Industrial Capitalism

11 Key excerpts on "Industrial Capitalism"

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  The Nation-State and Violence

  • Anthony Giddens(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  5

  Capitalism, Industrialism and Social Transformation

  What is Capitalism?

  Among both sociologists and historians, the fortunes of the concept of ‘capitalism’ have waxed and waned in different periods over the past century or so. Historians characteristically have been suspicious of the notion, although often on grounds that apply to many generalizing concepts, that it is too diffuse to do justice to the subtleties of historical detail and particularity. Where they have not been close to Marxism, sociologists have often favoured other terms to refer to the changes associated with modernity, such as ‘industrialism’, or the more global concept of ‘industrial society’. Marxists tend to use the word ‘capitalism’ with casual profligacy, regarding the development of capitalist production as the most fundamental phenomenon affecting the modern world, but not always being too careful to identify its traits in any sort of precise way. Behind the conceptual admixtures there are, however, a number of basic disagreements of substance. One concerns the primacy of the events or changes associated respectively with ‘capitalism’ and with ‘industrialism’. For Marx, and for his self-professed followers, industrialism is in its essential respects a furthering of characteristics found in capitalism, which is both more general and which precedes it in time. According to the majority of non-Marxist social scientists, on the other hand, capitalism is but a transitory phase in the formation of modern ‘industry’ and ‘industrial society’. The latter notions are thus more important for analysing the modern world, and of a more generic nature, than is the former.1

  Clearly the points at issue here are in large degree empirical: How should we seek to characterize the major economic transformations that have occurred over the past two centuries? But they are also conceptual. For evidently neither the terms ‘capitalism’ nor ‘industrialism’ are always used in the same way by those on each side of this particular theoretical fence.

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  Capitalism

  A Short History

  • Jürgen Kocka(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 China’s rapid industrialization also began to take off only when the country’s party leadership decided to loosen political controls step by step and make room for capitalist principles. There obviously was (and is) a pronounced affinity between capitalism and industrialization: for both, investments are of decisive importance. An inherent part of industrialization is the permanent search for new projects, as is constant engagement in new configurations; to this end, pointers and feedback from markets were and are irreplaceable. A decentralized structure that disperses decision-making among many different enterprises has proven indispensable. So far, any effort at industrialization expecting to be successful over the long run has presupposed capitalism.

  Finally, industrialization changed capitalism:

  1.  Wage labor on a contractual basis turned into a mass phenomenon. This meant that, for the first time, the capitalist commodity form—embodied in the exchange of labor power for wages—was applied to human labor fully and en masse. Labor relations became capitalistic—that is, dependent on fluctuating labor markets, subjugated to strict calculation for capitalist purposes, and the object of direct supervision by the employer and manager. The class distinction inherent to capitalism thus became manifest, taking a tangible form as a conflict over power and the distribution of income, and becoming operative as the basis for social mobilization.

  2.  With factories, mines, and new transportation systems, with mechanization and the expansion of manufacturing plant, the accumulation of fixed capital reached a scale like nothing before. Alongside the numerically dominant small and medium-size businesses, large concerns and mergers came into being. This brought with it a rising need for precise control of profitability and led in principle—with significant qualifications in reality—to making entrepreneurial structure more systematic. Planned and hierarchical organization based on the division of labor gained ground as an element of capitalism along with, and connected to, the principle of the market.

  3.  Technological and organizational innovations became incomparably more important than they had been in preindustrial varieties of capitalism. There was now a faster pace of innovation. In Schumpeter’s analysis, “creative destruction” has been the core component of the capitalist production method. In fact, it only got to be this way when Industrial Capitalism emerged. Factories replaced proto-industrial cottage industry for spinning yarn and weaving cloth. Steamship routes displaced towpaths and other traditional modes of transport on rivers and canals. Suppliers of electric lights quickly triumphed over gaslight companies. A hundred years later, the manufacturers of typewriters lost their market to the producers of word-processing computers. To be sure, such changes opened up new chances of success and earnings opportunities for enterprising men and women of business and their employees. As a rule, consumers profited. At the same time there were many losers. However, “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”4

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  Capitalism and the Dialectic

