Oh boy.Oh boy.
I dunno if I can do this, guys. Curiosity definitely killed this cat... Yesterday’s short preface (#1416318) raised more questions and awful hunches than it answered: All day, I couldn’t stop wondering about the Introduction. An intro chapter is supposed be a sort of condensation of everything the books does… sketch the argument, discuss the main evidence, present the landscape. I should be able to read it, and only it, and get the gist of the book.
Alas, I couldn't resist and instead wasted two hours before yoga, and quite some mindspace during the day.
Dude just HAS to specify more closely (#1416465 #1416827) what he means by “capitalism,” even if it's hard and fussy and unclear.
He did...ish. And it’s not pretty.
I now feel like shouldn’t have embarked on this quest, a neat little £35 (+ taxes) down the drain… it’s precisely as worthless and stupid an academic exercise as I first suspected. If your lens is fussy and your vision is poor and what you think you're looking for is overruling any other input, does anybody honestly think your report stating what you have observed, however comprehensive, is going to be worth anything?
This is Knots a Serious Project
Every page of the miserable 25-page introduction chapter had some stupidity, contradiction, hyperbolic sweeping statement or annoying phrasing. When you see words like “denaturalize, “accumulation,” “commodification,” “mobilization of labor” you know you’re in for pointless Marxist troubles. These linguistic perversions are just not particularly good ways of trying to figure out the past or understand the present.
Do I really need this much self-inflicted pain in my life?Do I really need this much self-inflicted pain in my life?
This book is precisely the kind of nonsense woke stuff that comes out of overly sensitive ivory towers – convoluted, excessively PC, make sure every marginalized group has a voice – filled with the latest fad in, in this case, history departments. When I was tramping the hallowed halls of Oxford about a decade ago, Global History was all the rage; you see, historians up until yesterday have been racists… eurocentric, they called it. And so we had to raise our gaze and look beyond to all the, uh, important things that took place in non-Europe over the centuries. (Nevermind that it was in Europe that the most important, consequential thing happened that allows us all to sit here in comfort and debate age-old ideas.)
I have about 3 areas of major concern from this chapter. But let's start with the definition, because we can't make any progress before we've got that.
OK, I caught about five components to that definition:
- economic life (as opposed to noneconomic life)
- characterized by "ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital" (p. 19) -- gets to Undisc's point (#1416827)
- productively invested, wealth deployed(!) for more wealth
- investments that mix L + K + tech + raw materials "to generate further investable capital"
- doesn't apply to all resources but resources "embedded within particular social relations"
Condensed, it's about more and self-referentially more. No particular purpose... capital owners don't want to e.g., improve their lot or have their name on some building or make a better life for their kids or go to Mars, they want just... more. OK, fine.
How this distinguishes, say, Mesopotamian farmers and traders in Uruk or any indigenous tribe ever from the merchants of Amsterdam or Elon Musk, I'm not so sure. Find me the shepherd who didn't want a larger flock, the farmer who didn't want to grow more crops to have better/more stuff and better feed his family. (We're gonna bump into this everything counts problem again.)
The second feature he piles on there is getting us somewhere: commodified objects that are bought and sold on a market. That is, self-sufficient agriculture is out... native American hunters are out (ish). Stuff has to be sold.
And finally, it's a process -- not a thing or specific date/place. Enter, my first problem:
#1: Everything all at once, invading spheres of economic life#1: Everything all at once, invading spheres of economic life
Picking out economic from noneconomic activity has always been tricksy... Austrians don't care much for this, so I've never bothered much to delineate it either. Economics, to my mind, is everything; optimization, trade-off, opportunity cost, marginality, time-preference etc. Doesn't really matter if it's measuring my workout or my bank account. So I cut Beckert 10% slack here.
But that capitalism is everything always, that's weird. Everything that is, and everything that ever was, is the same beast
"only changing and varying articulations of one differentiated and hierarchical structure" (p. 15)
It always needs growth (see definition) and so must get into new spheres and geographic places (hence “colonialism”). This kind of Leninist academic crap has been bad scholarship since, well, Lenin. Imperialism is not the highest state of capitalism, comrade.
