Ellen Meiksins Wood - The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

The collapse of Communism in the late 1980s and 1990s seemed to confirm what many people have long believed: that capitalism is the natural condition of humanity, that it conforms to the laws of nature and basic human inclinations, and that any deviation from those natural laws and inclinations can only come to grief.

There are, of course, many reasons today for questioning the capitalist triumphalism that followed in the wake of the collapse. While I was writing the introduction to the first edition of this book, the world was still reeling from the Asian crisis. Today, the financial pages of the daily press are nervously watching the signs of recession in the US and rediscovering the old capitalist cycles that they had been assuring us were a thing of the past. The period between these two episodes has been punctuated in various parts of the world by a series of dramatic demonstrations that proudly describe themselves as anti-capitalist; and, while many participants seem inclined to dissociate the evils of globalization or neoliberalism from the essential and irreducible nature of capitalism itself, they are very clear about the conflict between the needs of people and the requirements of profit, as manifested in everything from the growing gap between rich and poor to increasing ecological destruction.

In the past, capitalism has always pulled out of its recurrent crises, but never without laying a foundation for new and even worse ones. Whatever means have been found to limit or correct the damage, as many millions of people have often suffered from the cure as from the disease.

The increasingly transparent weaknesses and contradictions in the capitalist system may eventually convince even some of its more uncritical supporters that an alternative needs to be found. But the conviction that there is and can be no alternative is very deeply rooted, especially in Western culture. That conviction is supported not only by the more blatant expressions of capitalist ideology but also by some of our most cherished and unquestioned beliefs about history not just the history of capitalism but history in general. It is as if capitalism has always been the destination of historical movement and, more than that, the movement of history itself has from the beginning been driven by capitalist laws of motion.

B EGGING THE Q UESTION

Capitalism is a system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labour-power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where all economic actors are dependent on the market. This is true not only of workers, who must sell their labour-power for a wage, but also of capitalists, who depend on the market to buy their inputs, including labour-power, and to sell their output for profit. Capitalism differs from other social forms because producers depend on the market for access to the means of production (unlike, for instance, peasants, who remain in direct, non-market possession of land); while appropriators cannot rely on extra-economic powers of appropriation by means of direct coercion such as the military, political, and judicial powers that enable feudal lords to extract surplus labour from peasants but must depend on the purely economic mechanisms of the market. This distinct system of market dependence means that the requirements of competition and profit-maximization are the fundamental rules of life. Because of those rules, capitalism is a system uniquely driven to improve the productivity of labour by technical means. Above all, it is a system in which the bulk of societys work is done by propertyless labourers who are obliged to sell their labour-power in exchange for a wage in order to gain access to the means of life and of labour itself. In the process of supplying the needs and wants of society, workers are at the same time and inseparably creating profits for those who buy their labour-power. In fact, the production of goods and services is subordinate to the production of capital and capitalist profit. The basic objective of the capitalist system, in other words, is the production and self-expansion of capital.

This distinctive way of supplying the material needs of human beings, so very different from all preceding ways of organizing material life and social reproduction, has existed for a very short time, barely a fraction of humanitys existence on earth. Even those who most emphatically insist on the systems roots in human nature and its natural continuity with age-old human practices would not claim that it really existed before the early modern period, and then only in Western Europe. They may see bits of it in earlier periods, or detect its beginnings in the Middle Ages as a looming threat to a declining feudalism but still constrained by feudal restrictions, or they may say that it began with the expansion of trade or with voyages of discovery with, say, Columbuss explorations at the end of the fifteenth century. Some might call these early forms proto-capitalism, but few would say that the capitalist system existed in earnest before the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and some would place it as late as the eighteenth, or perhaps even the nineteenth, when it matured into its industrial form.