by DOMINIC ALEXANDER
This enormous history of capitalism provides much fascinating detail, but its flawed conceptualisation of the system’s history undermines it, argues Dominic Alexander
This is a monumental book for a monumental subject. Beckert’s history takes us from even before capitalism can be said to have existed with ‘islands’ or ‘nodes’, as he terms them, through its burgeoning as a world system, to the Industrial Revolution and its ensuing crises, all the way to the crisis of the present day. Beckert offers a series of important interpretations of capitalism’s patterns and dynamics, but notes at the outset that he rejects the idea that capitalism has ‘laws’ as either Adam Smith or Marx conceived them (p.22). Acknowledging the differences between the two, he nonetheless detects a commonality: where Smith naturalised the commodity, Marx’s critique of the commodity meant that ‘he naturalised class conflict’. These two positions are not actually the mirror image that Beckert presents them to be, but as far as explicit engagement with Marx’s system goes, this is all that’s offered.
It is not that Beckert eschews advancing a theory of capitalism in favour of an empirical agglomerations of data, but the analysis does threaten to sink beneath the weight of description at points along the way. Theoretical inspiration comes from the Austro-Hungarian reformist socialist Karl Polanyi’s critique of orthodox liberal economics, which can be both useful and limiting. Beckert begins with the observation, drawn from Polanyi, that the history of capitalism has seen us ‘move from a society in which markets were embedded in social relations to one in which social relations are embedded in markets’ (p.3).
Beckert correctly notes that markets are not themselves capitalism, long predating its emergence as a total system, or mode of production in Marxist terms, but he does perceive there to be an inherent, and autonomous logic to markets as such, thus making them ‘seeds’ of capitalism. This is a problem, because while on the surface, it sounds like common sense, the equation in fact accepts the assumptions that bourgeois economics makes about ‘markets’. Viewing ‘markets’ as a singular phenomenon with their own rules separate from the social relations which create them effectively de-historicises them. This means that while Beckert rightly insists that capitalism has to be viewed as a totality and a world system (p.12), the sense of it emerging from the contradictions of pre-capitalist society tends to be subsumed beneath the metaphor of ‘islands’ of mercantile capital inserting themselves into, and reshaping, societies.
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