From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon Sep 18 2006 - 16:42:13 EDT
Marx defined the capitalist mode of production (CMP) sometimes (1) as "generalised commodity production" (veralgemeinte Warenproduktion), i.e. the subordination of the entire production process of an economic community to the laws of commercial trade, and sometimes (2) as a "unity of the production process and the circulation process". Such an economic system could not exist at all, without the general use of money and the valuation of assets in monetary terms - the growth of integrated capital, credit and money markets within and between nation-states were a powerful stimulus for the development of the system. I think though Marx saw the essence of the CMP in what he calls "the capital relation" - summarised with the formula that "capital commands/buys labor". This assumes that both the inputs (the "factors of production") and outputs of production have become tradeable commodities with money prices, within a market system. Broadly, I would say the difference between merchant capitalism and industrial capitalism is that in merchant capitalism the larger part of production in an economic community does *not* function on a specifically capitalist basis (with privately owned means of production that can be more or less freely bought and sold as capital investments, and an extensive, integrated labour market for wage-labour). So, in merchant capitalism, trading houses, a small urban industrial sector, urban and rural petty-commodity production and subsistence farming exist side by side. In industrial capitalism, the extraction of surplus-value is however no longer limited mainly to the exchange (trading) process, but is also obtained directly from industries employing wage-labour, on a large scale, carried out on the basis of commercial principles. The "Smithian" or mercantilist vision of a "society of petty commodity producers" was in reality not possible, since beyond a certain point the growth of commercial markets inevitably produces industrial capital and wage labour on a larger and larger scale (though perhaps very unevenly in space and time). Historians debate the exact periodisations of mercantile and industrial capitalism - after all we are dealing with a world-historical process stretched out in time and space - but I would say one could date the beginnings of the dominance of industrial capitalism in Western Europe (principally Britain) at around 1800 or 1820. The concept `working class' emerged in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, at first used especially in the plural form. The 'working classes' (or labouring classes) comprised all those people employed to work for wages in manual occupations. Probably the term came into use when, because of the rise of manufactures and factories, new groups of wage earners appeared who could be classified neither among domestic servants, nor among day-labourers or journeymen. I've provided a short wikipedia entry on the CMP here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_mode_of_production Jurriaan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Sep 30 2006 - 00:00:06 EDT