Disassembly Required. Geoff Mann

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Disassembly Required - Geoff Mann


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on market competition between buyers and sellers. In a market, buyers generate demand, and sellers generate supply. If there are many buyers relative to supply, demand is high; if there are many sellers relative to demand, supply is high. The resolution of this competition between buyers and sellers, between sellers and other sellers, and between buyers and other buyers—however temporary or instantaneous—produces what we call a price: the agreed upon amount of money for which a commodity is exchanged. In other words, prices are not natural or mechanical products of some abstraction called “the market.” Prices may be “objectively” determined, in the roughest sense, by the cost of inputs, labour, etc., but all market prices are social artifacts, the outcome of conflict and negotiation between individual buyers and sellers, and between total demand and total supply—the wage, the price of labour, is the clearest example of the social origins of prices.

      (3) Monetary System Based on Bank-Credit Money

      None of the above would work, especially on a large scale, without a means of exchange and payment, or money. The money that circulates in money and capital markets—money used for investment or financial speculation—is produced by banks (loaned) for profit (which takes the form of the interest charged on the loan). Financing production and investment with money created via bank loans is unique to capitalism. While enterprises, wage work, and market exchange of the type we just described all existed in limited form before capitalism, their growth—to the point where they now define how things are done across much of the world—was only possible with the emergence of a state-sanctioned private banking system that could provide the necessary capital.

      (4) The State

      Finally, the state plays a key role—as both help and hindrance—in capitalism. That role is specific to different nation states at different times, but is also generalizable in important ways. The most obvious is sometimes referred to as the state’s “police” or “night-watchman” function: the guarantee of the sanctity of private property rights, the fundamental precondition of all market exchange. But there are other roles that will come up often in what lies ahead, if in complex ways, since the state is always a site of extraordinary contradiction. It simultaneously appears as one of the most powerful obstacles to a world beyond capitalism and one of the most immediately useful tools for building that world.

      Before we turn to a more detailed critique of these fundamental aspects of capitalism, however, we need to consider the concepts that enable us to even think about capitalism, and the theories that have explained, defended, and criticized it over time. For much of the power of capitalism, and the challenges facing the effort to displace it, are caught up in how it has become “common sense,” how easily the profit imperative has been confused with “human nature.”

      2. Capitalist Political Economy: Smith to Marx to Keynes and Beyond

      The most powerful theories developed to understand capitalist political economy have always played a significant role in shaping it as well. In general, these theories have three basic and related objectives: understanding economic change, development, or “growth”; understanding the distribution of the wealth that growth generates; and (especially recently) understanding how market prices are determined. Despite this common ground, we find a vast conceptual diversity. These differences are only partly “normative,” i.e., attributable to contrasting views of how the world ought to work. The more fundamental force behind them is historical conditioning. Depending on their contexts, thinking humans develop certain ideas and not others; they feel compelled to explain certain elements, others they consider less worthy of attention. Even as they shift meaning over time, ideas carry their pasts with them, pasts with built-in limits and potentials that are hard to see. Once revolutionary ideas can come to seem reactionary. Things considered a priori or obviously true in one time and place are often open to debate in another.

      Thus, as we turn to the foundational ideas of thinkers like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes, we must remind ourselves that theories of capitalism are attempts to make sense of dynamic processes unfolding in the world in specific times and spaces. This sensitivity is essential to any effort to uncover what work a theory was meant to do, what work it might or might not be able to do today, and the difference between them.

      Adam


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