“The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. . . . It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naïve idea of capitalism must be given up once and for all. Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit. Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.”
—Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (trans. 1930)
I
Why do definitions and discussions of capitalism seem so urgent just now? Is it that emphatic sense of an ending advertised by the recurrent crises of our time? Is it the feeling you get when you realize that Donald Trump means what he says—that he actually intends to adjourn any pretense of democratic or republican rule in the name of “private enterprise”? Or is it the dawning realization that, notwithstanding the willful inertia of the Democratic Party’s leadership, an eminently practical alternative to capitalism is already available in the ideas and programs sponsored by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Octasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani?
These are what I would call transition questions, the kind that crowd our imaginations when the weight of that sense of an ending is lightened, if only a little, by a glimpse of what lies beyond or ahead, but not above—not in heaven, but here on earth, where the redemption of the suffering that plagues us might be accomplished by understanding its worldly sources and symptoms as attempted cures for what ails us.
The “new” history of capitalism, in which Sven Beckert leads by example, is, so far, a deeply unsatisfying answer to such questions.
For its practitioners assume, contra Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, and Max Weber, that capitalism exists wherever merchants get inventive enough to convert their greed into culturally acceptable and socially productive practices that organize both the production and the distribution of commodities. From that assumption it follows that Adam Smith was right to claim that human nature was rooted in our propensity to “truck and barter,” but wrong to think that there was anything new in the “commercial society” of the 18th century he studied. In other words, capitalism is so old and so new that it has no discernible beginning, middle, or end. As Weber’s indefatigable colleague Werner Sombart kept claiming, its spirit saturates every stage of human history.
This “new” history of capitalism came of age over the last forty years as a reaction formation, first in response to the so-called new economic history—a hostile takeover bid by economists of a moribund field in the rival discipline of History—and then to a radical historiographical turn in the treatment of slavery as a modern development specific to the western hemisphere, or, more broadly, the Black Atlantic. Like many other new fields, it’s a “post-Marxist” genre whose practitioners are steeped in the sensibilities if not the methods of post-structuralism, the offspring of which include cultural and gender studies.
That matters, not because a predictable political program flows from Marxism (or from post-structuralism), or because Marx was a reliable prophet, but because the periodization of capitalism has long been both the preoccupation and the specialty of Marxists. You can’t peek over the edges of Marxist scholarship and expect to see capitalism whole, or anew, or otherwise refreshed by a better browser. Modernization theory, for example, the original challenge to Marxist assessments of the post-colonial landscape in the 1940s and 50s, was itself a species of vaguely vulgar Marxism that relied on economic determinism to assure policy-makers of a world to be made safe for capitalism (see: Walt Rostow, et al.).
The “new” historians of capitalism nonetheless insist that the theoretical problems and political possibilities that Marxists typically address or propose as they go about their business have become impediments to understanding when and why capitalism appeared, what it has wrought, and how (or whether) it might depart the world scene. As a result, our knowledge of merchants, markets, money, finance, trade, labor conditions, and general business practices has grown exponentially—Beckert himself roams the entire planet over the last thousand years in assembling his vast archive—but our understanding of capitalism has not improved, and may even have been impoverished, by the consequent flood of facts, figures, and barely filtered information. (Full disclosure: I’m a Marxist, more or less, who thinks that Jacques Derrida knew what he was talking about when he said that post-structuralism is “the radicalization of a certain tradition in Marxism.”)
This result seems incongruous if not impossible. How can the discovery of new archives and the correlative expansion of factual fields produce less working knowledge of the topic at hand? But a good answer lies close to hand: the effects of social media on political discourse in the 21st century would strongly suggest that, other things being equal, the mere increase of information is more likely to produce idiocy than to enhance understanding. That in turn suggests something more difficult to demonstrate, or to accept as a matter of course —that methodological protocols are in and themselves political principles, which produce actionable postures in the present and orientations to the future because they are attitudes toward history.
