Whence Capitalism?

I recently finished reading Spencer Dimmock's 2015 book The Origin of Capitalism in England 1400-1600. The work is unapologetically academic in tone and uncompromising in its beliefs. Dimmock spends most of his time arguing in favour of Robert Brenner's distinct strand of "political Marxism" as it relates to its explanation for the genesis of capitalism in England and against traditional liberal and "orthodox Marxist" explanations. Those familiar with the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood will feel right at home in the presentation of the material discussed.

The general outline is as follows: traditional accounts for the origins of capitalism either take capitalism for granted [α] (i.e., markets have always existed and therefore so has capitalism) or they are too caught up in its technical developments [ϐ] (i.e., the capitalist mode of production is only such when the means of production reach a certain head). There are also those, such as Fernand Braudel, who take the position that the world is far too richly complex to draw a line in the sand where one side demarcates "feudalism" and the other side "capitalism" [γ]. α fails on face value—in what way can we seriously say that the ancient societies of Babylonia or Egypt are just like those of modern day America or China? ϐ fails because it looks at the results of a transition as its cause—it can hardly be denied that industrial manufacturing is a tell-tale sign of a capitalist economy, but it is another thing to say that all moments prior were of an alien social formation. Finally, γ fails as a causal explanation due to its very ambivalence—if the Giants decide to not play a regular season game they'll go 0-17.

Dimmock belongs to the less commonly touted "fourth branch", for lack of a better phrase, which takes the origins of capitalism to be seated in changes to political formations as well as in strictly economic formations. When thinking about the origins of capitalism the most important question is less "How did it spring up?", but rather "Why in England? Why not France?" Dimmock says, "England emerged after the conquest by the Normans with one of the most centralized polities in Europe, and with a mutually supportive monarchy and aristocracy." The French were never as tightly knit as the English, neither were they as isolated, so their ruling class had to limit, relatively speaking, the amount they could extract from their peasantry. The English had no such limits. "[English] lords were always on the lookout for legal means to ratchet up the level of dues from the peasant tenants on their estates…" and often were successful in their search.

To make a long book short, Dimmock sums up the origins of capitalism in England like so:

"The origin of capitalism in England can be firmly located in the long 15th century, the period in which social-property relations were remodelled…It originated in the aftermath of demographic collapse [the Black Death], subsequent stagnation, and during a period of relative economic recession in terms of output…In the face of peasant mobility and resulting stagnating rents and increasing wages, lords were forced to transfer their desmesne property by lease to the upper stratum of broadly prosperous peasantry. With the unprecedented co-opting of these yeoman into a new political nexus of mutual interests between lord and farmer the scales of the class struggle increasingly tipped in favour of the latter from the 1440s, against the broader peasantry, and it is from here that we see the emergence of agrarian capitalism growing up in the shell of the lord's estate system."

This came as a result of "the unintended consequence of lords and peasants acting in class conflict with each other with the purpose of reproducing each other as they were". Dimmock stresses that it was not just the vertical relationships between classes but the horizontal relationships inside of each strata which led to the development of capitalism. Certain peasants were able to create opportune relationships with their lords and muscle their way into protected positions that those lords relied upon for their surplus extraction. Lesser lords and greater peasants became the breeding ground for the burgeoning bourgeoisie.

The above discussions surrounding the genesis of capitalism can feel rather abstract and academic at first blush. The poking and prodding of legal charters and wheat price tables don't help its case. The work is important precisely due to its focus on investigating what exactly capitalism is in order to place it historically. This is all for the best considering there is now a misguided tendency in popular leftist writing in which thinkers are all too ready to claim that capitalism is as dead as a doornail (Yanis Varoufakis, Jodi Dean, McKenzie Wark, etc.). If we understand capitalism to be a mode of production whereby commodities are produced for profit and the vast majority of people sell their labour-power for a wage, it becomes very difficult to justify the claim that we now live in an entirely different economic structure. Identifying the transition in directly aids in identifying the transition out.