Through the waning years of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, a cottage industry of sorts has erupted around how best to characterize the extreme and in many ways frightening transformations of capitalist economies. Designations offered for the current era certainly tell a tale: “gore capitalism” (Valencia 2018); “carceral capitalism” (Wang 2018); “authoritarian capitalism” (Bloom 2016); “totalitarian capitalism” (Liodakis 2010); “crack capitalism” (Holloway 2010); capitalism that has reached its “cancer stage” (McMurtry 1999); and so forth. These, along with ubiquitous references to “globalized”, “neoliberal”, and “financialized” capitalism, are all intended to emphasize some striking feature of capitalist economies to differentiate capitalism as it supposedly “really exists” today from the capitalisms of the past.
What is particularly revealing about this spate of writings is that, with a few notable exceptions, its elaboration upon those aspects of economic goings-on deemed most idiosyncratic of current seismic transformations proceeds with little account taken of an earlier growth industry on theorizing capitalist change in the post–World War II (WWII ) period. As will be shown in this book, the genre of work on post-WWII capitalism is extremely fecund. A diverse group of authors from around the world set out to conceptualize the modus operandi of an era of capitalism widely referred to as a “golden age” of prosperity among advanced economies. This writing, of course, was hardly triumphalist. Its critical bent spurred theorists to not only explore economic and institutional contours of the era, along with processes that purportedly launched these, but extrapolate from existing tendencies future prospects for capitalism.
That such extrapolative ventures in virtually no case captured the global economic shifts that shape today’s world is hardly surprising. It is not only a question here of social science itself being an explanatory science rather than predictive, which is de rigueur in natural science (we will attempt to navigate this thorny epistemological and ontological thicket in later chapters). Rather, the problem rests with the conceptual frameworks and analytical procedures that have been applied to understanding momentous capitalist change. And, indeed, it is precisely to answer such big theoretical questions of capitalist transformation that calls forth the research agenda of periodizing capitalism, which is the concern of this book.
After all, the view that such a creature known as a capitalist economy really exists is largely accepted axiomatically. Where things begin to get messy is over questions of the “kinds” of capitalist economies that have populated modern history. Then we enter the realm of an even greater problematic when attempts are made to delineate broad “types” of capitalism in the context of sweeping world historic transformations of capitalism as captured in the aforementioned notion of capitalism reaching a “cancer stage”, for example. If humanity finds itself today in such a “stage” of capitalism, there, of course, needs to be theorizing of what the key elements of this era of capitalist history are that differentiate it from previous periods. But theory must also account for the way these elements mark different kinds of capitalist economies such that notwithstanding their empirical differences (e.g. between the United States [US] or Japan’s economy), it is still possible to classify them as representatives of this “cancer” species of capitalism. Finally, the crux of the matter, which is often occluded in the analysis of capitalist change, is the ultimate conceptual touchstone for determining whether an era of economic history or a particular type of economy, “cancerous” or not, is capitalist in the first place.
While this issue will be revisited at points over the following pages, it may be safely asserted here that mainstream economics, from its “classical” birth through its neoclassical progeny, offers little foundation for thinking systematically about capitalism and capitalist change. After all, its basic orientation is that “the Invisible Hand of Providence …coordinated and reconciled all disparate and conflicting interests of blind human beings (like ‘monads’) into a world of the (Leibnizian) Pre-established Harmony” (Sekine 2013: 245). Thus, the fundamental approach of mainstream economics to really existing capitalism revolves around the question of how human economic life is best compelled to obey the dictates of “the market” as captured today by neoclassical models and the “virtual economy” these depict, to adopt the apt expression of Blaug (2003: 147–8). And, though there is a case to be made that classical political economy at least grappled with how social wealth is produced through “real” market workings (which potentially leads to problematizing capitalist change), neoclassical economics shifts the very course of mainstream economic thinking away from such interests toward the narrow concern over distribution of “given” means (Dasgupta 1987: 77).
It is largely (though not solely, as we shall see) in the hands of Marxian economics and political economy that the research program of periodizing capitalism unfolds. Two overarching research frameworks may be preliminarily delineated. Though, to be sure, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. First, building on Marx’s words spiking his various writings to the effect that capitalism is driven by an “inner” logic or “laws…winning their way through and working themselves out with an iron necessity” (Marx 1977: 91), Marxist approaches have endeavored to create an explanatory “chain link” between the “laws” as they understand these and historical transmutations of capitalism (Laibman 2005: 293). The merit of these approaches is that they seek to ground their analysis of capitalist change on some “essence” or constant of capitalism which it is then claimed shapes capitalist development notwithstanding the dramatic historical recasting it undergoes across its major historical stages or phases. Where these miscarry, on the one hand, stems from the chosen constant that is conceptualized as the prime mover of capitalism and, on the other hand, due to the inclinations of such theorizations to box in historical difference, contingency, and agency.
