Another in a series of examples of facts lying around deliberately unseen...
Capitalism is often presented, even by anti-capitalists, as the system of production and distribution whose perfection was forged by centuries of progress, whose emergence across Europe from the cocoon of the pre-capitalist marketplace was a pinnacle of human discovery-- in a time of decreasing evidence of heavenly insinuation into daily human affairs, an advanced and worthy object of devotion*-- made possible by advances in human knowledge and technology that unfettered capitalism from the mere potentiality inherent in the market.
The story that Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism tells, based as it is on a study of the facts is quite different and to my mind, far more plausible. While the market always existed, it was historically used primarily for luxuries, for trade of resources originating in one part of the world for resources plentiful in another, and for artisanal goods and crafts. The explosion of mercantilism in the 17th century that brought wealth and maritime adventurism to the Netherlands was not and did not engender capitalism according to Wood. Instead, capitalism had its origins in agriculture in England.
The twin engines of this innovation were the two innocuous sounding concepts of enclosure and improvement. Under feudalism, peasants lived on and worked the land for themselves. Annually they were taxed a portion of their yield to the king or local lord for the privilege of keeping their kneecaps intact. By the sixteenth century, this had changed as the practice of enclosure in which -- under the auspices of government and with the aid of government forces-- common lands were sealed off from the peasants who had worked them as a concept of property ownership caught vogue among the idle upper classes. Now, the right to work and live off of arable land had to be leased from a landlord, forcing all but the most successful farmers into homeless vagrancy. In order to remain viable as tenants of the land, farmers engaged in a process of "improvement"-- literally devising ways to increase the profitability of the land through greater yields with less labor. This drove the search for better technology, and for the first time markets for the sale of factory farm-produced crops and meat.
The peasantry that was driven from the common lands, now homeless and impoverished was forced into cities where they were now required to sell their labor in return for meager sustenance (procured now exclusively from the marketplace) and cramped shelter in vast tenements. The production of food needed to live was thereby taken from the masses and given to a class of agrarian capitalist. The locus for the procurement of food was now transferred from one's own garden to the marketplace, which became also the primary seller of all household goods, such as pottery and clothing, now manufactured in the largely urban enterprises that hired the landless masses.
The transition from feudalism to capitalism gave England an edge in the international trade of goods that had to be maintained by transplanting the agrarian revolution to Ireland and other overseas colonies; moreover it raised the stakes on the continent to follow England's lead with varying degrees of difficulty and success. In time, the capitalist forces and relations of production, circulation and reproduction were everywhere. The priorities of the owning and political classes became centered the world over on profit, and capital "improvement". As Wood notes at the conclusion of her history,
Then there are the corollaries of ‘improvement’: productivity and the ability to feed a vast population set against the subordination of all other considerations to the imperatives of profit. This means, among other things, that people who could be fed are often left to starve. There is, in general, a great disparity between the productive capacities of capitalism and the quality of life it delivers. The ethic of ‘improvement’ in its original sense, in which production is inseparable from profit, is also the ethic of exploitation, poverty, and homelessness.
Capitalists have claimed the Enlightenment for capitalism, but Wood, without going into a lot of detail puts this notion to bed, saying that although capitalist England contributed to the enlightenment (via Newton, Bacon and Locke in particular) it was basically a product of the non-capitalist continent, which is why its most salient values-- individual freedom and rationality-- have little to do with business and more to do with human progress. In fact, the consequences and prerequisites of capitalism-- inequality, growth for growth’s sake, poverty and homelessness-- are antithetical to enlightenment values. The whole book is basically a reminder that capitalism is just a societal organization that originated as an accommodation to the particular circumstances of an insular European province, that then trended-- not the apotheosis of human history. The trick for all of us (and it’s a tough one unfortunately) is extracting the world from the organization that capitalism requires.
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