which ones the mail delivery business the airport security business the education business those are the places

where industrial capitalism and socialism are still competing and in that sense at least the struggle

continues thanks for watching I'll see you next week crash course is produced and directed by Stan meller our script

supervisor is Danica Johnson the show is written by my high school history teacher Raul Meyer and myself were ay

interned by mayor at Dano and our Graphics team is thought bubble last week's pH of the week was the Tardis so

you can stop suggesting that now if you'd like to suggest future phrases of the week or guess it this week's you can

do so in comments where you can also ask questions about today's video that will be answered by our team of historians

thanks for watching crash course and as we say in my hometown don't forget to be awesome all right Stan bring the movie

Magic [Music] yes

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