I welcome the optimism the phrase “late capitalism” carries. It’s probably not very rigorous theoretically, but I think academics should be able to forgive the public for being less than rigorous here given our own collective lack of rigor on the subject. We’re still debating when and where capitalism arose, we have a number of competing definitions, and not infrequently we ignore those definitions anyway. In this two part series I’m going to avoid doing all of that and try to divide capitalism into a series of distinct phases. If we want to talk about late capitalism we need to think about early and middle capitalism. 

These are very early thoughts, but hey, that’s what blogs and newsletters are for. Some of the concepts will be repetitive for very frequent and longtime readers, but they’re necessary for completeness.

First, a definition. A former mentor of mine had the productive and infuriating habit of asking definition questions– sometimes at the beginning of a seminar, sometimes as a response to students using those words. I’ve adopted this habit myself and find it productive. I think you should too. Nowhere is this questioning more important than with big, grand analytic terms like capitalism. 

For my purposes, capitalism means market dependence, after the work of political Marxist Ellen Meiksins Wood. I don’t agree with everything about Wood’s historical argument on early capitalism, but as you might expect from a political theorist, her analysis of the formal structure of capitalism is clear, useful, and in my view accurate. By market dependence I mean that capitalism is the system where most and the most critical economic inputs are obtained primarily through market exchange: elites mostly get work done by purchasing workers’ labor power rather than ordering them around as serfs or corvee labor, ordinary people mostly get food by buying it on the market rather than primarily growing it for yourself, etc.

This is one of the broader available definitions, which means under this scheme capitalism appears in more places and contexts than it might under others– as you’ll see in a moment I think slavery is not only an economic contributor to the development of capitalism but formally very, very capitalist, which was once a controversial idea– but it’s also specific enough to be useful. Capitalism is not just buying and selling stuff, but it’s more than industrial or post-industrial wage labor. All of this is to say I think market dependence is a useful definition, which is what matters, because the whole point of these terms is to help analysis and not to be eternally true in some Platonic sense.

With that out of the way let’s dive in. There are, I think, five eras of capitalism. 

One- Capitalishm

In Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, which takes place in 1327, there’s an episode where one character explains to another that in urban Italy, money is beginning to take on a life of its own: you need it for everything. Urban Italians were entering a world of money rather than discrete things. The point isn’t that money itself was new, but that it was taking on a new role as a constant mediator of economic relations generally rather than only the previously-limited sphere of economic activity that occurred in the market. 

The urbanizing Mediterranean world is one of the first places you can credibly find capitalism. I think you can find capitalists- people who are individually market dependent and make money with their money- well before this, and even isolated communities of market dependence- for example, towns in the Indian subcontinent clearly heavily dependent upon trade with Rome. But it’s in Italy that we start to see this happen on the scale of whole regions and states. Rome had capitalists, but it wasn’t capitalist. You can make an argument that Venice or Genoa were. 

I am not a medievalist or someone who focuses on the Mediterranean, don’t feel qualified to weigh in on the (very important!) debates about whether we would place this in, say, the 13th or 15th century, and am most persuaded by later arguments that put the emphasis on the Atlantic colonial world. But of course as an 18th-century Atlanticist I would say that! We dismiss this early capitalism (?) at our peril. So: capitalishm. We don’t have to agree about when or whether the Mediterranean world is capitalist to agree that it is displaying formative capitalist tendencies.

Why ish (because “I don’t know medieval Italy” is not an argument)? First, this is as far as I can tell a very urban phenomenon. That matters, especially with rural areas producing the food: I’m not yet sure we can call it market dependence, but I’m also not sure we can’t. Moreover, markets are clearly still competing, within and beyond the Italian city-state world, with other political-economic forms. Relatedly, I’m not sure on how much of what Marxists call real subsumption is happening here: how much markets are taking over existing production relations at the top without changing how they are organized within. Market dependence is about profound changes to life, not just sticking markets at the top or in the towns. That’s not only what’s happening in Italy, but there’s enough of it that a winking “ish” might serve some analytic purposes. As I said, these are early thoughts, and if your conclusion so far is that I need to read more about medieval Italy, I’d agree.

Up next we have:

Agrocapitalism, roughly mid-1500s to roughly 1790s

This includes Wood and Robert Brenner’s agrarian capitalism and grows out of that, but it isn’t only that. They argued that capitalism emerged out of changes in agriculture, specifically in England at first, that revolutionized politics and economics. In this era the modern landlord was beginning to emerge. Landowners and investors in England enclosed land, literally kicking people off of it (sometimes by sale, sometimes by law, sometimes with armed goons and no particular justification) and dividing it into separate walled plots that could be bought, sold, rented, and profitably converted from subsistence farming into market production: making wool.

Something profound is happening here beyond just market dependence, and related to it: what Wood calls the “separation of the political and the economic,” and with it the rise of a new ruling class. Medieval aristocrats exerted their power through formal state relations: I am the lord of the manor, work on my fields, etc. It’s true that they “owned” their lands– but this ownership was not something you could or would readily buy and sell, did not include many modern property rights (you couldn’t just evict peasants the way you can tenants) and did include different rights (imposing taxes, corvee labor). 

Landlords work differently. If you rent from someone today, they probably aren’t also the mayor, and if they are you’re still renting from them in a private capacity. Instead of directly forcing you to work for a particular elite through formal political relations, capitalism requires you choose to work for one (to get money) to pay rent, a private economic relation. now we have the state increasingly setting the rules of the game and punishing you if you try to exit the arena it has set up: if you want to go build a house or farm on unused (but owned) land to try to escape market relations, you will be punished. And even the house and farm themselves are bought and sold on the market. Enclosure isn’t the only reason for this (the wool market helped drive demand for it), but it’s both a critical part of capitalism’s rise and a useful symbol of what that rise means.

The separation of the political and the economic does not mean any relationship is purely either– you can take this formal argument way too far. This didn’t emerge all at once, it only ever partially emerged because formal relations are never a full description of a system, and capitalism only sustains itself by constantly having the state jump into the arena of economic relations like a referee and fix new crises with inventive interventions. But this change did happen. And it supported a change in who was in power as well as how. Aristocrats were rich because they were powerful. The bourgeoisie was  powerful because they were rich. 

Agrocapitalism in my scheme here is more than just English landowners though, because the agro we’re talking about encompasses colonial plantations as well as enclosed farms in the metropole. The 17th and 18th centuries are an age of three related dispossessions: enclosure, slavery, and settler colonialism. They have to be understood together.

Next month: this series continues, after March’s premium piece, which will be something different, because I wouldn’t give you half an analysis and make you pay for the rest.