The nonmarket and coercion have played an important role at every point in the history of capitalism. I am somewhat skeptical of an interpretation that says: yes, there is a violent early history of capitalism, but it ultimately gives way in the nineteenth or twentieth century to a peaceful history of contract and human freedom. I would question this narrative.
Of course, the way in which this violence is exercised and the forms it takes change. There is sometimes a tendency to lump everything together and say: okay, slavery is not really that different from what textile workers in Cambodia have to endure today. I disagree with that. It is important to see how these forms of coercion have changed throughout the history of capitalism.
We are returning to a moment in which the rhetoric, the issues, and even the politics of the late nineteenth century are suddenly reappearing in the present.
Today many observers are shocked and disoriented because they adhered to a narrative that assumed that this early history of capitalism had been permanently overcome and we had entered a completely different moment of capitalism. In the age of neoliberalism, the idea that contracts and markets could and should best structure all human relationships became, so to speak, a law of nature. Now we see that what some observers regarded as natural over the past fifty years was in fact only a particular moment in the history of capitalism. And to the surprise of almost all of them, we are returning to a moment in which the rhetoric, the issues, and even the politics of the late nineteenth century are suddenly reappearing in the present.
From the perspective of the ideology of the last fifty years, this is surprising, but from the perspective of the long history of capitalism, it’s not surprising at all. In a way, one of the core arguments of the book is that capitalism has taken very different political forms in the past — but also very different forms of labor regimes,…
Auteur: Sven Beckert