II
The “new” history of capitalism is a direct descendant of new approaches to the history of slavery in the western hemisphere. The characteristic gesture of both fields is the conflation, or equation, of capitalism and slavery, and it typically begins by dismissing or ignoring the work of the outspoken Marxist scholars Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese—among many other scholars, Marxist and not, who were baffled by the resilience of slavery in the New World—as misguided apologia for this moral atrocity. Here’s an example from the “Introduction” to Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016), a collection of essays edited by Beckert and Seth Rockman which functions as a prequel to the big new book:
“One distinguishing characteristic of the field [the “new” history of capitalism] has been its departure from Marxist theorizations that separate slavery and capitalism into antithetical modes of production. . . .Whereas an older scholarship saw capitalism and abolitionism as concurrent and mutually reinforcing, newer work highlights the material and ideological convergence of capitalism and slavery in the dynamic emergence of long-distance markets for financial securities, agricultural commodities, and labor power. . . . Pretenses of paternalism went hand in hand with practices of profit maximization and an unrivaled investment in the sanctity of private property rights, making it increasingly fruitless now to saddle slaveholders with labels like pre-, proto-, or quasi-capitalist.”
Sometimes the conflation of capitalism and slavery is accomplished by imperceptible rhetorical means, as in Walter Johnson’s brilliant River of Dark Dreams (2014), where the author imposes his assumption on readers by insinuation, simply by writing as if there is no difference between the 19th-century slaveholders who scrambled to pay their debts to cotton factors during the massive economic crisis of 1837-44 and the 21st century bankers who begged the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury to restore and maintain the system’s liquidity during the massive economic crisis of 2008-2016. The troubling beauty of Johnson’s prose makes a case of its own, on its own—the silences, the images, the metaphors, the sardonic asides, even the conjunctions convey explanatory meanings, and the temporal movement they enforce is always from the present to the past, as if he’s piloting a steamboat upstream against the dark current of the Mississippi River, as if our proper destination is the past, not the future. Time runs backward in this book, to the point where the crimes of contemporary capitalism become indistinguishable from the atrocities of antebellum slavery.
More often the conflation of capitalism and slavery is accomplished by empirical overload, with no more than passing mention of previous periodizations or “theorizations.” But again time runs backward, proving without saying so that William Faulkner must be right, the past is not even past: the abiding present now expands accordingly, turning historical questions into moral problems to be solved by syllogism in the appropriate tense, on the (unstated) assumption that any difference between past and present has already been erased. Here the method is scenic, almost cinematic, so it eventually produces the phenomenological density of documentary film by showcasing huge quantities of archival footage, and the emphasis is always on the monumental scale of whatever wanders into range of the camera’s eye, or, alternatively, on the unbearable intensity of the exactions required of those enslaved or employed.
The essays collected in Slavery’s Capitalism, and the sheer quantity of data presented in Edward Baptist’s gleefully incendiary book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014), operate according to this methodological protocol. It works, so long as you assume that insofar as a commercial enterprise animated by the pursuit of profit becomes both systematic and gigantic, it is by definition a capitalist venture. For example, once more from the “Introduction” to Slavery’s Capitalism: “Literally the nation’s first ‘big’ businesses, plantations managed large labor forces—how many northern factories had more than twenty workers?—through factory-like modes of regimentation, careful accounting practices, and the active pursuit of industrial machinery.”
III
Beckert’s new book is a brilliant hybrid of these approaches. It is beautifully written—it persuades without argument, as does all good literature, whether fictional or factual—and it is composed of countless scenes from every species of private enterprise, in every conceivable setting, from the mid-12th century to the present. The sensory overload induced by this combination is an intoxicating experience, something like getting drunk with an especially learned, loquacious, but astonishingly eloquent roommate who has just finished his dissertation, and is now eager to explain every step, even the formatting of the footnotes, that went into completing the thing.
It works, until you sober up and ask yourself, what was that about? At that point, you realize that what has erased your memory of the conceptual apparatus that organized your roommate’s dissertation research is not the alcohol you consumed but the staggering volume of historical data he cited in explaining his argument, in justifying his completion of the thing. You realize that the facts he adduced and displayed in last night’s session were so plentiful that they had gradually overwhelmed and finally obliterated that argument, so that you now want to return to the scene, retrace the steps he had recounted, and recover some semblance of coherence from what has become a blur.
That rueful, hungover condition certainly describes my experience of Capitalism: A Global History. But it begins promisingly enough, with a nimble Introduction announcing that a provisional definition and a corresponding periodization are essential to the project: “To see capitalism, we need to understand, first and foremost, that it is a distinct economic order with a unique logic,” a logic that boils down to a “dependence on our acquiring almost everything through markets, using money”; but to see it clearly, “we also need to place it in its proper time frame.”