Capitalism is not about markets, we learn... but then it is about invading nonmarket spheres, or making markets or commodities social relations into markets. Capitalism and its logic = everything:
"the result of a panoply of political choices and social conflicts, structured in myriad ways by society and the state. [It’s] just as much an ecological, cultural, social, and political order as it is an economic one" (p. 15)
I know exactly why "ecological" and the frequent mentions of "predatory relationship to nonhuman nature" and "feeding on gifts of nature" (p. 12) are there (hashtag Greta and her lot) but, like, why!
The vagueness and the mystique is guaranteed on purpose:
"capitalism thrives not on homogeneity and consistency through time and space but on variety" (14)
Plus, I can basically flip that story on its head: Plenty of spheres that to the ancients would have seemed perfectly fine to hand over valuable goods or service in exchange for are out of the question for us moderns. Your wife, for instance. Or your friend. Or your nation's soldier. And the SLAAAAVES obvs, but since that's his forté, I imagine we'll get to hear more about how slavery is capitalism later.
#2: The Agency Contradiction#2: The Agency Contradiction
This is just stupid and annoying more than wrong. He is very adamant that capitalism is a human-made and human-directed enterprise...
though he never writes about it like that! The only mention in actual use is when capital owners partnered with fascist states (p. 14). That gaslighting is enough to make me want to tear down Harvard with him inside.
It "turned human relations upside down; infiltrated our politics" (p. 5). Rearrange and change the spheres "subject to capitalist logic." And all these third-person processes (p. 21):
subsumes other logics into its reproduction. uh-hu.
...and then he just kills me:
#3: The State is Capitalism#3: The State is Capitalism
And it's necessary for capitalism to exist.
my god. Out of all the retarded things I'm about to hear in 2026, I think this is just going to win (@remindme in 345 days)
"Capitalism, this book argues, is an extraordinarily statist form of economic life" (p. 16)
….uh-hu, blow me. But maybe he didn’t mean that or it was an innocent typo? No, next page:
"capitalism is a highly state-centric economic order that needs to be understood primarily as a political economy" (17)
Oh, maybe you think Den is just misquoting him and twisting his words?
Please exit center right and never come back.
Alright, now that we've taken a breather, let's go full Hitchens on him: Extreme statements asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. And in this case, turning on the word "unimaginable," I can rebut this statement right here, right now: YES, it is imaginable. I see it. I can understand it. As can countless of writers from @Undisciplined's guy Bob Murphy to David Friedman to Michael Malice to Murray Rothbard and Michael Huemer, to every single Seasteading effort or Próspera-type locality.
PLENTY of people have imagined that, and some as simple as a quick googling would have unearthed the emptiness of this research agenda.
And let's just think about the basic economic structure of human life: it consists, Robinson Crusoe style, of production and consumption and capital goods. (Money requires larger division of labor, and more people, to make sense.) That doesn't need a state. He can have a companion with whom to cooperate economically. That doesn't need a state.
Yes, but that's not capitalism you might say. Fine. Let me scale it up to 8 billion people spanning the globe, and filled with financial markets and complicated institutions for figuring out who does and doesn't own which thing. How about now? At what point did we cross the rubicon non-capitalism → capitalism?
SAME. BLOODY. THING. as far as I can see
Tl;dr, just watch this clip
“Young man, you don’t follow for a very simple reason: these men are screwballs”“Young man, you don’t follow for a very simple reason: these men are screwballs”
I don't know when, or if I'll continue this. Like Thomas Piketty's book, which had a stupid overarching case, was filled with good historical accounts from which I learned a bunch. I'll give one or two of the chapters a chance, and if it's equally retarded I'm probably just gonna quit. Not worth anybody's time this nonsense.
Capitalism, Blapitalism (#1401462) clearly.
