The Transformation of the World (145 page)

Such indeterminacy did not mean that the concept of capitalism was abandoned: following the classical economists, it persisted not only in the Marxist tradition but also among open apologists of the system, although the new orthodoxy preferred to speak innocuously of “market economy.” Events in the last two decades have now led to a certain revival of the term. Whereas its use was once associated with the rising power of industry, impoverishment of the early proletariat, and subjugation of the world by the spirit of business-oriented instrumental rationality, the most relevant tendencies today are the global presence of transnational corporations and the failure of all
non
capitalist alternatives, whether they ended with the hollowing out of socialism from within (as in China) or the straightforward collapse of any such order (as in the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence). Since the 1990s many attempts have been made to describe and explain “global capitalism,” but a new synthesis is still lacking.
¹¹⁵
Today's typologies look different from those of a hundred years ago, with a special emphasis on regional capitalisms: European (itself differentiated into “Rhineland” and other forms), American, East Asian, and so on.
¹¹⁶
Many theorists have a strongly contemporary orientation, without the historical depth of the classics, and overlook what Fernand Braudel and some of his disciples, following in the tracks of Werner Sombart, have written about the early modern commerce centered on Europe (though not conducted by Europeans alone) as a first manifestation of something like “global capitalism.”

One finds oneself agreeing with many observers of the world before 1920 who characterized the nineteenth century as a new, unprecedentedly dynamic stage of capitalism, and also with such interpreters as Sombart, Braudel, or Wallerstein who see the development of capitalism as a long-term process begun long before the nineteenth century. What general points, then, can be made about nineteenth-century capitalism?
¹¹⁷

First
. Capitalism cannot be purely a phenomenon of exchange and circulation. Long-distance trade in luxury goods may relocate and multiply wealth, but it does not institute a new economic order. That requires a special organization of production, as it came into being in the nineteenth century.

Second
. Capitalism is such an economic order. It rests upon production for the market, involving a division of labor and organized by individual or corporate entrepreneurs who make a profit and mostly seek to reinvest it productively—in Marxist terms, “to accumulate.”
¹¹⁸

Third
. Capitalism is bound up with general commodification, with a transformation of things and relations that makes perhaps not “everything” but every factor of production into a commodity exchangeable on the market. This is true of land as well as capital and knowledge, and above all of human labor power. Capitalism thus presupposes the presence of “free” (also in the sense of spatially mobile) “wage labor.” It has often found ways of integrating unfree labor in the
periphery of its systems but cannot tolerate it in the core. Slavery and other kinds of “extra-economic” bondage conflict with its logic of unlimited availability.

Fourth
. Capitalism as an economic order has the flexibility always to use the most productive technologies and organizational forms (whose efficiency is tested by the market). In the nineteenth century, these included not only factory production but also large-scale, increasingly mechanized, agriculture, especially farm businesses of the North American type. Agrarian capitalism may be located upstream of industrial capitalism, in the sense of a preparatory agricultural revolution, but it equally exists alongside it in a symbiotic relationship.
¹¹⁹
Since the end of the nineteenth century, these forms have grown closer to each other within an internationally active agro-industry, which controls whole product chains from the original farming to processing stages to final marketing.
¹²⁰

Fifth
. The famous Marxist question of the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” is rather academic and applies best to parts of Western Europe and Japan. In a number of other places where capitalism was particularly successful in the nineteenth century—the United States, Australia, and South African mining areas—there was never any “feudalism,” any more than there was in China. The whole issue ought to be formulated more generally in terms of institutional frameworks for capitalism, which came about mainly through legislation and state action. But the state is not a product of the market. Although markets may also arise and grow spontaneously through the activity of private economic subjects, the free spaces for them to operate in are the result of political regulation or the lack of it, of state action or state inaction. Free trade in the nineteenth century was a creation of the British political elite. In the late twentieth century a one-party socialist dictatorship in China established a quasi-capitalist economic order. By means of detailed “bourgeois” legal systems—from the Napoleonic Code of 1804 to the German Civil Code of 1900 (still considered a model in many parts of the world)—state apparatuses everywhere safeguarded and made possible capitalist enterprise, first and foremost by providing the fundamental legal guarantee of private property. In East Asia and elsewhere, strong bonds of reciprocal trust among economic subjects in civil society fulfilled an analogous function. From German mining to Chinese industrialization, the state was also active as an entrepreneur in mixed public-private ventures.

Sixth
. The links between capitalism and territory are especially controversial. Evidently, the global capitalism that spread after 1945 was less dependent than earlier forms on being anchored in a particular locality. Production is becoming ever more mobile, and with the Internet and advanced telecommunications many businesses can operate almost anywhere in the world. Early modern commercial capitalism too, featuring individual overseas merchants and chartered companies, wove its trading networks with often only a weak implantation in the Dutch or English mother country. In the nineteenth
century, however, capitalism and the (national) territorial state stood in a close relationship with each other.
Before
capitalism could move beyond national boundaries, it profited from the state-backed integration of national markets—for example, in France, Germany (after the
Zollverein
of 1834), or post-1868 Japan. In the eyes of continental Europe and the United States,
extreme
free trade was an episode limited to the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Big business, emerging after roughly 1870 and taking shape, often with global reach, in the second economic revolution, displayed striking national styles beneath a general cosmopolitanism that was much more marked in finance than in industry.
¹²¹

Seventh
. Territorialization in the course of industrialization is bound up with the material character of industry. The overseas merchant of early modern times—think of Shakespeare's Antonio from
The Merchant of Venice
—whether alone or in a partnership, placed his productive assets in ships and transportable goods. The technological structures of the early industrial age opened up new opportunities for long-term material investment. Mines, factories, and rail networks were intended for a use cycle longer than the turnover time typical of the wholesale and overseas trade of early modernity; wealth was now tied up in machinery and infrastructure in a way that it had been earlier only in monumental buildings—which were unable to create further riches. This was linked to unprecedented intervention in the physical environment. No economic system has ever reshaped nature more drastically than the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century.

