Take a photo of a barcode or cover
sean_mann 's review for:
The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View
by Ellen Meiksins Wood
The two main themes that stood out to me from this book are the historical specificity of capitalism (it is a unique economic and social system that developed due to particular historical conditions), and the qualitative shift in social and property relations that had to come about to make capitalism possible.
Woods makes a strong case that capitalism wasn't just a result of a quantitative shift (better technology + better divisions of labor = more accumulation of capital), but was due to a qualitative shift in how people related to each other and the legal constitution of property. Once the English were able to shift people's relationships to property, and allow the dispossession of huge amounts of farmers due the legal concepts of enclosure and "improvement" (productive use of land for creating exchange value), it was only a matter of time before wage labor became almost universal and market imperatives became integrated into social relations.
This was not inevitable, but the result of specific historical conditions and the enforcement of a specific view of property.
Overall, the book was more accessible than I thought, though the first section showed how much more I have to learn about history and political economy. I could spend years reading the different perspectives Woods quotes and argues against in setting up the way that many thinkers naturalize capitalism with arguments that tend to assume the conditions of capitalism have always existed, while trying to explain how it came into being.
Woods makes a strong case that capitalism wasn't just a result of a quantitative shift (better technology + better divisions of labor = more accumulation of capital), but was due to a qualitative shift in how people related to each other and the legal constitution of property. Once the English were able to shift people's relationships to property, and allow the dispossession of huge amounts of farmers due the legal concepts of enclosure and "improvement" (productive use of land for creating exchange value), it was only a matter of time before wage labor became almost universal and market imperatives became integrated into social relations.
This was not inevitable, but the result of specific historical conditions and the enforcement of a specific view of property.
Overall, the book was more accessible than I thought, though the first section showed how much more I have to learn about history and political economy. I could spend years reading the different perspectives Woods quotes and argues against in setting up the way that many thinkers naturalize capitalism with arguments that tend to assume the conditions of capitalism have always existed, while trying to explain how it came into being.