Introducing Capitalism Introducing Capitalism E-Book

Dan Cryan

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 114

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Capitalism now dominates the globe, both in economics and ideology, shapes every aspect of our world and influences everything from laws, wars and government to interpersonal relationships.Introducing Capitalism tells the story of its remarkable and often ruthless rise, evolving through strife and struggle as much as innovation and enterprise.  Dan Cryan and Sharron Shatil, with Piero's brilliant graphics, cover the major economic, social and political developments that shaped the world we live in, such as the rise of banking, the founding of America and the Opium Wars.The book explores the leading views for and against, including thinkers like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno and Milton Friedman, the connections between them and their historical context.  Few ideas have had as much impact on our everyday lives as capitalism. Introducing Capitalism is the essential companion. 

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPemail: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-765-9

Text and illustrations copyright © 2013 Icon Books Ltd

The author and artist have asserted their moral rights.

Edited by Duncan Heath

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Capital and Capitalism

Capitalism vs. Feudalism

The Crusades

The Knights Templar

Dissolution of the Templars

Opening up the Trade Routes

Expansionism

The Birthplace of Capitalism

The Dutch East India Company

English Pirates

The Power of Private Investment

Hobbes, the First Capitalist Thinker

The Power of the Individual

The State of Nature

Leviathan, and the Social Contract

Natural Reason and Private Property

Locke and Civil Government

Locke and Colonialism

The Wealth of Nations

Self-interest

The Invisible Hand

Specialization of Skills

Free Trade

The Scottish Enlightenment

The Slave Trade

The Rothschilds

Industrialization

The Opium Wars

The Rise of Social Sciences

David Ricardo

The Cost of Labour

The Workers’ Straitjacket

John Stuart Mill

Utilitarianism

The Pleasures of Freedom

Rules of Nature and Society

Distribution of Wealth

Supply and Demand

Humane Capitalism?

Life in the Slums

The Great Famine

Movements for Reform

The Chartists

The Birth of Socialism

Control of the Means of Production

Bakunin and Anarchism

Marx, the anti-Utopian

Marx and Hegel

Resolving the Contradictions

Thesis–Antithesis–Synthesis

The End of History?

Historical Materialism

The History of Class Struggles

Das Kapital

Surplus Value

Marx’s Prediction

Capitalism Without Imperialism

The Rise of the US and Germany

The Production Line

The “Empires of Trade”

The Roaring Twenties

The Crash and the Great Depression

The New Deal

Keynes and Liberal Economics

A Healthy Circulation

The Cycles of Capitalism

Beating Inflation

Fighting Depression

State Capitalism

“Economic Miracles”

The Marshall Plan

Monetarism vs. Keynesianism

How to Ensure Rising Consumption?

Cultural Effects of Capitalism

Max Weber and the Protestant Spirit

Catholic and Protestant Ethics

The Rise of Rationality

Making Organizations Work for People

Neo-Marxism and the Frankfurt School

The Adoration of the New

Unmasking Consumer Culture

Adorno and the Media

The Construction of Consciousness

Seeing Beyond the System

The Situationists

Debord and the Spectacle

Every Choice a Pseudo-choice

Right-wing Critiques of Capitalism

Knowing Your Place

Liberty and Difference

Nozick and Right-wing Libertarianism

Taxation as Forced Labour?

Fukuyama and the End of History

Directional History

The Struggle for Recognition

Challenging the Free Market

The Developing World: Free Trade …?

… or State Capitalism?

Islam and Capitalism

Sharia Banking

Bursting the Bubble

Further Reading

History

Weber and Marx

Neo-Marxism

Conservatism

Contemporary Commentary

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Index

Capital and Capitalism

Capitalism is the name of a family of economic systems based on the private ownership of the means of production and trading goods for profit. Capitalist economies tend to be characterized by free competition and industrialization, although capitalism without industry is not a contradiction in terms.

