Life After GDP: Tim Jackson Returns to 1968 to Excavate a Post-Capitalist Future

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. We are on the road today. We're in Guildford in Surrey, just south of London, with an old friend of the show, Tim Jackson, prominent UK-based thinker on the environment, economist, and he's been on the show before talking about June, 1968, June. Tim, do you remember where you were on the 5th of June, 1968?

**Tim Jackson** (1:00)
Yeah, I remember where I was on the 4th of June, 1958 because it was my birthday, 1968
Yeah, I remember where I was on the 4th of June, 1968 because that was my birthday, and I think it was very late on that day in California. So it would have been very early the next day on 5th of June when RFK senior was shot just after he finished speaking at the end of a very successful California primary, which more or less guaranteed him the Democratic nomination. But he was shot leaving the hotel that evening and died a couple of days later.

**Andrew Keen** (1:47)
And you were an 11-year-old boy watching this on a black and white television in the UK?

**Tim Jackson** (1:53)
Yeah, I think I've got that right. I mean, I sometimes I confuse it in my head because I was also old enough to remember the assassination of JFK five years earlier.
And I sometimes confuse them in my mind, but basically my sense watching this on this black and white TV was, oh no, not again. And a kind of prayer that this time it would turn out differently than it did with JFK.
And I remember, because I remember my, at that point I had an aunt who had just decided basically she was going to emigrate to the US. And I'd seen her off, I think, from Southampton on a transatlantic liner, going to this job that she was to be taking up in the US, and thinking is this the country that my aunt is going to? It's two assassinations, two high-profile assassinations. Actually it was more than that because of Martin Luther King, obviously, and then wondering the kind of violence, the political violence that inhabits the world. And as an 11-year-old that was a kind of, you know, a sort of odd moment, out of time as it happened. And I had no sense then, no understanding, no inkling, that RFK would become important to me professionally some 20, 30 years later.

**Andrew Keen** (3:27)
And I know you discovered, so to speak, RFK through a speech he made in Kansas a couple of, three or four months before his assassination in the spring of 1968, a speech that you discovered in a university basement.

**Tim Jackson** (3:44)
Yeah, I didn't discover it myself, but I was drawn to this discovery because the speech was, as you said, it was given, it was actually pretty much the first, maybe the second speech that he gave in his presidential campaign. The first one was at Kansas State University, and the second one was at the University of Kansas. As you might know, there's a huge sporting rivalry between KSU and University of Kansas, and they sort of been at each other's throats. The first thing that Bobby Kennedy says when he gets to University of Kansas is, I've just come over from KSU, and they told me to send them their love. Yeah, no, they did.
That's all they think about over there is how much they love you. Of course, the whole stadium where he was speaking erupts into-

**Andrew Keen** (4:36)
This was at the Phog Allen Fieldhouse just outside Kansas City on the campus.

**Tim Jackson** (4:42)
And so he's there giving this- I mean, he's really finding his way into the campaign when you look at the campaign speeches at that time and the record of what he was doing. He'd only just decided he was going to stand, and he was standing against the incumbent president. He was standing as Democrat against Democrat. He was a kind of outsider in the race at that stage, and he was feeling his way into it. He'd been persuaded into it largely because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. But there were other things that he wanted to talk about, and it was the other content of the speech that really blew my mind when I discovered that it existed because he began to talk at a certain stage in the speech about the limitations of an economy built around economic growth.
And I spent my professional life up to that point thinking about talking about economic growth.

**Andrew Keen** (5:36)