Beckert insists that capitalism is neither natural, “a universal state of the world,” nor a sudden, inexplicable departure from the continuum of human existence that exploded on the scene around 1800 in the form of modern industry. Is it, then, what Marx, Polanyi, and Weber agreed it was, a social system that for the first in human history came to rely on abstract social labor—a proletariat working for wages paid in money—to produce most of the goods available for purchase in the market? These three disagreed on the timing and the etiology of this event, to be sure, but they converged on it as the defining feature of capitalism, and assumed it occurred at some point in what historians call the early modern period, roughly 1500-1800.
Beckert cites all three in the Introduction, but even as he invokes them, he departs from this consensus on a definition, and thus frees himself from any chronological boundaries—that is, from any need to periodize capitalism according to social relations of goods production. The “commodification” of labor can now mean anything, including chattel slavery, as long as those who own the products of labor treat those products as commodities that can be bought and sold in a market. The difference between a feudal lord collecting rent as payment in kind from a commoner with a copyhold lease on the nobleman’s land, an itinerant merchant buying finished products from an artisan’s household under a putting-out system, a slaveholder selling raw cotton planted, cultivated, and harvested by slave labor, and a capitalist buying twelve hours of an unskilled factory worker’s labor time is thereby abolished, along with any distinction between capitalism, feudalism, and slavery.
And so, “capitalism has been perfectly compatible with other forms of labor commodification, including, at key historical moments, slavery. What defines capitalism, therefore, is the commodification of labor across a spectrum of forms.” Beckert is careful to hedge this bet, by surrounding it with three other characteristics, namely (1) the ceaseless urge to accumulate not more goods but ever more extensive and effective claims on goods, which means that capitalism is inherently imperialist because it “never can be stationary”; (2) the establishment of powerful nation-states that can enforce such claims, which include, if necessary, the colonization and/or dispossession of peoples, indigenous and otherwise, whose way of life has hitherto precluded the commodification of their labor power and natural resources; and (3) the creation of social spaces that remain outside the scope of such claims: “capitalism rests on, and continually produces, spaces of non-accumulation” like the intimate space of the family.
As a result, capitalism becomes an ineffable, almost ghostly presence—“a process, not a thing or an event that can be precisely dated or located”—and yet a substantial, inexorable set of events: “there were no ‘capitalisms’ in the plural, only changing and varying articulations of one differentiated and hierarchical structure.” That unitary process, or structure, took shape as an archipelago, Beckert argues, a string of “island cities” dedicated to long-distance trade over the entire second millennium, “capitalism’s millennium,” roughly 1100 to the present. Tectonic shifts after 1870 reconstructed this geography, making continents out of island chains; but its inner articulation hasn’t much changed since the merchants of Aden, “the world’s earliest capitalists,” perfected their techniques right around 1150.
So much for periodization. Hereafter capitalism happens wherever and whenever on the planet merchants, a.k.a. capitalists bent on accumulation, have been clever, wealthy, and powerful enough to subordinate goods production to their needs, no matter how this production is organized, as long as it reproduces a surplus that merchants can buy cheap and sell dear. By that accounting, Sombart was right: capitalism knows no boundaries, whether temporal, geographical, social, or psychological: it just is.
IV
But for God’s sake, who cares? What is the point of pressing the question of periodization? So what if capitalism now defines the abiding present since time out of mind, because we have “placed” it before, during, and after the advent of modern market society? So what if we all agree that slave society in the antebellum South was already the epitome of financialized capitalism, and thus is to be understood as the origin of our own time and failings? The practitioners of the “new” history of capitalism believe they have created a profoundly usable past by erasing or ignoring any difference between then and now—between the 12th and the 21st centuries—or between the before and after of the American Civil War. Why not grant them their premises and accredit their purposes?
Because by eradicating the differences between the past and the present, they make the study of history pointless: there’s no future in it. An attitude toward history does not equip you with a readiness for the future as such, but for a future, for the actual empirical possibilities residing in the present as these were disclosed by the methodological protocols you adopted in approaching the past. If your attitude toward the history of capitalism inclines you to the view that it exists wherever and whenever you might find long-distance trade organized by merchants motivated by the somewhat disgusting morbidity of profit, why then the future for which you are prepared is more of the same—simply because there are very few moments in the history of humanity where this has not been the case.