Broadly speaking, capitalist systems give a central role to the accumulation of resources that can be used for further production. These resources, known as “capital”, give capitalism its name.

capitalism is not just about short-term profit, but sees reinvestment as the principal source of even greater profits in the future.

capitalism vs. feudalism modern capitalism began in the middle ages with the rise of the merchant class. merchants, rich on trade, began to break down the rigid feudal system in which you were usually born into your social, economic and political status.

Once it had taken hold in Europe, capitalism spread around the world like wildfire, the driving force behind business, prosperity, empire and exploitation. As capitalism is an economic system based on trade, private ownership, and currency, its development is bound up with the history of trade and banking.

but back in 10th-century europe, neither trade nor banking amounted to much. the ancient trade routes and much of the sea was taken over by the muslim kingdoms, and europe was concentrating on pulling out of the dark ages and supplying food for everybody.

The food-supplying landowners became the nobility. The feudal economic system they constructed was based on a careful balance between small land units and a stable level of production. Feudalism aims for stability, and this makes it diametrically opposed to capitalism with its search for ever-growing markets.

The Crusades

While merchants and artisans, such as bakers and weavers, had begun to develop influence in Europe’s cities, it was the Church that gave rise to what was effectively medieval Europe’s first great international trade venture – the Crusades, which started in 1095.

The Crusades led to conquests along the eastern rim of the Mediterranean and gave Europeans more control over traditional trade routes. As a result, the kingdoms of Europe found themselves shipping goods and people across relatively long distances for the first time since the days of the Roman Empire.

the kingdoms of italy were the first to profit from this, as they had the best fleet in western europe at the time.

The rise of trade and banking in 14th-century Europe eventually became the Renaissance, which was supported by bankers made princes like the Medici.

as the italian merchant class grew richer, they gained power and influence. this played a significant role in the development of republican city-states like genoa and siena. lorenzo de’medici (1449–92) however, the scale of italian trade was too small and local to shake the foundations of feudalism beyond a few towns.

The Knights Templar

The first commercial banks appeared in the late 13th century in Italian towns like Siena. The word comes from banco – Italian for bench – since at first banking services were provided on benches at the town’s centre. But banking does not begin with the Italian merchants – its origins lie with the Knights Templar, an order of warrior monks founded in 1096 to ensure the safe passage of European pilgrims heading to Jerusalem in the aftermath of the First Crusade.

the journey back and forth from europe to byzantium and beyond wasn’t easy. bandits and pirates lurked along the way and disease could strike unpredictably.

So when an order of hardened, experienced Crusaders, who were also known for being zealously honest, offered to take the risk of the journey upon themselves, many jumped at the offer.

The Templars soon had representatives in all the major cities of Europe, and held a series of forts along the main roads connecting the Crusader states.

people could deposit their goods at any of our branches and we would provide them with an official note for its worth in gold, which they could then collect at any other templar centre.

That allowed people to travel light and fast, and to buy what they needed locally wherever they got to. They would need to part with only a small percentage of their gold as a service charge.

Dissolution of the Templars

The Templars got immensely rich during the heyday of the Crusades. Because they were so vital to the survival of the Crusader states, they were granted permission by the Pope to run their own affairs, which meant they were effectively answerable to no one. As the Crusader states began to flounder, the Templars invested more and more of their vast wealth in property in Europe.

as the middle eastern venture approached its demise, the leaders of europe grew increasingly uncomfortable with us holding a fortune they couldn’t get their hands on. france, for example, got so involved in the crusades that most of the king’s treasury was sitting in our “temple” in paris.

eventually church and state united against us, and we were accused of heresy and the performance of unspeakable acts.

The order was dissolved in 1314, its leaders were put to the stake, and its wealth confiscated and divided up. The Pope entrusted his share to other Knightly orders that were not so independent. It ended up funding such ventures as the conquest of Prussia from its pagan natives and the reconquest of Spanish territory from the Arabs.

Banking lived on and developed mainly in Italy by private hands, but its basic idea remained unchanged from the days of the Templars to the arrival of the Rothschilds in the 19th century (see here).

