Naming the System

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

NAMING THE SYSTEM

You might be surprised to learn that Marx, whose name will be forever attached to the word capitalism, never used it in any of his voluminous writings, published and unpublished, on political economy. But this is easy to explain: the word capitalism was not introduced until the middle of the 19th century and did not begin to circulate widely on the political left until after Marx's death. As you can see in the photo above, it continues to circulate in Florence, adding another voice to the street art that decorates that beautiful city and urban space generally, wherever you go.

If the word capitalism was not available to political economists of the 18th and 19th centuries, what did they call the new economic system that by their own account was turning the world upside down? In his 1763 Lectures on Jurisprudence, Adam Smith contended that history fell into four "ages," each of which corresponded to a predetermined stage of development. All societies were obligated to pass through these stages on their way to the promised land of civility, civilization and material abundance. In chronological order, Smith enumerated the age of hunters, the age of shepherds, the age of agriculture and the age of commerce. He designated "commercial society" as humanity's crowning achievement, the highest form of social organization ever devised.

In The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, Marx and his fellow revolutionary Frederick Engels likewise marveled at the technological and material achievements made possible by the new economic system. But they refused to gloss over the violence, oppression and upheaval that were the flip side of Smith's narrative of enlightened progress. "The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles," they famously proclaimed.

Writing at a moment when such struggles had suddenly taken a revolutionary turn in Europe, Marx and Engels set out to unmask the contradictory social relations that were exploding along the street barricades of Paris but were notable by their absence in Smith's story of human advancement. By redesignating "commercial society" as "modern bourgeois society" they made clear how closely the new economic system was tied to the rise of a new ruling class bent on conquering the world.

In Marx and Engels's revolutionary call to arms, Smith's assumption that progress was an unqualified blessing for all took quite a beating.

Unsurprisingly, Marx ran afoul of the authorities. During the next nineteen years of political exile in London, he undertook a herculean inquiry into the economic system on which modern bourgeois society and its ruling class were based. He conceived of this system as a historically-specific "mode of production" in which the material forces and social relations of production fused in a contradictory unity. Like all previous modes of production such as feudalism, Marx contended, this one operated according to its own "laws of motion."

Marx named this mode of production and its laws of motion capital.

This is a good place to stop and ask what is the difference, in Marx's view, between capital and modern bourgeois society, and how do both of these relate to what nowadays we call capitalism?

"What Marx subjects to analysis," Harvey explains, "is the totality of capital within the much broader totality of capitalism. His reason for so doing is that he sees capital as the economic engine, the foundational power-house, the source of the abstract forces to which all of us are willy-nilly obligated and bound to some degree."

You'll spare yourself a lot of headaches if you keep in mind Harvey's distinction between capital as a specific mode of production and capitalism as the more expansive social formation in which the mode of production is situated.

Marx never intended his theory of capital to be a theory of everything. It was not, for example, a theory of modern bourgeois society. For the most part Marx chose to ignore matters that go to the heart of capitalism as a social formation, such as social reproduction, culture, literature, consumption, everyday life, religion, the state, civil society and identity formation. He pushed these things to the side not because he thought them unworthy of analysis, but in order to focus his full attention on the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production, which, as he stated in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "can be determined with the precision of natural science."

It is true that Marx saw a close connection between the mode of production and the social formation. And it is also true that in the Preface and elsewhere, he seems at times to prioritize the mode of production and the forces of production over everything else. But when Marx's writings are read through his concept of totality, which posits capital and capitalism as dynamic wholes made up of co-evolving and overdetermined processes, I think it is fair to say that Marx saw the social formation as relatively autonomous vis-à-vis the mode of production, to borrow a term from Louis Althusser, a leading Marxist intellectual of the 1960s.

Don't be taken in by those who would have you believe that Marx was a crass economic determinist and a technological reductionist. While he never wavered in his commitment to historical materialism, Marx understood that capitalism did not lend itself to the kind of "scientific" analysis that was suitable for capital.

The study of capitalism called for the narrative skills of a historian, the nose-to-the-ground doggedness of a journalist, the imaginative powers of a novelist and the expressive brush strokes of a painter—in short, the sensitivities of an observer open to the contingencies of everyday life. Marx was fully capable of undertaking this kind of analysis, as is attested by The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), a rip-roaring classic of Marxist historiography on par with Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution, E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and Harvey's Paris: Capital of Modernity.

If Marx had decided to spend his adult life analyzing capitalism rather than capital, we might remember him today as the author of Modern Bourgeois Society. But every author must choose which books to write and which to put on the bucket list. Marx made Capital his life's work, even though it meant postponing, permanently as it turned out, a projected series of books that would have dealt directly with many topics that fall on the capitalism side of the divide, including a literary study of novelist Honoré Balzac whose fictional works he admired for their warts-and-all depiction of the spectacles and seductions of modern bourgeois society.

For what it's worth, my view is that Marx made the right choice in putting capital before capitalism. However much he left undone and however much we might regret not being able to read Modern Bourgeois Society or his book on Balzac, no one before or since has written more or more insightfully about capital as an economic system, a mode of production.

What, then, is this mode of production? What are its laws of motion? The long answer will be found in the 2,600 pages of Capital, to which we should probably add the 900-page Grundrisse, Marx's unpublished preparatory notes written in 1857-58. But if you're looking for a sentence or two rather than a life sentence, consider the following definition:

Capital is a self-reproducing totality of co-dependent processes through which value is produced, realized, exchanged, distributed, circulated, consumed and reinvested so that there is more value at the end of the day than there was at the start.

If this exceeds your word count, try Harvey's three-word definition: capital is value in motion.

I can almost hear you asking, "OK, but what is value?"

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist

NAMING THE SYSTEM

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Essays by a Marxist Tourist