  The Uno-Sekine Approach to Marxian Political Economy

  • John R. Bell(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  Consequently, industrial capital was able to appropriate the fruits of the workers’ surplus labour in the form of surplus value without having to resort to extra-economic coercion. The society-wide, impersonal and seemingly impartial market appeared on the surface to offer economic agents economic freedom and equality of opportunity while, in reality, its inner logic acts to reproduce class inequality. Liberals have always been ideologically blind to the fact that a class of workers who have nothing to sell but the ‘property’ of their labour power could not possibly meet on equal footing in the market with those who own income-producing property outside their persons and who appear in the market exclusively as buyers of labour power. Other stages of capitalism and, of course, other types of hierarchical society have had to devote far more attention to the development of the appropriate ideological defences of class and other social divisions, whereas the market, by virtue of its misleading appearance, relieves the defenders of the system of much of this burden (Uno unpublished, II, Introduction). The closer a particular social formation approaches pure capitalism, the less state support is required and the greater is the likelihood of a laissez-faire policy being advocated and implemented. It is, therefore, not surprising that in the liberal stage of capitalism laissez-faire policies were pursued. Due to the liberal faith in the self-regulation of the market, the economic policies that were favoured tended to eliminate restrictive trade practices (both at home and internationally), while strictly curtailing public finance. The Navigation Acts and the Corn Laws, together with royal charters with respect to monopolies, import duties and export bounties, were all eventually revoked. As the workshop of the world, Britain imported raw materials from all over the world and exported manufactured goods.

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  Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed

  • John Seed(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Thus, he says, ‘the veiled slav-ery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery pure of the New World as its pedestal’ (1976: 925). The dominant form of capital in these early European com-mercial empires of the sixteenth- to eighteenth centuries was merchant capital. It was largely driven by the need to appropri-ate wealth and raw materials and to monopolize trade. Methods of production under the rule of merchant capital were still in many respects pre-capitalist in form and the direct impact on the pre-capitalist modes of production of the societies it was plun-dering was limited, if mostly destructive. This changed with the transition first to manufacture and then to industrial forms of MARX: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED 92 production. ‘To-day’, Marx argued, ‘industrial supremacy brings with it commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture it is the reverse: commercial supremacy produces industrial predom-inance’ (1976: 918). Merchant capital, dependent on monopolistic restrictions in trade, was increasingly swept aside by international free trade. Pre-capitalist forms of production in Asia and Africa could hardly survive in the face of industrial production which was already by the middle of the nineteenth century transforming Britain, and some other parts of Western Europe and the United States, into societies of unprecedented wealth and power. The his-tory of the social division of labour and the transformation of the labour process, especially through machinery, is crucial for any understanding of the Industrial Capitalism of the present (of Marx’s present). It is to this other, convergent, history in the pages of Capital that we now turn. INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION For Marx, the recent history of Britain had been characterized by a massive and still incomplete transformation between two periods – the period of manufacture and the period of ‘modern industry’ – amounting to what he sometimes called an ‘industrial revolution’.

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  Global Historical Sociology

  • Julian Go, George Lawson(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Part III Capitalism and Political Economy 7 The Global, the Historical, and the Social in the Making of Capitalism Ho-fung Hung Introduction The rise and triumph of capitalism has been a focus of historical socio- logical analysis ever since the founders of sociology attempted to explain modernity through tracing the origins of capitalism in Europe. No matter whether they define capitalism as a relation of production grounded on waged labor (Marx), as an economic system driven by the urge to accu- mulate wealth for the sake of accumulating wealth (Weber), or as a division of labor that fostered the transition of human society from mechanical to organic solidarity (Durkheim), most studies along these lines continue to compare capitalist development in different countries as if they are isolated processes unfolding independently and confined within the boundary of nation states (e.g., Gerschenkron 1962; Amsden 1989; Brenner 1977). The rise of dependency theory and world systems analysis in the 1970s broke this mold of nation-state-centrism for the first time. Immanuel Wallerstein, who combined the Weberian, Durkheimian, and Marxist views to see capitalism as an economic system based on the ceaseless accumulation of capital, international division of labor, and transfer of surplus labor value from periphery to core regions, emphasized that since its genesis in the sixteenth century, capitalism has been an international system. For Wallerstein, capitalism was global from the start. Pathbreaking as this analysis is, the original world sys- tems paradigm is inadequate in specifying how the three processes of capitalism – capital accumulation, international division of labor, and surplus appropriation – are interrelated and which one is the most fundamental characteristic of capitalism.