A second broad research approach to periodizing capitalism largely anchors its analysis in the systemization of empirical history to produce what are dubbed “stylized facts” or “ideal types” of institutional or economic trends in capitalist economies (Hollingsworth and Boyer 1998). In its dedicated Marxian political economy version, this broad approach to periodizing capitalism carries over elements of the first in setting out a matrix of core economic “forms” which orient the systemizing of empirical history in a capitalist period. Marxist approaches of this cast also eschew determinate explanations of capitalist transmutation bound to purported trans-capitalist economic “laws”. Most importantly, Marxist approaches here offer refined explanations of how, notwithstanding crises tendencies inhering in capitalism, a pattern of relatively stable accumulation over decades is nevertheless managed.
A significant contingent of non-Marxist perspectives falls into this broad category of periodizing capitalism according to systemizations of empirical history. Interestingly, these approaches sprouted during the post-WWII era. And, while such analyses of the post-WWII period of capitalism self-identified as non-Marxist, that they were either inspired by questions Marxism asked (as opposed to neoclassical economics silence) or tacitly imbibed in their work Marxian foci on technological change, forms of business organization, and the like is instructive.
Yet, where Marxian and non-Marxian variants of periodizing capitalism through systemizing empirical history miscarry is over what gave the first genre its confidence. That is, the attempt to set out a constant or invariable substance of capitalism that defines it or its operations in their most fundamental incarnation. Initially, the move of theory away from its tethering to a constant of capitalism was heralded as a positive, liberating step, opening up a vista for greater historical play and accounting for difference and contingency which “orthodox” Marxism supposedly frustrated (Hirst and Zeitlin 1991). However, in the end, it left periodizing capitalism at the mercy of ad hoc constructions of stylized facts based upon this or that salient feature of the age. And, as adverted to above, in their reveling in historical idiosyncrasies of an era, the life span of such theories was inevitably short as momentous, unforeseen economic change overwhelmed them.
Eliding elaboration of a constant or invariable substance of capitalism leads to a bigger problem for the periodization of capitalism research program. Capitalist economies have existed in human history for a few hundred years, possibly longer depending on the theoretical approach to this question. Economic historians of both Marxist and non-Marxist persuasions engaged in extensive, long-running international debate over the genetic markers of the capitalist era, the process by which capitalism emerged from the womb of precapitalist society and on what initially differentiated capitalist economic modalities from those engaged in within “feudal” economies (see, for example, Aston and Philpin 1987; Anderson 1996). Why this debate raged for so long, in fact, it arguably continues today in some academic circles, is precisely because no benchmark for what capitalism is in its most fundamental incarnation was accepted by all parties to the dispute. Travails of this theoretical gap are only compounded by the “gray” historical conditions that prevail during times of epochal social change, as was the existential condition of the period of transition away from feudalism in Western Europe.
As will be argued in later chapters, it is the case particularly with regard to periodizing post-WWII capitalism and conceptualizing the economic changes occurring at the close of the twentieth century that dearth of theoretical reflection on how to apprehend capitalism in its most fundamental incarnation hamstrings thought in ways not unrelated to difficulties faced in treating the transition from feudal economies to capitalism. This follows from the fact that an array of economic practices adopted in so-called golden age social democratic, welfare state capitalism “governed” capitalist market operations with a degree of programming and coordination in many ways more akin to socialism than capitalism (Kapp 1939). What is important to grasp here is that it is not simply a question of the existence of a “mixed” economy that confronts theory and empirical analysis. Rather the core problem is that of historical determinacy of the economic “forms” composing the “mix”. In the case of feudal economies in their process of disintegration, it will be shown that the sprouting within them of what are perceived as ostensibly capitalist practices does not necessarily beget capitalism per se. Much the same may be said of germinating socialist economic forms within capitalist economies. These do not necessarily lead to the rise of socialism itself.
Two Foundations for Periodizing Capitalism in Marx’s Writing
Given the central role Marxian economics and political economy, both directly and tacitly, plays in periodizing capitalism as a research program, it is necessary to acknowledge upfront that ambiguities in Marx’s own writings impel thinking along two broad paths. First, in the famous “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx states (1904: 11–2):
In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure...