As a word denoting a distinctive economic system, capitalism began to appear, according to Raymond Williams (1983 1976, p. 50) in English, French and German from the early nineteenth century (although the Oxford English Dictionary cites its first use by Thackeray in 1854). Capitalist- as a key actor in a capitalist system – has a longer semantic history, dating back a half-century earlier, but this term too was clearly being used to describe an economic system – sketched by Adam Smith and the Scottish political economists among others – for which the word capitalism had not yet been invented. Capital and capitalist, says Williams, were technical terms in any economic system but gradually became deployed to account for a particular stage of historical development, and out of this shift in meaning crystallized the term capitalism. Marx, who did not use the term until the 1870s, was the central figure in distinguishing capital as an economic category from capitalism as a specific social form in which ownership of the means of production was centralized (through a capitalist class), and that depended upon a system of wage-labour in which a class had been freed from property. Capitalism in this sense, again as Williams observed, was “a product of a developing bourgeois society (1976, p. 51). The term gained some traction in the 1880s in the German socialist movement and was then extended to non-socialist writing, though its first extensive English and French usages seem to not have been until the early twentieth century. In the wake of 1917, and most especially after the Second World War, capitalism was rarely used as a descriptor by its promoters, and was deliberately replaced by such terms as free or private enterprise and, more recently still, the market or free market system (as part of the neo-liberal discourse of the 1980s and 1990s).

What, then, are the defining qualities of capitalism, understood as a distinctive mode of production? It is a historically specific form of economic and social organization and in its industrial variant can be roughly dated to mid-eighteenth century Britain, but the theor-ization of its conditions of possibility and its internal dynamics have necessarily been an object of intense debate. Classical political economy – Adam Smith and David Ricardo -and its Marxian critique both accepted that capitalism was a class system, that labour and capital were central to its operations, and that capitalism as a system was expansive, dynamic and unstable. These accounts fasten upon the economy – or, more properly, the political economy – and the centrality of property relations, the market-commodity nexus, the separation of the workers from the means of production and the centralization of capitalist control under the figure of the capitalist-entrepreneur. These claims – to the extent that they reflect some common ground – are subsequently elaborated in radically different ways. Some cling to a narrow definition of economy (theorized in different ways) as central to the intellectual enterprise; others seek to link economy, culture, politics and society into a more elaborated sense – what Max Weber called a cosmos – of a capitalist system. In general, the development and institutionalization of the critical social sciences has seen a massive proliferation of opinion – and of conceptual apparatuses – for the examination of actually existing capitalist systems.

Some of this diversity of opinion can be appreciated by a consideration of a quartet of theorists. Adam Smith, like other classical political economists, was concerned with the distribution and accumulation of economic surplus and the problems of wage, price and employment determination. Writing at the birth of industrial manufacture, the key to the Wealth of nations is the concept of an autonomous self regulating market economy described as civil society. Smiths genius was to have seen the possibility of an autonomous civil society, its capacity for self regulation if left unhindered and its capacity for maximizing welfare independent of state action. Smith located capitalism at the intersection of the division of labour and the growth of markets. Furthermore, in this system self interested individuals indirectly and inadvertently promoted collective interest through the functions of self regulating markets. The growth of commerce and the growth of liberty reinforce one another under capitalism. In its neo-classical variant, labour markets are seen as no different than any commodity market and capitalist markets are assumed, if unimpeded by the state or other distortions, to function to produce a general equilibrium. Friedrich von Hayeks (1944) account of liberal capitalism took this reasoning to its limit. Capitalism was conceived of as a unity of liberty, science and the spontaneous orders that co-evolved to form modern society (the Great Society, as he termed it). It is a defence of the liberal (unplanned) market order from which the preconditions of civilization – competition and experimentation – had emerged. Hayek, like Weber, saw this modern world as an iron cage constituted by impersonality, a loss of community, individualism and personal responsibility. But, contra Weber, these structures, properly understood, were the very expressions of liberty. From the vantage point of the 1940s this (classical) liberal project was, as Hayek saw it, under threat. Indeed, what passed for liberal capitalism was a travesty, a distorted body of ideas warped by constructivist rationalism, as opposed to what he called evolutionary rationalism. Milton Friedman (2002 1962), in the realm of economic theory, waged this battle from the 1960s onwards.

