You don’t need to know the entire coastline of an ocean before you begin exploring it. The exploration has to come before the map. On the other hand, if you want to tell anyone else where you’re going, you’ll need to be able to describe it in a way that situates it relative to shared landmarks, and distinguishes it from other oceans.
These are two different ways of thinking about what definitions are for. When historians like Louis Hyman write that “defining capitalism is a bad idea,” they’re thinking of the first version. When critics like Paul Kershaw ask such historians for clarity about “what they think capitalism is,” they’re worrying about the second.1
Using capitalism to frame your historiography has certain reasonably legible connotations, even without a definition. Most importantly, it takes activities and dynamics that might otherwise be abstracted as “the economy” and says, “no, these are elements in wider structures of power and meaning, and without adjusting our perspective to those structures we can’t understand what’s going on.”
Describing your work as a history of capitalism is a way of saying that you take the historical production of power and meaning seriously, and that your account of economic relationships is rooted in that context.
It’s also a way of differentiating your work from the kind of economic history that deploys a set of disciplinary assumptions to bracket off that context. Such bracketing makes quantification easier, and that’s part of the point, but it’s the assumptions rather than the quantification itself that historians often find suspicious.
What I’m describing there is an approach to historical study, though, not an object of it: a how, not a what. By putting forward a possible definition — “capitalism exists where capital (and through capital, power) is consolidated in such a way that labor can be highly commoditized” — Caitlin Rosenthal meets folk like Kershaw much closer to where they want to be.
Her empirical work shows that the slavery of the nineteenth-century United States would certainly fit such a definition of capitalism. By contrast, the idealized relationship between feudal lord and peasant leaves no room at all for labor as a commodity. Wherever we do find “highly commoditized” labor, Rosenthal’s definition tells us, we’re looking at capitalism. That doesn’t, of course, tell us everything we want to know about capitalism. It just helps direct our attention.
What particularly strikes me about Rosenthal’s formulation is the extensive agency that it seems to grant to capitalists themselves. “Slaveholders,” she writes, “deployed the language of commoditization as they chose.” The point is not that labor is commoditized, only that it can be. Laborers themselves — in this case, enslaved people — find themselves at the mercy of capitalists’ choices, while capitalists find themselves free to choose according to their interests.
Let’s compare that definition to one that Rosenthal rejects in a footnote: “generalized market dependence,” as set out by Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood.2 Here, laborers depend on the market to exchange their labor for the necessities of survival. At the same time, capitalists depend on the market to purchase labor and extract surplus value. Markets mediate all parties’ relation to production, forcing both capitalists and laborers to compete with one another and in turn, on average, driving prices down and productivity up. In this description, each capitalist may be more powerful than any laborer, but all alike are constrained and driven by forces beyond their control.
The Chicago sociologist John Clegg, whose earlier work Rosenthal cites, has recently given a full account of how slavery in the United States might be understood within the framework of market dependence. In fact, Clegg’s arguments intersect very neatly with Rosenthal’s work, because central to his case is the fact that enslaved labor was highly commoditized and exchangeable.
“In the antebellum South,” Clegg writes, “slaves were a highly liquid asset.”3 The labor power of enslaved people was bought and sold on the market — in a different way to wage laborers’, certainly, but rendering slaveholding capitalists dependent on the market all the same.
Rosenthal is interested in the limits of commoditization — enslaved people’s inability to purchase their own freedom at the market price. As she points out, that was essentially a question of monopoly, something that other market actors also have to deal with regularly. It doesn’t belie the fact that enslaved labor was mediated through the market.
Her analysis makes clear that enslavers often understood their human property as a commodity — for the purpose of accounting, insurance, or sale. Employers thought about wage-labor in similar ways. But in both cases, that thinking applied to the marketplace more than the workplace itself. How much does it tell us about capitalists’ violent and coercive power?
In her concluding paragraphs, Rosenthal rightly seeks to foreground the coercive element in capitalism, both under slavery and in today’s waged and salaried labor. To me, dependence explains that coercive element better than commoditization does. It is dependence on their wage or salary (or healthcare plan), dependence on the market for the things they need, that makes today’s workers vulnerable to the coercion and tyranny of their bosses — and precisely the extent that we avoid being dependent on those things that gives us freedom.
It is dependence on survival in the market that means even the most well-intentioned capitalists, and the most paternal of enslavers, must exploit their workers.
Market dependence is central to labor relations, then, because capitalists’ power over laborers is proportionate to their ability to buy replacement labor. That applies as much to enslavers as employers. The more easily replaced a worker is, the less strength she has when it comes to negotiation in the workplace.
And the flipside holds too. In reality, labor is rarely a fungible commodity. Workers’ experience, relationships, and skills make them less easily replaceable, and give them power vis-à-vis their bosses. Solidarity, collective organizing, is the workers’ best means of resisting commoditization and thus coercion. Collective resistance to enslavement was the call of antebellum abolitionists like David Walker. His advice is all too pertinent today.
About the author: Tom Cutterham is a historian of Revolutionary America and the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and a Lecturer at the University of Birmingham. Following his first book, Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic (Princeton University Press, 2017), he is working on two projects: a biography of Angelica Schuyler Church, and a volume of essays about capitalism and the American Revolution. @tomcutterham
Notes
- Louis Hyman, “Interchange: History of Capitalism,” as quoted in Rosenthal, “Capitalism when Labor was Capital: Slavery, Power, and Price in Antebellum America,” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 1.2 (Spring 2020), 296; Paul V. Kershaw, “Hamlet Without the Prince of Denmark: Bringing Capitalism Back into the ‘New’ History of Capitalism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 33.1, Special Issue: Capitalism and American Empire (March 2020), 61-73.
- Rosenthal, footnote 21, page 302. For an accessible interpretation of the position, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso, 2002).
- John Clegg, “A Theory of Capitalist Slavery,” Journal of Historical Sociology 33.1, Special Issue: Capitalism and American Empire (March 2020), 74-98, quotation at 83. Clegg diverges from the position of another follower of Brenner and Wood, Charles Post, whose interpretation situated slavery as external to capitalism: Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620-1877 (Haymarket Books, 2011).