To suggest, for example, that slaveholders were capitalists is to claim that there is no difference worth discussing between the status of the slave and the standing of the wage laborer—it is to claim that capitalists, now as then, at the North as well as the South, have legal rights to the very bodies of the people who work for them. That sounds absurd in view of the 13th and 14th Amendments, but it has been argued explicitly by reputable political philosophers (Elizabeth Anderson, David Ellerman, et al.), and it follows, at least logically, from the work of the scholars who gather under the banner of the “new” history of capitalism.
And that’s only the half of it. To make this claim, whether explicitly or implicitly, is to insult both the slaves who built America and the proletarians who believed in it—the people who fought slavery, escaped slavery, destroyed slavery, which is to say the abolitionists and anti-slavery radicals who risked their lives in the cause, the troops on the ground who sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they marched toward what they knew would be massacres, and the half-million participants in the General Strike of 1860-65 who didn’t know what the future would hold, only that as the constituents of the largest slave rebellion in recorded history, they were now its determinants. Freedom waited on their exertions, and they were acutely aware of this impending fact.
To suggest that slaveholders were capitalists is also, and accordingly, to claim that the Civil War could not have made much difference in the history of the American people—or, to put it more plainly, that it was an unnecessary and inexplicable diversion from the inexorable, exceptional development of capitalism in the United States. So conceived, the real issue in that epochal event was the Good Old Cause of states’ rights, not slavery, just as William A. Dunning, J. G. Randall, and dozens of other experts proved by their prodigious archival research. It was a tragedy, pure and simple, an unforced error on the part of statesmen who should have known better than to stand by and let the radicals and the firebrands seize control of the narrative.
To make that claim is, again, to insult both the slaves who built America and the proletarians who believed in its future, but only as its promise would be redeemed by their efforts.
The claim that capitalism exists wherever merchants, markets, commodities, and cupidity become salient features of a civilization might also insult our intelligence, as heirs to the many pasts that made us modern. For it is obvious that long before merchants in African, Arabian, and Indian cities of the second millennium had organized a long-distance trade in fabrics and foodstuffs, the people of the Hellenistic Mediterranean were familiar with large-scale, seafaring commerce, exotic commodities, and their attendants in markets, money, credit, debt, and, yes, accounting.
Come to think of it, you can find these “economic” dimensions of human civilization throughout recorded history—even if you don’t think David Graeber got it right—because, as Friedrich Nietzsche surmised in explaining the ancient origins of morality, thinking as we know it arose when equivalent values had to be constructed out of differences brought by strangers, by merchants from worlds elsewhere, and when money, the universal equivalent that functions as the most elastic metaphorical device ever invented, became useful on an everyday basis, in the Attica of the fifth century B.C.
V
In view of these last two declarations, you are no doubt wondering why I have taken issue with Werner Sombart and his intellectual descendants among the “new’ historians of capitalism, including Sven Beckert. You are no doubt wondering how I propose to distinguish between capitalist societies, on the one hand, and, on the other, pre– or post-capitalist societies in which merchants, markets, long-distance trade, commodities, money, debt, and accounting are nevertheless salient features—and why I think it’s worth doing so.
The why is the easy part. Unless we’re able to make this distinction, we can’t explain how capitalism has by now made a passage beyond its limitations both possible and necessary because we’ve assumed that, having been present at the creation of civilization, and having tightened its grip on every society since the second millennium, it’s here to stay, like it or not.
If capitalism boils down to markets, and we know that markets are indispensable devices in allocating (certain) goods efficiently, then we have no rational grounds for opposing capitalism per se, only reasons to dislike the moral depravity it enables at the extremities of private enterprise—as embodied, say, in the grotesque forms of Donald Trump’s avarice—and to recommend reform, regulation, and self-restraint as the only available cures for what ails us. We also have no reason to suggest that markets can serve the cause of socialism, or whatever we might call a post-capitalist civilization.
Moreover, unless we’re able to make this distinction, we can’t explain the anti-capitalist attitudes and actions of those who nonetheless accept, nay, embrace, private property, free (competitive) markets, hard work, and a money economy as given features of modern life—from the Levellers and the Puritans of the 17th century to the Knights of Labor and the Populists of the 19th century, and now on toward the substantial part of MAGA Nation that hates “woke” capitalism as peddled by large corporations. Not to mention the slaveholders of antebellum America, whose “unrivaled investment in the sanctity of private property rights” forced them to wage war against those who, like Abraham Lincoln, insisted that if all men are created equal, then there can be no moral right in making one man a slave of another, and accordingly that they had no right to do what is wrong.
