Whence Capitalism? (Burger Edition)

In his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, David Foster Wallace opens with a classic joke about fish:

"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'"

The parable, which Wallace is characteristically eager to deconstruct, serves as metaphor for the so-called common sense truth that "the important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about." What's passed over here is exactly why these realities are hard to see. This is where the Marxist concept of ideology becomes useful.

Plainly stated, ideology "is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence, through which people make rough sense of the social reality they live and create from day to day."¹ It is the air we breathe, or, to return to our fish metaphor, it is the water in which we swim. Ultimately, ideology is not something than anyone can escape or find themselves existing in a state removed from its influence. We are at all times conditioned by ideological thinking. Much like Hashem in the minds of the medieval kabbalists, ideology dwells in an infinite many rooms—as Engels once wrote, "there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event."² Spheres within spheres that encompass and warp one another. A fractal fun house of reality defining truisms.

Unsurprisingly, these "truisms" are constantly reified in the form of popular myths about American life and its origins. Having gone through the American public education system, I can say with confidence that during my grade school education there was never any doubt that America was always, and would forever remain, a capitalist country. The intrepid Protestant "freedom seekers" of the Mayflower, and other such ships, were at all points focused on the establishment of a "shining city on a hill" in which one would find a local market that would act as a quaint version of the big box stores I had grown up going to all of my life. Once the pesky Indians were done away with, capitalism would be found, ready-made.

As I've gotten older and more interested in the origins of capitalism, that particular narrative never really seemed to square with the historical record. America was more or less a marginal force in international politics for hundreds of years since its establishment as a set of loosely connected British colonies. It did not emerge as an ultra-wealthy, world-historic powerhouse until the powers of Western Europe collapsed under the weight of their own bombs. It wasn't until the Civil War that there was an established paper currency backed by the federal government (trailing Britain by over a century).³ And so one is tempted to ask yet again, "Whence Capitalism?"

In order to learn more about America's capitalist origins I decided to read Charles Post's 2011 book The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620-1877. Contained within it are five previously published articles on the topic, and one additional article written specifically for the book. They cover different aspects of the same central question: "When did America become capitalist and how?" Post, like Ellen Meiksins Wood, Robert Brenner, and Spencer Dimmock (whose book The Origin of Capitalism in England 1400-1600 I wrote about here), operates under the logic of "Political Marxism". Following that tradition he "emphasises the random—unpredictable—outcome of class-struggles in preserving, restructuring, or transforming different forms of social labour." Put another way, he does not believe in the hyper-structuralist view of Orthodox Marxists which take for granted transitions between modes of production.

For Post, America, prior to the mid 19th century, more or less existed in two bifurcated modes of production: household-production and slave-plantation production. To any American reading this, these modes were split down obvious geographical lines. The North (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, etc.) belonged to the former, the South (Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, etc.) to the latter. What separated them was custom, land availability and land arability. Northern farmers had more modest plots of land and produced crops largely for their own subsistence. Southern plantation owners did produce for the market, but inefficiently and never needed market-based profits to reproduce themselves.

This is not to say that Northern farmers never sold their crops at market, they did so frequently, but it is to say that they never relied on the practice. Post writes, "The farmers' autonomy from market coercion during the 18th century was the consequence of their ability to maintain their status as small property-owners without recourse to effective production for the market…" Plots were large enough to ensure harvests could guarantee another turn around the sun as long as the goods were consumed at a reasonable pace. The same persisted for the South: "US slave-plantations were self-sufficient in food in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." Slave-owners would have slaves tend to their own gardens in the off-season for cash crops (tobacco, cotton, etc.) so as to eliminate the need to reach out into the marketplace to fill the need for food. Despite the fact that slave-plantations would grow crops to sell on the market, they were never dominated by the logic of capital. The most obvious example of this being that "the masters could not readily reduce the size of their slave labour-force to adapt labour-saving technologies in the face of changing market imperatives." Capital requires a constant reinvestment in fixed capital at the expense of variable capital—slaves were not variable capital and could not be improved with machinery without making portions of them irrelevant.

What then turned the tides for the emergence of a capitalist America? Post points to two major influences: the rise in property taxes following the Revolutionary period and land speculation. The Revolutionary war caused serious disruptions to the lives of colonial Americans. The war was terribly expensive and, in order to settle serious foreign and domestic debts, the state governments, and federal government, had to levy comparably serious taxes on their subjects. This led to a "cycle of class-struggles during the 1780s and 1790s which initiated the transition from independent household-production to petty-commodity production in the north-eastern countryside." The burgeoning merchant classes lobbied for greater and greater control of the political apparatuses of post-revolutionary America whose "political hegemony ensured that the farmers marketed both the 'surplus' and portions of their 'subsistence'-output." No longer could farmers get away with storing some of their crops for their own consumption and selling the excess, each pile became one and the same to pay their dues. Furthermore, as a steady increase in taxes became commonplace there then came a wave of land speculation which drove up those self-same property taxes: "Land-speculation was the product of merchant inspired capitalist state-policies (federal land-laws that transformed land in the trans-Allegheny west into a commodity)." This generated a "necessity to compete effectively in order to survive economically [which] compelled farmers throughout the Northern US to specialise production in cash crops best adapted to their soil-types." Over time the "cash-crop specialisation" that followed led to a "very rapid and continuous rise in labour productivity in agriculture from the 1840s to 1850s." By that point, capitalist development had reached such a head in the North that it began to butt heads with the slave-plantation economy in the South leading to "the political crisis that culminated in the Civil War."

What then marks a society as developing capitalism? Post refers to a sort of checklist designed by Robert Brenner which I have reproduced in a paraphrased form:

1. Can independent production survive?
   • Must people sell their labour-power?
2. Can labour be made more productive through separation or specialization?
   • Can land be appropriated?
3. Are there incentives for investing in labour productivity?

For colonial America, there is not a single box that can be ticked in favour of a capitalist economy. Independent production puttered on, there was minimal agricultural specialization, and farms were no more productive than anywhere else nor did they need to be. The slave-owning Southern plantation owners never encountered a situation whereby they could not reproduce themselves without recourse to the market, they did specialize into cash-crops, but only for the British foreign market, but because they were essentially the only game in town with regards to cotton production there was never a need to invest in increasing labour productivity. The South had to be brought kicking and screaming into the capitalist world through the auspices of the North as midwife. Although "the 'market historians' are quite correct when they claim the US has no 'feudal past'" they are seriously mistaken to assume that the US has always had a strictly capitalist past.