Opening up the Trade Routes

By the end of the 15th century, improvements in the design of ships and inventions like the clock and the compass meant that crossing the ocean became feasible.

The newly formed Christian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal saw it worthwhile to send Columbus westward and Vasco da Gama southward in search of a naval route to India that would bypass the Muslim-dominated land routes.

Spain and Portugal found themselves suddenly with trading options all along the African and Asian coasts, as well as vast and rich new territories in the New World. From the 16th century onwards, international trade offered prospects of wealth far superior to the grain produced by the small feudal fiefs of Europe. With the arrival of that wealth, the feudal system faded away and was replaced by what came to be known later as a mercantile economy.

roughly speaking, a mercantile economy is based on the idea that the amount of wealth of a country is represented by the overall profit it makes from trade. my journey west in 1492 led to christian europe’s discovery of the americas. five years later, i found the cape of good hope and uncovered the real naval route to india. each strip of land has a limited amount of tradeable resources. so the volume of a country’s trade depends on the amount of land over which it has trade rights.

Expansionism

The rise in trade led to expansionism, and any European power that could afford it would send off ships, hoping to find new territory that “no one” (i.e. no other European) had discovered yet. Controlling land overseas gave these Europeans access to resources that could be exploited, often at the cost of the local inhabitants.

The transition to a mercantile economy also played a major role in the formation of the modern state out of the loose array of feudal estates.

customarily the monarch held claim to the new territories overseas, and their management required a large administrative body under direct royal control. this was the first ancestor of national government.

serving the king in times of war had been profitable throughout the middle ages, but with territorial expansion, serving the king abroad became a far more lucrative prospect for the nobility than managing their private estates.

Rich merchants could also be knighted and accepted to the king’s service. In this way, the king’s government reinforced its position as the main avenue of social, political and financial advance.

While a powerful, centralized monarchy created the first great European empires, it held back the development of a strong and independent merchant class, and that held back private enterprise. As a result, capitalism did not grow out of the empires of Spain and Portugal, but out of the disadvantaged newcomers to the race for international trade, and especially England and the Netherlands.

The Birthplace of Capitalism

The Netherlands is a small nation but its contribution to the development of capitalism is immense.

at the end of our 80-year struggle for independence from spain in 1648, we had no significant aristocracy and few marked class differences. instead we developed a significant middle class that thrived on trade. our population was mainly city-dwellers, the early bourgeoisie – merchants and small manufacturers.

It may be said that the Dutch created the only true European “empire of trade” and never joined in the imperialist land grab that happened after the Industrial Revolution.

The Dutch held the chain of islands in the Indian ocean now known as Indonesia, and a few small bases in the Caribbean, but their trading posts spanned the globe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

some became the basis for later english colonies like new amsterdam (today’s new york), or cape town in south africa.

Amsterdam itself was the greatest trade city in Europe up to the Industrial Revolution, and was home to the first stock exchange and insurance company. The Netherlands is considered by many historians to be the first truly capitalist nation in the world.

The Dutch East India Company

The Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, was one of the first multi-national companies. It was run like a partnership among the Dutch states. Each held an independent branch (called a “chamber”), but a directorate of seventeen members who represented each of the chambers decided the company’s strategy on a yearly basis.

in effect it was a company whose shareholders were also its employees. it was also the first company ever to offer its stock on the market.

The East India Company created the Dutch empire in Indonesia by means of brute force combined with economic pressure. It managed to drive the Portuguese off most of their trade posts in the Indian Ocean. It was a success story of individual enterprise that was much imitated, and it stayed ahead of competition until the final decades of the 18th century.

English Pirates

Like the Netherlands, England was a Protestant country threatened by the Catholic might of Spain at sea and France on land. As things stood in the second half of the 16th century, the English crown had nothing to lose by encouraging private ship-owners to make a living out of pirating the slow and heavy Spanish merchant ships returning from South America laden with gold and silver.