But how can you be both invested in the sanctity of private property, free (competitive) markets, etc., and up against the capitalists? How is that even possible?
Consider the individual who is capable of self-government, as posited by republican theory and practice since Solon took Hesiod’s side in argument with Aristotle—then as reinterpreted in the early modern moment of “civic humanism”—and as it is now covertly endorsed by the “new” history of capitalism. This is the same figure celebrated by the anti-liberal political theories of the radical Right, for example in the work of Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Helen Andrews, and others associated with Compact, the magazine.
Of what does that individual consist, or rather, what does the ideal type exclude? To begin with, he—this figure invariably appears coded as masculine if not biologically male—is not dependent on a master, a lord, or an employer for the means of his subsistence: he is not a slave, nor a serf, nor a proletarian. In the terms on offer from the Frankfurt School as translated by David Riesman and Christopher Lasch, he is not an “other-directed individual” because, as Max Horkheimer explained the matter in Eclipse of Reason (1947), his individuality still has an “economic basis.”
If this person engages in necessary labor, he works for himself, on his own account, as “his own boss,” meaning that he never relinquishes control over his time, and thus his will, to another. This individual is independent of others, a self-made man in the sense that he owns enough property to sustain himself and his family. Indeed he is the quintessential “family man” because he is a patriarch whose moral obligation is to supervise the allocation of both the labor and the sexuality of his wife and his offspring.
This individual is self-determining because he is independent of others, but he is not a stoic, isolate killer, along the genealogical lines of Natty Bumppo. The social groundwork of his identity is a household economy, wherein the basic unit of goods production is the family—not the nuclear family devoid of any economic function apart from consumption of goods, but the “extended” family remembered as the oikos of antiquity, which included slaves and servants, then the small farm or artisanal workshop of early modern Europe whose work force included apprentices as well as family members. Notice the temporal span of the household economy: it’s as close to a trans-historical social structure as you will find in the annals of civilization.
From antiquity to the present, this economy typically consisted of small producers who participated in markets, but commerce was a matter of transactions between households, not individuals; any long-distance trade was the business of merchants who bought finished products from households on market days, or through a putting-out system. The production of goods presupposed a certain level of consumption because the goal was reproducing the economic autonomy and moral integrity of the household, not selling more and more goods at a profit: the regulative principle of economic behavior was therefore “safety first,” not “take risk, buy cheap, sell dear.” Surpluses were “saved” or reinvested rather than sold, or sold only when provision for the next season or round of production had been made.
Understood in these terms, Sven Beckert has written a history not of capitalism, but of merchant capital’s ceaseless attempts to colonize household economies as they slowly emerged from the remnants of the Roman Empire in the second millennium of the common era, and then came of age in the early modern period we have come to know as the Machiavellian Moment.
In any event, a household economy was exported from Western Europe to North America in the 17th century, and, as understood by the revolutionaries who created the United States in the late-18th century, it was the social-economic foundation of equality, thus of popular government. As such, its instantiation or restoration was the goal of social movements in the 1740s and 50s (the Great Awakening), in the 1840s and 50s (anti-slavery), then again in the 1880s and 90s (the Knights of Labor, the Populists). From the standpoint of its partisans, and now from the standpoint afforded by the “new” history of capitalism, self-determination meant self-employment, and wage labor signified a state of servility if not enslavement.
This household economy was the infrastructure of simple market society, as per C. B. Macpherson’s specification, a society in which there were thriving markets in goods, but, generally speaking, not in labor. A better way to put it, I think, is to say that a society grounded in and by a household economy is a society with markets, but not (yet) a market society. So conceived, it is not yet a capitalist society, because goods production is not (yet) organized and dominated by the social relation of capital to wage labor. Maurice Dobb called it petty commodity production, following Marx, who designated it as simple commodity circulation and furnished an explanatory formula: C-M-C, where C = commodity and M = money.