Eighth
. This materialization and crystallization of capital corresponded to its significantly greater mobility. In purely technical terms, this was at first the result of better-integrated money and finance markets; the transfer of monetary values from the colonies—still a major practical difficulty for the British in late-eighteenth-century India—became ever simpler as international means of payment were perfected in the nineteenth century. The rise of the City of London to become the center of the world capital market, together with the emergence of subordinate centers in Europe, North America, and (at the end of the century) Asia, made the network considerably denser. British, and increasingly other, banks and insurance companies offered financial services to the whole world. After 1870, capitalism discovered overseas investment as the way to export capital, although for a long time this remained a British specialty. Both the temporal dimension of amortization or debt repayment and the spatial horizon of planning grew wider; people planned not only further into the future but also across greater distances. Europe's textile industry had to make arrangements well ahead for its supply of raw materials from distant countries. The electrical industry came into existence only with the technical challenges of long-distance telegraphy, and right from the beginning it sold its products all around the world. Although the term “global capitalism” should be reserved for the period after 1945, or even 1970, many countries by 1913 had
a national capitalism with a global radius of operations. Industrialization, defined as the development of mechanized factory production using local energy sources, was in each case a regionally specific process. Nineteenth-century capitalism, on the other hand, may be understood as an economic order that made it increasingly possible to insert local entrepreneurial activity into interactive circuits spanning large areas or even the globe as a whole.

CHAPTER XIII

 

Labor

The Physical Basis of Culture

At all times most people have worked.
¹
Adults who did not do so—whether sick or disabled, fortunate in their circumstances, or belonging to an idle elite exempt even from military or priestly service—have been a minority in every society. Since work is performed in countless different ways and conditions, it is much more difficult to say anything general about it than about highly organized systems such as industry or capitalism. A history of work can be a history only of typical instances—or, where especially good data are available, of workloads and their gender distribution.
²
If work is regarded not as an abstract category but as an aspect of people's actual lives, then the worlds of work are legion. A butcher in Bombay in 1873, about whom we know from a record of court proceedings, lived in one such world. An opera singer in the Italy of Rossini's time, when patronage had all but given way to market employment, had to operate in quite another. And different again was the world of a Chinese coolie working as cheap labor down a South African mine, or of a ship's doctor as he accompanied every transoceanic voyage, under sail and under steam.
³

Work produces something—and nothing more often than meals. Cooking must have been the most widespread, and generally most time-consuming, expenditure of labor throughout history. As this example shows, not all work is market oriented, and not all labor power is procured via the market. Work may take place at home, within a village community, or in a complex organization such as a factory, an army, or a municipal authority. The idea of a “regular job” appeared only in the nineteenth century; much work has been (and is) “irregular.” Work usually follows a standard pattern, within the framework of “labor processes.” These processes are social in nature. Most include direct cooperation with other people, and all are indirectly enmeshed in a social order. Certain kinds of worker and labor process typify a certain level of the social hierarchy. Relations of power and domination determine the extent to which work is autonomous or heteronomous. If standardized labor processes are combined with a consciousness defined primarily by work, the result is an “occupation.” Workers who derive their identity from an occupation do not look only for an employer's
approval but also set certain quality standards for their own work. But such standards are also corporately defined. In other words, practitioners of an occupation control, sometimes exclusively, the domain of their work: they regulate access to it “off market” and often receive state support to boot. This gives rise to niches in which the very membership of a profession (a trade, a guild, an occupational association, etc.) constitutes a form of income-generating capital.
⁴

Given these multiple possibilities, it is hard to trace global tendencies for a whole century.
⁵
Yet, it is all the more important, though, because the nineteenth century had a special concern for questions of work. Where the culture held it in high esteem, as in Western Europe and Japan, capitalism created new scope for it to develop. In the West, “work” became both a high value and a favored category in the description that people gave of themselves; while idleness ceased to be a desirable norm even among the elites. Queens let themselves be seen in public with their knitting. In economic theory as in certain currents of anthropology,
Homo faber
became the mandatory model. Classical political economy explained creativity and physical effort as the source of value creation—a doctrine that also became the axiom of socialism and fueled demands for workers to be paid and treated well. Others went even farther, trying to conceive of work as the purification of humanity; alienated and exploited labor under capitalism was transformed into a utopia of emancipated labor. With the spread of machines, the superiority of manual labor became a distinctive theme: critics such as William Morris, the writer, early English socialist, influential designer, and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, returned in theory and practice to the endangered ideals of premodern crafts. When the average workweek, having risen in the early period of industrialization, fell again in parts of Europe and the United States toward the end of the century, leisure time emerged as a new kind of time to be actively lived and not just idled away. This raised the issue of how to separate paid labor and nonwork—within each day and within a year or a lifetime. It has been argued that Europe drew a particularly sharp distinction between the two,
⁶
but even there different conceptions existed alongside one another, and the idea of a “typically European” understanding of work is not without its problems.
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