Restricting ‘capitalism’ to industrial wage-labor obscures its commercial and financial predecessors.

Evidence

R. H. Tawney has commented on the several forms of capitalism in European history. The occasion for his remarks was the review of Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (Routledge, London, 1946): “Mr. Dobb’s limitation of the term ‘capitalism’ to a particular system of production, under which labour is employed on the basis of a wage contract to produce surplus value for the owner of capital, might seem, at first sight, to escape some of the ambiguities inherent in less restricted interpretations; but it raises problems of its own. It is not merely that, as he would agree, financial and commercial capitalism have been highly developed in circumstances when the institution, as interpreted by him, has been a feeble plant, and that to exclude these varieties on the ground that they do not fall within the four corners of the nineteenth-century definition is to beg the question. It is that, as his work shows, the origins and growth of the industrial species require for their elucidation to be considered in relation to the history of other members of the family, some of which have been among its progenitors. Obviously the capitalism of our day rests predominantly on a wage-system, and the latter is so familiar that it is tempting to treat it as historically a constant.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1496

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Tawney’s critique of narrowly defining capitalism clarifies what the term must encompass to explain its history.
• XREF: This connects to Robinson’s overall argument that capitalism is historically a racial/social phenomenon, not reducible to wage contracts.

Related

• Capitalism is a symptom of something deeper and unnameable in Western civilization (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism is symptomatic of a deeper civilizational disorder that Marxism fails to name (similarity 0.78)
• Capitalism and racism evolved organically from feudalism rather than negating it (similarity 0.78)