My name for the social complex built on the foundation of a household economy—petty commodity production, in Dobb’s terms—is bourgeois society. I would summarize the difference between it and capitalism as follows. In bourgeois society the ownership and allocation of property is the means to the end of producing a certain social type, the self-mastering individual who is the head of household. Under capitalism, that relation is inverted. The ownership and allocation of more property—the infinite accumulation of more claims on resources, wealth in the abstract—becomes the goal, and the means to that end now appears as those individuals whose labor power can be bought in the market (who are collectively known as the proletariat). To put it in the abbreviated alphabet Marx proposed: when the formula for capital, M-C-M^, supersedes, reorganizes, and dominates the formula of simple commodity circulation, C-M-C, bourgeois society has given way to capitalism.
VI
So conceived, capitalism emerged when “the repudiation of work no longer earned the reputation of sanctity,” as G. W. F. Hegel defined the “modern time.” This would be about the same time, according to Weber, that the Protestant Ethic rendered “the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume,” producing a new personality type accustomed to the rigors of anal-compulsive calculation in a market society, ca. 1500-1700. As both Marx and Polanyi insisted, capitalism matured thereafter insofar as labor power, not merely the products of labor, became a commodity, and, as a result, the predominant means by which the producers of goods secured an income was wage labor paid in money, ca. 1700-1900. So it took a trans-Atlantic industrial revolution to empty households of their economic functions and to complete the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Marx’s most succinct definition of capitalism followed from these basic insights:
“The capitalist epoch is therefore characterized by this, that labour power takes in the eyes of the labourer himself the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently becomes wage labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that the produce of labour universally becomes a commodity.”
This quite modern moment was, according to Marx, the culmination of the historic process—the process, broadly defined, of enclosure—which had robbed peasants of their access to the commons and forced them into the dispossessed condition of wage labor, where, as proletarians, they had to buy the right not to die:
“It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital. In the relations of slavery and serfdom this separation does not take place; rather, one part of society is treated by the other as merely an inorganic and natural condition of its own reproduction.” [my italics]
But the very same process created the convincing material conditions of belief in the idea that all men were created equal; to the same extent, it grounded a labor theory of value; for “to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality.” Hence:
“The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities.” [my italics]
All roads led, therefore, to Europe’s frontier in America, where the future waited:
“The fact that the particular kind of labour employed is immaterial is appropriate to a form of society in which individuals easily pass from one type of labour to another, the particular type of labour being accidental to them and therefore irrelevant. Labour, not only as a category but in reality, has become a means to create wealth in general, and has ceased to be tied as an attribute to a particular individual. This state of affairs is most pronounced in the United States . . . . The abstract category ‘labour,’ ‘labour as such,’ labour sans phrase, the point of departure of modern economics, thus becomes a practical fact only there.”
As these passages might suggest, capitalism was always parasitic on bourgeois society in the sense that it couldn’t have developed, and did not develop, absent the work ethic which Weber correlated with the Reformation—but which also characterized the medieval peasant cultures Rodney Hilton studied, and which had, long before, galvanized the small holders portrayed by Hesiod and Solon as the backbone of Athenian democracy. Like most parasites, with the possible exception of homo sapiens, it can’t kill off the host without sentencing itself to death.
That is why bourgeois society has never been obliterated by capitalism. It survives in the social groundwork of “small business”—where you will find the start-up, the self-made man, the entrepreneur, the garage band, the family farmer, and of course the corner store run by Mom & Pop—and it thrives as an ideological imperative in the image of the rights-bearing individual who is free of any encumbrance except adherence to the bourgeois virtues, foremost among them the compulsion to work and its corollary, a willingness to defer gratification.
This “inner-directed individual” of bourgeois descent is the unicorn darling of both Left and Right. On the Left, the family farmer, the starving artist, the pointy-headed professor, and the small businessman are conceived as bulwarks against the encroachments of corporate capital, which, as amplified by consumer culture (commercial, then social media), turn commodity fetishism into commons sense. On the Right, the “man of the house” is the patriarch who protects his wife and children against the unwarranted demands of the state, on the one hand, and the lewd blandishments of the market, on the other, thereby preserving a presumably non-coercive, non-commercial space wherein “family values” can be articulated and enacted.
The fundamental cultural contradiction of capitalism resides in the conflict between its validation of feckless hedonism—as fed by the commodification or “monetization” of every dimension of everyday life—and the residual bourgeois virtues personified by the “inner-directed individual” of bourgeois descent to whom both the Left and the Right look for deliverance from evil. On this every informed observer of the moral catastrophe that is the 21st century agrees. But its origins lie deep within the history of capitalism.
