What is it about?
How to identify the existence of capitalism and explaining its change over the decades as well as being clear on the limits of its changeability is a crucial task. This book explores major attempts to identify capitalism through setting out a "constant" of it, and how on the basis of that its changeability is understood. It reviews all the major approaches to these questions beginning with Karl Marx's definition, proceeding through the early theories of capitalist change of the imperialist era, examining the numerous approaches to capitalist change of the post world war 2 era and culminating in debates over capitalist change in the periods euphemized as neoliberalism and globalization. Remember, orthodox or neoclassical economics studies capitalism on the basis of its pure or abstract theory of the "market" and then attempts to use this theory to explain events or states of the world irrespective of the Mariana Trench gap between their mathematical market and really existing capitalism over the decades. In fact, orthodox economics does not even use the term capitalism to identify modern economic history. What readers will see is that while early Marxist approaches fixated on some key force of capitalism which purportedly compels capitalist change toward socialism, Marxists working in France, the US and Japan simultaneously in the aftermath of world war 2 developed more sophisticated analysis which introduced a mediating level of theory that helped bridge the gap between abstract understanding of the basic logic of capitalism and its complex humming and buzzing history.
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Why is it important?
This book is important because while debates continue to rage in academic circles over when capitalism comes into being in the transition from feudalism in Europe, there is largely blithe acceptance of the continuing existence of capitalism notwithstanding a plethora of factors which suggest that capitalism is in a state of severe decomposition leaving not socialism but barbarism of some new form as the historical outcome. Put differently, capital and capitalists may persist well beyond the existence of capitalism and the obscene travails of the current world follow from this.
Perspectives
My view is that capitalism is a particular kind of society and like all historical societies must satisfy some key "norms" to survive as a human society. Put differently, while the historical goal of capitalism has always been augmenting abstract mercantile wealth or profit making, at least as a byproduct, it must meet the basic norms of material reproduction to exist as a human society. The key norms are, as Marx set these out, that the direct producers must receive the product of their necessary labor, and that allocation of social resources, primarily the allocation of human labor, must ensure that supply of basic goods meets social demand without chronic waste. While capitalism manged this feat from roughly the mid 19th century, drawing upon the state for support in the mid 20th century, today in the era of neoliberalism and globalization it can no longer meet the general norms of human economic life and this is why, despite the persistence of capital and capitalists, capitalism as an historical society is putrefying yet with no viable replacement for a livable human future on the horizon. Neoliberal ideology is particularly insidious in that it claims the world economy is being returned to some kind of pure liberal market order and that asymmetric wealth outcomes, environmental despoiling, human alienation and so forth are simply the result of market forces. Yet this is nonsense on stilts...Financial "markets", repos, shadow banking, commanding heights production corporate operations, energy corporations activities are ALL largely managed, subsidized and commandeered by governments to degrees the welfare state never reached. Without such supports and subsidies modern economies would simply collapse..."The market" and "bourgeois freedom" are enduring historical tropes but like Don Quixote's knights errant dream they have long been outpaced by history...
Dr Richard Westra
University of Macau
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Periodizing Capitalism and Capitalist Extinction, January 2019, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-14390-9.
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