For Max Weber, the capitalist cosmos was guided by systems of calculability and rationality – this is what gave Western capitalism its specificity – which grew in part as an unintended consequence of Protestantism . Formal rationality produced a capitalist society characterized by large-scale industrial production, centralized bureaucratic administration and the iron cage of capitalism that shapes individuals lives with irresistible force. Contra Smiths roseate vision of capitalism – though always wary of the costs of class oppression, in his view dished out by corrupt government -Webers vision of capitalism was ultimately bleak, always operating in the shadow of the totally administered society.

Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian economic historian and socialist, who believed that the nineteenth-century liberal capitalist order had died, never to be revived . By 1940, every vestige of the international liberal order had disappeared, the product of the necessary adoption of measures designed to hold off the ravages of the self regulating market; that is, market despotism. It was the conflict between the market and the elementary requirements of an organized social life that made some form of collectivism or planning inevitable. The liberal market order was, contra Hayek, not spontaneous but a planned development, and its demise was the product of the market order itself. A market order could just as well produce the freedom to exploit as the freedom to associate. The grave danger, in Polanyis view, was that liberal utopianism might return in the idea of freedom as nothing more than the advocacy of free enterprise, in which planning is the denial of freedom, and the justice and liberty offered by regulation or control just a camouflage of slavery, liberalism on this account will always degenerate, ultimately compromised by an authoritarianism that will be invoked as a counterweight to the threat of mass democracy. Modern capitalism, he said, contained the famous double-movement in which markets were serially and coextensively disem-bedded from, and re-embedded in, social institutions and relations. In particular, the possibility of a counter-hegemony to the self regulating market resided in the resistance to (and reaction against) the commodification of the three fictitious commodities – land, labour and money – that represented the spontaneous defence of society.

Marxs account identifies a fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism – a contradiction between two great classes (workers and owners of capital) that is fundamentally an exploitative relation shaped by the appropriation of surplus. Unlike feudalism, in which surplus appropriation is transparent (in the forms of taxes and levies made by landowners and lords, backed by the power of the church and Crown), surplus value is obscured in the capitalist labour process. Marx (1967) argues that labour is the only source of value and value is the embodiment of a quantum of socially necessary labour. It is the difference between the sale of a workers labour power and the amount of labour necessary to reproduce it that is the source of surplus value. The means by which capital extracts this surplus value under capitalism – through the working day, labour intensification and enhancing labour productivity – coupled to the changing relations between variable and constant capital determine, in Marxs view, the extent, degree and forms of exploitation. In the first volume of Capital, Marx identifies the origins of surplus value in the organization of production (the social relations of production so-called). In volume II, Marx explains how exploitation affects the circulation of capital, and in volume III he traces the division of the total product of exploitation among its beneficiaries and the contradiction so created. In Marxist theory two kinds of material interests – interests securing material welfare and interests enhancing economic power – are linked through exploitation (exploiters simultaneously obtain greater economic welfare and greater economic power by retaining control over the social allocation of surplus through investments). Members of a class, in short, hold a common set of interests and therefore have common interests with respect to the process of exploitation .

In the wake of Marxs work, the central debates over capitalist exploitation have turned on (i) whether the labour theory of value is a necessary condition for any truth claim about exploitation, (ii) whether exploitation can be made congruent with the complex forms of class differentiation associated with modern industrial society, and (iii) whether there are non-Marxist accounts of exploitation. In neoclassical economics, for example, exploitation under capitalism is seen as the failure to pay labour its marginal product (Brewer, 1987, p. 86). Exploitation in this view is micro-level and organizational. That is to say, using micro-economic theory exploitation is a type of market failure due to the existence of monopoly or monopsony. In more developed versions of this organizational view, exploitation can be rooted in extra-market forces; for example, free-riding or asymmetric information (the so-called principal-agent problem). A more structural account of exploitation from a liberal vantage point would be the ideas of Henry George or John Maynard Keynes, for whom land owners or rentier classes (non-working owners of financial wealth) produce not exploitation in the Marxist sense, but exploitation as waste and inefficiency due to special interests.