VII
To illustrate this claim, I would cite three moments in this history, the third of which is as contemporary as Donald Trump’s latest post at Truth Social. The first was the revolt of the artisans against factory discipline that animated, punctuated, and ultimately defined the making of the English, the European, and the American working classes, ca. 1780-1880, as their stories have been told by E. P. Thompson, Joan Scott, Herbert Gutman, and countless other labor historians. The Luddites were only the most obstreperous and outspoken of the artisans who refused the new role of machine herds.
The second was the Slave Power’s armed rebellion against the threat of “free labor, free soil, free men,” ca, 1850s-1870s. By their own accounting, the slaveholders were determined to preserve a labor system that treated the producers of goods as members of patriarchal households—a system that collapsed any distinction between the will of the master and the volitions of his “familial” dependents by claiming the entirety of their time, which is to say their bodies, their selves. The masters almost won their war on behalf of slavery.
The populist revolt in the US of the 1880s and 90s was an aftershock of this earthquake, this War for Southern Independence, to the extent that it reasserted the claims of the piedmont farmers of the South, the small holders who had aligned themselves with the slaveholders in the name of a household economy—and its attendant, bourgeois society—at mid-19th century. That historians of the US remain in thrall to the democratic promise of the “populist moment,” construed as the last stand of the “inner-directed individual” against corporate capitalism, demonstrates their devotion to the bourgeois virtues, and, by the same token, it marks the outer limits of their anti-capitalist politics, such as they are.
These scholars are constituents of the third moment in the relevant history of the 20th and 21st centuries, which is the politically ambidextrous revolt against corporate (or monopoly) capitalism. It registers most consequentially in the repudiation of modern, corporate liberalism, most often as cultural phenomena and intellectual tendencies, but sometimes as more or less “populist” political movements.
On the Right, this gesture has occasionally taken the extreme form of fascism, not least in our own time, but more frequently it has appeared as a post- or anti-liberal intellectual infatuation with classical republican theory and practice, a tendency epitomized by Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), and now routinized in the renaissance of Straussian political philosophy exemplified by Patrick Deneen. On the Left, the repudiation of modern, corporate liberalism typically appears in the form of “cultural Marxism” of the kind sponsored by the Frankfurt School, which dwells on the “reification” of social relations that resides in the commodification of mental labor, that is, in the prostitution of the talents of the man of letters by the culture industry, as this lamentable event was depicted in the founding document of 1923, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” by Max Weber’s student, Gyorgy Lukacs.
But notice how ambivalent the politics of these positions can be. Steve Bannon’s right-wing rants against Elon Musk, Silicon Valley, and the “tecno-feudalism” they represent are deeply informed by his appropriation of Christopher Lasch, a writer on the Left who, as previously noted, translated the findings of the Frankfurt School into a recognizable American idiom, in both The Culture of Narcissism (1979) and The True and Only Heaven (1994). Meanwhile, Bruno Leopold’s rendition of Marxism as a branch on the family tree of republican theory and practice, in Citizen Marx (2025), has become a sensation on the Left. And let us not forget either that “The Port Huron Statement” (1962), the intellectual inaugural of the New Left, borrowed heavily from the classical republican tradition, or that Michel Foucault concluded his career by returning to this very tradition in The Uses of Pleasure (1984), where he conducted a search for the sources of a self both bound and freed by political obligation to his fellow citizens.
By this accounting, the “spaces of non-accumulation” created in and by the history of capitalism as told by Sven Beckert are iterations of bourgeois society as these were raised on the real or imagined foundation of household economies. Until the late-18th century, these households were the principal site of goods production the world over, always preyed upon by merchant capital but never emptied of their productive capacities. Thereafter, they would be turned inside out, as industrial capital completed the dispossession of producers by bending merchant capital to its will, thus removing the scene of goods production and distribution from households to the factories, schools, offices, and department stores where the descendants of small holders learned their place, and earned their keep, as proletarians.
Beckert tells the epic story of merchant capital’s predatory methods over ten centuries, and he tells it with great skill, learning, even eloquence; but he has mistaken it for a history of capitalism. In doing so, he has rehabilitated Werner Sombart’s periodization of capitalism, and thus lent credence to the preposterous and politically paralyzing idea that its spirit—not the specter of communism summoned by Karl Marx—will forever haunt us.
