taking.’
2
Even in the face of the obvious failures of the current phase of finance-dominated capitalism, the political class seems to have no ability (or even willingness) to regulate the destructive behavior of those wielding economic power – let alone the imagination to conceive of an alternative to capitalism. Reform of regulatory agencies such as the US Federal Reserve or the Bank of Settlements in Switzerland has largely left them toothless or subject to bad conflicts of interest. The market conditions that allowed the collapse of 2008 to occur remain a Sword of Damocles hanging over the global economy.
Historical roots
There was a time when capitalism was seen as simply one of a number of competing philosophies of political economy. It grew up in opposition to the traditionalist conservatism of big feudal landowners. It was associated from its inception with a politics that embraced the negative freedoms of non-interference with individual enterprise and conscience. Its proponents were quite skeptical of the more positive freedoms associated with a wider democracy. They feared (not without reason) that a broader majoritarian self-rule would endanger the rights to the enjoyment of property of those who by ‘dint of their own efforts’ had been successful in obtaining it. For theorists such as John Locke, who influenced the English Revolution, or many of the Founding Fathers who shaped the limits of the American Revolution, there was a profound distrust of mob rule. By this they meant that those without property (and perhaps even slaves) might come together to assert their interests and rights. The vision of the most radical of these theorists of the revolutions that cleared the way for capitalism to flourish was that of ‘a republic of smallholders’. Men like Thomas Jefferson of Virginia or Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France might well have been horrified by the way in which today’s one-per-cent corporate super-rich and their acolytes dominate economic and political decision-making. Their vision was a distinctly rural one of a sturdy and independent yeomanry and craftspeople that would form the backbone of a healthy society. Nonetheless, their emphasis on market freedom and the unrestricted right to accumulate property and riches helped to pave the way for the current pre-eminence of wealth and power. The smallholder (although still around) proved far too vulnerable to the market forces that concentrated resources in the hands of a few. A very few smallholders became successful entrepreneurs while the great majority were forced into a precarious position at the edge of the capitalist economy.
There were, of course, those who railed against the limitations of the capitalist revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries with their narrow notions of freedom. Most famous, perhaps, were the Levellers during the English Civil War, who foresaw the inequalities of wealth and power that were to plague capitalism throughout the coming centuries. They were given short shrift by Oliver Cromwell, who first argued with and then executed them. In the 13 colonies, Thomas Paine found the American Revolution lacking in democratic substance. The radical priest Jacques Roux and his Enragés championed the economic rights of the poor during the French Revolution, demanding an end to private property and a classless society. Roux so alarmed Robespierre and the Jacobins that they brought trumped-up charges against him and caused him to commit suicide in his jail cell in 1794. There has always been a sense among its critics that capitalism has never really delivered on its promise of a thoroughgoing political democracy, a persistent sense that inequality and the rule of property consistently work to undermine the self-rule of the majority.
One of the features of capitalism that has enabled it to survive is its ability both to create and to take advantage of economic crises. This phenomenon was investigated and systematized by the political economist Joseph Schumpeter, who referred to it as a tendency for ‘creative destruction’. Schumpeter saw this underlying attribute as a kind of positive resilience that keeps capitalism from collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. For centuries, its opponents have looked to such crises as a source of hope, believing that the beast had finally overstepped the mark and could be brought to ground. These booms and busts are not new but have supplied the rhythm of the deployment of capital from the 16th century onwards, destabilizing people’s lives through the enclosure of the commons, the expansion of empires, and the shift of industry from less profitable to more profitable regions. This destabilizing effect has always been a major source of the dissatisfaction with capitalism. It has inspired people to search for alternatives that provide a more balanced and stable form of existence, where they can count on regular access to the fundamentals of their survival – food and shelter, peace and community. Capitalism constantly puts these things at risk in its restless search for new avenues of profitable growth. Oddly, this has aroused dissatisfaction from both conservative and radical sources: conservative, in the sense that people struggle to preserve whatever well-being they have managed to achieve but find it constantly threatened; radical, in the sense that the search for security calls forth the need to imagine and fight for a new order of things in which people control capital rather than the other way around.
Those who, for moral, economic or political reasons, are opposed to the insecurity, inequality and egoism that seem inevitable consequences of the capitalist way of operating do, however, face a significant uphill challenge. Not only has capitalism shown great resilience in overcoming the periodic crises it has faced but it has also even been embraced by its onetime ideological opponents: state socialism in China and the countries of the former Soviet bloc. These societies have now embraced the market as the most effective economic driver of future development. Today, most of the public economies of such countries have come under the sway of private capital – much of it foreign. China, in particular, has become ‘the workshop of the world’, with its labor force working under extremely exploitative conditions within a political system that still proclaims itself communist. Here, opportunities for resistance by workers are much more limited than they were in the early days of industrialization in the Western world. With few exceptions, trade unions are imposed from above and work with management to help discipline the workforce. Any worker resistance is met with staunch measures by police or private security forces. While some local worker complaints are allowed if sent through official channels, overall co-ordination of worker resistance, direct action or critiques of ‘communist’ capitalism that joins up all the analytic dots are all vigorously suppressed. Yet these dissenting activities still go on. ‘Mass incidents’ of labor unrest in China rose from 70,000 in 2004 to 180,000 in 2010 with virtually every economic sector affected.3 This has led some to identify contemporary China as ‘the epicenter of global labor unrest’.4 It is certainly one of the ironies of the modern world that what remains of this failed experiment in communism is being used to undermine the struggles of workers for a better life.
Primitive accumulation
One reading of economic history restricts the idea of ‘primitive accumulation’ to the early stages of capitalist development. This refers, for example, to the enclosures that established private property and forced rural people into the satanic mills in early industrial England, and to the high-seas privateering (piracy, really) that contributed to capital formation and helped to establish the Canadian banking industry. According to this view, the features of primitive accumulation that included brutal working conditions, slavery and child labor are identified with a bad old capitalism that has long since passed. Today, it is claimed, we have a sophisticated corporate version, a regulated and civilized capitalism that eschews bad behavior and operates in the interests of society as a whole. But while features such as child labor and piracy may have been modified – or at least displaced to countries such as Bangladesh and Somalia – new forms of primitive accumulation have taken their place. These stretch from the speculative derivatives market to privatizing the water we drink and the spaces we inhabit. The very notion of a public sphere has come into question, with the restless search for profit rendering the notion of public services and places an anachronism. A destabilizing market rationality is now in the process of penetrating every corner of our lives.
The features may have changed but the fundamentals of a recurrent primitive accumulation are still very much with us. As previously noted, capitalism still depends on the constant ‘creative destruction’ identified by Schumpeter during the Second World War when he wrote his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