Because of how he's decided to describe things, I'd go the other direction.
Start with a capitalism and kill all but one guy, call him Robinson Carusoe. If the logic of capitalism subsumes all other logics, then how can Robinson's activities cease being capitalistic. He's still operating under a logic and capitalism ate all the other logics already.
Dang. Seeing those excerpts really hurts my brain. Where is the agent-based logic derived from first principles of human action? Nowhere to be found. Just meaningless, poorly defined buzzword after meaningless, poorly defined buzzword. Over and over again.
What kind of professorship does this guy hold again? Is the practice of that field really so intellectually bankrupt?
you will be not-at-all-surprised that he's top of his field and at Harvard.
Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University.
I guess when you reach that level of a historian, you gain the ability to read minds of all owners of capital throughout all history.
They have no wants, only hopes
Are you denying the existence of the invisible hand?
The profit motive is surely fundamental to capitalism.
I was just being facetious. But the more substantive criticism of the quote is that it doesn't acknowledge that the production of the commodities are because other people need and want them, and therefore are willing to trade their capital for it, and that the capitalist's goal isn't necessarily the accumulation of more capital for its own sake, but rather for the consumption that it brings to himself, his descendants, and other people (through the investment in productive capacity of more goods and services down the line.)
Capitalism is highly dependent upon the state.
This is easily demonstrated by the fact that without the state and the rule of law it enables property ownership, contracts and security of people and territory which underpin capitalism are not possible.
It never ceases to amaze me how Libertarians can ignore this fundamental reality and somehow imagine that capitalism could exist, let alone thrive without the state creating and enforcing the property rights and security.
To translate that buzzword salad: "Pay me for pointing a gun at you, and in return I'll 'protect' the property I'm now leeching off."
State-sanctioned theft is an attack on rule of law as dictated by man's conscience. The professional agitator who raises the sales tax on gasoline nationwide is a billion times more destructive than the guy who loots only one gas station.
How about all the extortionists of the world just fuck off, and if someone earns money they can keep it?
I don't get it. I give someone $100, they give me 0.001 BTC, and then someone like you comes along demanding $20 for the Somali children because "society." Why?? Enough of the taxation bullshit. I don't care if it's been going on for thousands of years. Enough is enough.
People want to have government- it provides the rule of law and certainty that capital wants.
Remove government and the people clamour to replace it because they understand the nature of life without it is fucking chaos and law of the jungle.
Go live somewhere there is no government and report back
You act like it's my fault. The gangs follow me. You don't let me leave.
I separated my money from the state, at least. And my wealth is infinitely safer as a result.
The core difficulty in much modern academic writing on capitalism lies in its unwillingness to anchor the concept in concrete and falsifiable terms. What you describe here is a prime example of definitions that dissolve on contact with scrutiny. When capitalism is framed as both everywhere and nowhere as both a specific economic form and an amorphous social order it ceases to have diagnostic value. That vagueness allows the author to stretch the label across any historical period or social practice which leads to the everything counts problem you identified.
The insistence on an omnipresent state role is similarly questionable not because the state has never shaped markets but because asserting capitalism as inherently state centric ignores entire traditions of thought and historical cases where market order developed outside of or in tension with state control. By treating the state and capitalism as inseparable the author precludes serious engagement with voluntary and decentralized economic arrangements which undermines the utility of the analysis.
Your critique of the language is important as well. Terms like commodification or accumulation are not inherently meaningless but when stacked without clear operational definitions they function more to signal ideological alignment than to clarify mechanisms. Solid economic history depends on tracing cause and effect between real institutions incentives and actions not weaving together abstract categories that can be stretched to fit any conclusion.
To an Austrian, I believe the only non-economic parts of life would be acts of pure insanity or getting hit by random parts of the universe unexpectedly.
I'm ok with this. It's part of the expanded definition of capitalism that I prefer that encompasses more than the libertarian version.
JBP says you should pick up the heaviest thing you can find and carry it as far as you can.