A Brief History of Capitalism
The best definition of capitalism, as far I am concerned, is “mass production of goods and services for sales in geographically extended markets.” That definition, it has occurred to me, allows for both ‘private enterprise capitalism’ and ‘state capitalism’. I have no problem with that. It also allows for ‘bondage slavery’ as well as ‘wage slavery’. I have no problem with that, either.
Civilization began with (relative) mass production of agricultural products for sales in local markets. “Civilization” means, literally, living in cities. In the very first city on Earth as today, surplus food was needed to feed people who were not engaged in the production (or hunting/gathering) of food.
I had always assumed that bondage slavery was present from the very beginning of civilization, that it was intrinsic to the process of establishing cities. I have recently been disabused of that assumption. In the first cities farmers and herders were apparently paid (using money or barter) for their food.
Slavery did, however, soon rear its ugly head. Enslaving people made it possible to create the first capital surpluses.
Slaves are capital. They are people used as machines — or draft animals. Enslaving people created capital out of nothing, as it were, capital acquired without having to surrender anything in exchange: pure capital surplus.
Slave labor produced surpluses of goods and services. For one thing, the slaves could not be consumers of anything beyond what was needed for the merest subsistence. The existence of slaves therefore initiated a search for markets to sell the goods and services that the slaves produced. Sales in extended geographical markets developed (using money or large-scale barter), and capitalism was born.
From the start of civilization, perhaps even narrowly preceding it, wage slavery existed (though the ‘wages’ may have been in the form of goods and services). There were people who employed others for wages for the material gain of the employer. In wage slavery the employer still uses the employee as a machine (or a draft animal) — and hopefully, from the point of view of the employer, for just enough in exchange to keep the wage slave in good enough condition to work and reproduce.
Such employment in the days of city-states and empires, when wealth was in control of the political (and religious?) elites, was almost totally limited to local production for local consumption — mostly to the local elites. Capitalism as we commonly think of it today arose with production of goods and services for sales in geographically extended markets using wage slavery in privately owned enterprises. State capitalism, in which the people are effectively the wage slaves of the ruling elite, has also existed, as in the old Soviet Union and in a few remnants of that system scattered around the globe, but most wage slavery today is in undertaken in private enterprises.