In the Marxian tradition, there has been in general an abandonment of the labour theory of value – away from the view of Elster (1986) that workers are exploited if they work longer hours than the number of hours employed in the goods they consume (1986, p. 121) -towards John Roemers notion that a group is exploited if it has “some conditionally feasible alternative under which its members would be better off (Roemer, 1986a, p. 136). Perhaps the central figure in developing these arguments is Erik Olin Wright (1985), who sought to account for the contradictory class location of the middle classes (in that they are simultaneously exploiters and exploited). Building on the work of Roemer, Wright distinguishes four types of assets, the unequal control or ownership of which constitute four distinct forms of exploitation under capitalism: labour power assets (feudal exploitation), capital assets (capitalist exploitation), organization assets (statist exploitation) and skill assets (socialist exploitation). While pure modes of production can be identified with single forms of exploitation, actually existing capitalism consists of all four, opening up the possibility of the simultaneous operation of exploiter/ exploitee relations (e.g. managers are capital-istically exploited but are organizational exploiters).

A long line of Marx-inspired theorizing has attempted to grasp the relations between (European or transatlantic) capitalism, empire and the non-capitalist (or developing) world. This is the heart of theories of imperialism (Lenin, 1916), whether as the coercive extraction of surplus through colonial states (Fanon, 1967 1961), through unequal exchange (Arrighi and Pearce, 1972), or through the imperial operation of transnational banks and multilateral development institutions (the World Bank and the international monetary fund). The so-called anti-globalization movement (especially focusing on institutions such as the World Trade Organization) and the sweatshop movements (focusing on transnational firms such as Nike) are contemporary exemplars of a politics of exploitation linking advanced capitalist state and transnational corporations with the poverty and immiseration of the global south against a backdrop of neo-liberalism and free trade (Harvey, 2005; Starr, 2005).

It is axiomatic that there has been enormous controversy over the operations, the merits and the costs of the capitalist system since the nineteenth century. Much ink has also been spilled attempting to provide periodi-zation or classifications of actually existing capitalisms and the origins of capitalism in the transformation from feudalism. The plur-alization of the word capitalism – capitalisms -highlights enormous geographical, temporal, institutional and cultural diversity of what is now a global and integral form of political economy. The originary question hinges in large measure on engaging with Marxs account of primitive accumulations and the British enclosures, and the extent to which the feudal system was transformed by the corrosive effects of the markets and/or urban-based merchants, by demography or by internal contradictions within the feudal system (reflections in class and other struggles between tenants, lords, the Church and merchants). The periodization of capitalism turns on similar theoretical tensions: Was early capitalism characterized by expansionary trade and the dominance of merchants capital? Was this early mercantile capitalism actually in the business of inventing new systems of capitalism production (e.g. the plantation)? What was – or is – the relation between forms of unfree labour (some of which still exist, although not as organized mass slavery) and the development of industrial capitalism? To what extent were the accumulations associated with differing phases of the development of the world system – slavery, informal empire, and the first age of empire – integral to the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain or elsewhere in Europe? These questions have produced a vast body of scholarship and theorizing. What can be said, with some trepidation, is that while the trajectories of capitalism in Europe and elsewhere have some substantive diversity, there is some agreement that the rise of industrial manufacture in Britain in the eighteenth century, the growing concentration of capitals (and the linking of industrial and bank capital) at the end of the nineteenth century, the insti-tutionalization of a sort of Keynesian capitalism in the wake of the First World War, and the genesis of a resurrected liberal capitalism (dubbed neo-liberalism, echoing the late nineteenth century) as a force driving the post-1945 globalization of transnational capitalism are key moments – or watersheds – in the long march of modern capitalism. The national and local forms in which the great arch of capitalist development has been institutionalized -sometimes theorized as systems of regulation or social accumulation , sometimes as national capitalisms, sometimes as models or cultures of capitalism – has generated a very substantial and sophisticated body of work over the past three to four decades, including an important dialogue over the differences between the first and late developers (e.g. the so-called ASIAN tigers).

Geographers, particularly since the 1970s, have been especially concerned to address the relations between space, environment and the reproduction of the capitalist system. The most elaborated account in the English language is the body of work of David Harvey (1999 1982) – but one might easily point to an equally expansive and synoptic account in the work of Henri Lefebvre (2003 1970). Harveys work began as a critical account of the city in the advanced capitalist states, but quickly developed into a magisterial re-reading of capital in which the friction of space – and what he termed the spatial fix – provided a key theoretical ground on which to understand the circuits of capital and the built environment, the changing geography of capitalist accumulation and the environmental costs of – and, more recently, the relations between – American empire and primitive accumulation (what he calls accumulation by dispossession). Other geographers have naturally contributed to the space-nature-capitalism triumvirate: Doreen Massey on spatial divisions of labour, Neil Smith on uneven development, Richard Walker on regional and agrarian capitalism, Ash Amin on industrial districts, Gillian Hart on trajectories of capitalism, Stuart Corbridge and Richard Peet on neo-liberalism and development, and so on.

