Anti-Capitalism
Harvard history professor Sven Beckert offers up a history
of capitalism, but in fact he has written an anti-capitalist screed. Although
never mentioned, he follows in the footsteps of Honoré de Balzac’s well-known
aphorism, “behind every great fortune there is a great crime.” Beckert treats
capital as a unitary bloc, rather than as a multitude of businesses in
competition with each other. Further, he sets up a strawman argument that from
its creation, capitalism needed state support—as if that violates the notion of
a free market. So, what? Adam Smith noted that capitalism needs the state to
enforce laws and contracts and provide for defense, among other functions.
He starts his history in Aden around the year 1000, where,
to him, the first islands of capitalism are formed. Trust me, he has written a
very long history that takes up 1300 pages. His definition of capitalism is a
society where capital seeks to reproduce itself in an ever-growing
accumulation. This differs, to him, from the primitive markets of 4000 years
ago. What is strange to me is that he hardly discusses money and its role in
creating a capitalist society. Money in the form of gold coins existed 2500
years before his Aden merchants. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2026/01/my-review-of-david-mcwilliams-history.html)
He also ignores the role of the free trade zone established by Rome, while
noting the importance of the free trade zone established by Islam that
supported the Aden merchants.
In Beckert’s opinion, the critical catalysts that put
capitalism into hyperdrive were the Caribbean sugar trade centered around the
British colony of Barbados and the great Potosi silver mine in Bolivia, which
flooded Europe with money. Great fortunes were made, and those fortunes were
built on slavery—in other words, Balzac’s crime. However, slavery existed long
before capitalism, as in the Hebrew slaves of Egypt. He makes short shrift of
the anti-slavery movements in capitalist England and the United States that
brought it to an end. One thing he gets right is that capitalism is highly
adaptable to changes in circumstances.
With the rise of industrial capitalism in the 1700s, he not
only notes its effects on cities but also on the countryside. In the country,
common land became enclosed to increase food production and drive farmers off
the land into the city to supply labor for the new factories. Beckert is
critical that through about 1850, real wages stagnated in England. This is when
Marx wrote his famous manifesto highlighting the immiseration of the working
class. Nevertheless, that very same manifesto offered a paean to the new
capitalist world that was being born. Then, of a sudden, real wages started to
increase. He offers no explanation.
He casts blame on capitalism for causing racism, sexism, and
environmental destruction. None of these are unique to capitalism, as all three
have existed for millennia. And if Beckert were fair, he would note the
environmental destruction on a grand scale that took place in Soviet Russia and
Communist China. Indeed, most of the progress in ridding the world of racism,
sexism, and environmental destruction has taken place under capitalist
auspices.
What really bothers me is his use of the Marxist term,
“commodification.” He uses it over and over to denounce the growing role of
markets in our daily lives. He doesn’t like dating apps. Along a similar vein,
he cites such leftist economists as Polanyi, Piketty, Sraffa, Braudel,
Hobsbawm, and Gramsci, for example, while spending far less time on Chandler,
Friedman, Schumpeter, and Mokyr. His sympathy for socialism is obvious.
While he lives comfortably off the benefits of capitalism in
Harvard Square, he just doesn’t get that capitalism involves huge risk-taking
and somehow misses the spirit of enterprise that invigorates the process of
capitalist accumulation that drives our society forward.
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