What does “capitalism” really mean, anyway?
The end of capitalism, in his view, is a world where “almost nothing can escape commodification.” Beckert here refers to commodities in the loose, colloquial sense of “products that can be bought and sold,” but he uses the word more often as a technical term to refer to a tradable good, such as grain or copper, that is standardized, fungible, and divisible into arbitrary quantities. “Capitalism: A Global History” is a history of the commodity and a case in point. Its core is monolithic, standardized, and interchangeable, as if it has been extruded page by page to meet the needs of buyers at any scale. Beckert clearly took stock of the consumer landscape – the sluggish demand for explanations of feudalism, the frothy bubble of spaces that hold capitalism in its place – and relied on product-market fit. He frames his project explicitly as a speculative “bet,” a wager that “the whole history of capitalism can be understood, if not entirely contained, between the covers of two books.”
If his competitors’ goods are flawed, it is because trying to pin capitalism “on any single explanation of cause, or any part—an institution, a technology, a nation—does not explain much.” Beckert believes that capitalism cannot be reduced to a separate essence. It has neither a fixed origin nor a fixed path. It corresponds to different forms of political and social life, and never varies from one place to another or from one moment to another. It is not the work of single actors, but the relationship between all human action.
One might wonder, says Beckert, whether it is worth retaining a concept that is subject to so much drift. However, he takes the fact that the word “capitalism” exists as an indicator to which reference should be made Something. But how can a working definition be provided while “avoiding rigid, essentialist, overly abstract, or presentist approaches”? The solution is to return with one hand what he took with the other hand. Capitalism does not have a trans-historical trend, but it nevertheless embodies a “unique logic”: “the tendency to growth, flow and penetration into all spheres of activity was ancient, which constitutes an essential and irreducible characteristic of capitalism.” Capitalism had no essence, except that its “essence was in fact a globe-spanning sprawl of interconnected diversity.” It is a manifestation of predatory appetite. What Beckert captures here is how “capitalism” often functions in the academic humanities: as a way to show that the evils of the world—imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, inequality, exploitation, extraction, climate change, social media, dating apps, insomnia, and a general sense of constant stress—are not merely evil in themselves, but extensions of a singularly evil phenomenon.
Social media savvy people who blame capitalism – or, more civilly, “late capitalism” – for everything that befalls us, may nonetheless hesitate to see their experience as part of a story that runs through Japan in the 1980s, Sweden in the 1970s, Detroit in the 1950s, Manchester in the 19th century, Barbados in the 18th century, and Java in the 17th century. This is the challenge that Beckert faces. When he talks about capitalism’s “interconnected diversity,” he suggests that any apparent differences are merely a local phenomenon of capitalist cunning.
He points out that the book’s colonial-era introduction predates the formulation of “capitalism” by a few hundred years, but its story properly begins even earlier, with the Yemeni port of Aden in the twelfth century. It was, he writes, “quite literally, a fortified node of capital, an island for capitalists” where Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu merchants linked the medieval Arab world to India. Their craft was neither production nor cultivation, but acquisition and exchange.
Although the trade itself, says Beckert, was ancient, it had long been restricted by the customs and customs of local participants. He adds that in pre-capitalist societies, seemingly respectable people were content to reap what they sowed – he believes that “production for personal use was immortal” – and elites had the right to expropriate any surplus. These chiefs and warlords may have accumulated great wealth, but Beckert argues that, in contrast to the way capitalism works, their “redistribution of resources” was explicit and legible. Even genocidal theft, in his account, was carried out in keeping with the prevailing ethos of usage: the nomadic conqueror Timur plundered Central Asia, but devoted his plunder to building “magnificent mosques and madrassas,” making his methods “fundamentally different from those of the owners of capital.” For Beckert, merchants like the Aden merchants, who used their resources only as a means to seize more resources, were a “completely different” breed.