Since the 1990s, the spectacular rise of neoliberalism as a specific form of capitalist development and its relation to questions of empire, development and environment has drawn much critical attention. David Harveys A brief history of neoliberalism (2005) attempts to map the dismantling of the social democratic world, with a special focus on the British form of national Keynesianism, inflected by the command economy of the Second World War, but whose roots lay earlier in the response of the managers of North Atlantic capitalism to the Depression, and which came in the form of welfare safety nets, income redistribution, domestic industry protection, state-financed public works and capital controls – embedded liberalism of the Polanyian sort.

The rise of neo-liberal capitalism was in a sense the victory of Friedrich von Hayeks The road to serfdom. It was Margaret Thatcher, after all, who pronounced, at a Tory Cabinet meeting, This is what we believe, slamming a copy of Hayeks The constitution of liberty onto the table at 10 Downing Street. His critique of collectivism – that it destroys morals, personal freedom and responsibility, impedes the production of wealth, and sooner or later leads to totalitarianism – is the ur-text for market Utopians. Collectivism was by definition a made rather than a grown order; that is, a taxis rather than a cosmos. Collectivism was, Hayek said, constructivist rather than evolutionary, organized not spontaneous, an economy rather than a catallaxy, coerced and concrete rather than free and abstract.

As Antonio Gramsci might have put it, there has been a Hayekian passive revolution from above, in which we have witnessed what Perry Anderson has dubbed a neoliberal grand slam (2000c). The vision of the Right has no equivalent on the Left; it rules undivided across the globe and is the most successful ideology in world history.

The process by which neo-liberal capitalist hegemony was established, and its relation to forms and modes and sites of resistance, remains a story for which, even with Harveys synoptic survey at hand, we still have no full genealogy. Neo-liberalism was a class reaction to the crisis of the 1970s (Harvey talks of a restoration of class power); on that much, Milton Friedman and David Harvey are agreed. But we are still left with many paradoxes and puzzles. Why, for example, did the LSE and Chicago – once the respective centres of Fabianism and a certain version of (American) liberalism under Robert Hutchins -become the forcing houses of neo-liberalism? What were the facilitating conditions that fostered the arrival of the maverick Ronald Coase in Chicago, marking a neo-liberal turning point? How did the World Bank – a bastion of post-war development economics and, it must be said, of statism – become the voice of laissez faire? How can we grasp the fact that shock therapy in eastern Europe was more the product of the enthusiastic Hungarian reformers than of the more reticent American neo-liberal apparatchiks? It is sometimes noted that the 1991 World Development Report (shaped by former US Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers) marked a neo-liberal watershed in its refiguring of the role of the state. But it was Africa (not latin America or eastern Europe) that proved to be the first testing ground of neo-liberalisms assault on the over-extended public sector, on physical capital formation and on the proliferation of market distortions by government. There is much that remains unclear in the rise of neo-liberal hegemony as a particular force of capitalism.

As Polanyi might have anticipated, three decades of radical neo-liberalism culminated in the autumn of 2008 with a spectacular and massive implosion of the US financial sector, turning quickly into a deeper and systemic crisis of capitalism itself. The catastrophic collapse of US investment banks – which ramified globally producing de facto bank nationalizations in much of western Europe – was triggered by a classic housingbubble. During the 1990s,how-ever, this bubble was, unlike the past, driven by new and dubious financial and mortgage instruments, and by the utter failure of the financial regulatory institutions (the credit rating agencies and the Securities and Exchange Commission in particular). By late 2008, in spite of a massive $700 billion bailout by the US Treasury, credit and the banking sector remained in effect frozen and the prospect of a massive global recession loomed. The great experiment in free market utopianism – the so-called neo-liberal grand slam – had put Keynesianism back on the political agenda. In the US and much of Europe, a Polanyian counter-revolution – in the US there is talk of a new New Deal – is now in the offing.

Fuente: guidewhois.com