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  The Structure of World History

  From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange

  • Kojin Karatani, Michael K. Bourdaghs(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Origins of Industrial Capitalism The accumulation of industrial capital is expressed by the formula M-C . . . C′-M′. The formula for merchant capital is M-C-M′ and that for usurer capital M-M′. In historical terms, the last two are older; industrial capital appeared only after they had come into existence. Marx writes that with the formation of industrial capital, merchant capital found itself displaced, con-fi ned to the commercial sector of industrial capital. The same was true for usurer capital. But the rise of industrial capital does not lead to the disap-pearance of merchant and usurer capital. By its nature, capital seeks surplus value through difference, not caring what kind of difference is involved. For capital, only rates of profit matter. Accordingly, where possible, capital will 194 chapter eight pursue self-valorization through commerce or fi nance, rather than through industrial capital, which requires investment in constant capital (fi xed as-sets). Th is does not change even after industrial capital becomes the main-stay, as can be seen, for example, in the trend toward fi nance capital in the United States since the end of the twentieth century. Let’s consider the emergence of industrial capital. Th is cannot be seen simply as a shift from merchant to industrial capital. Industrial capital is not something automatically produced through the development of world mar-kets and commodity production. For example, in the world markets of the early modern period, commodity production developed in many locations, but as I’ve noted, this did not necessarily lead to the appearance of indus-trial capital or the proletariat. Instead of leading to the destruction of the existing order, in many cases merchant capital actually preserved or even strengthened it. As a matter of historical fact, industrial capital (capitalist production) was born in Britain.

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  An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Marxism, Socialism and Communism

  Economic, Philosophical, Political and Sociological Theories, Concepts, Institutions and Practices - Classical and Modern, East-West Relations Included

  • J. Wilczynski(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  I.e. must not be confused with JOINT VENTURE. Industrial Democracy A broad term ap-plied in capitalist countries to WORKERS' PARTICIPATION. Industrialization The process of develop-ment of manufacturing industries and the necessary supporting branches of the economy at an accelerated rate. I. leads to profound economic, technical, socio-political and cultural changes in society. It may be a gradual process, brought about by favourable historical, geographic and social conditions, as was the case of the Industrial Revolutions in the leading Western countries, or it may be a deliber-ately planned development induced or im-posed 'from above', as in most Socialist countries (Czechoslovakia and the Ger-man DR being exceptions). I. has been a focus point for Marxist analysis. The early Marxist thinkers believed that a PRO-LETARIAN REVOLUTION could occur only in industrialized countries (they were later proven wrong). After the seizure of power, the Communist regimes assigned top priority to i. for the following reasons: 1. to develop more balanced economic structures (virtually all had been back-ward agricultural countries); 2. to become independent of the capitalist world for the export of raw materials and the import of manufactures; 3. to develop a solid military-industrial base in order to defend socialism and support revolutionary movements in capitalist countries; 4. to ensure full employment by creating new jobs in industry; 5. to raise labour produc-tivity and advance the Socialist society towards FULL COMMUNISM, a precondition of which is all-round affluence; 6. to en-large the industrial working class, the mainstay of Communist power; and 7. to demonstrate the superiority of Socialism as being capable of achieving i. in a rela-tively short period of time and relying on individual efforts. In capitalist countries, i. began mostly in light industries (textiles and other consumer goods) in response to market forces.

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  Re-Envisioning Global Development

  A Horizontal Perspective

  • Sandra Halperin(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Neoclassic economics treats markets as arenas in which economically rational actors trade without regard to social identity, political loyalties, or affiliations (Carruthers 1996: 162). 47 But, as Braudel noted, capitalism does ‘not take up all the possibilities for investment and progress’ that economic life offers (Braudel 1982: 422). The preferences of market participants concerning what to produce and for whom are shaped by social relations and by concerns relating to class, power, and status. 48 Industrial Capitalism requires foreign markets in order to maintain the basic relation of capital (the subordination of labour to capital). To maintain the basic relations of capital – to maintain a largely unskilled, uneducated, impoverished, and disenfranchised workforce that could be easily subordinated to capital – required that industrial production be geared to producing commodities for consumption abroad ; for to industrially produce goods for home use would require that workers be paid sufficient wages to enable them to consume what they produced, and this would lead to social levelling. Thus, in the nineteenth century, there was a change in the composition of output in favour of capital goods and services for upper-class consumption (Deane 1979: 270). European producers created consumers by encouraging rapid capital accumulation and concentration in other countries. They introduced new export crops – coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, rubber – or devised land-settlement schemes that stimulated production of traditional crops, such as rice, for export; and constructed physical infrastructure (roads, railroads, port facilities)

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  The Constitution of the City

  Economy, Society, and Urbanization in the Capitalist Era

  • Allen J. Scott(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  London alone reached a population of 2.7 million in the same year. Urbanization in the rest of Western Europe and in North America followed parallel patterns of growth and spread as capitalism and industrial development took deeper and deeper root in these parts of the world. 4 Why and how, we may ask, did capitalist industrialization lead to such rapid urbanization over wide areas in Western Europe and North America? How was this process expressed in the geometry of the urban land nexus? And what specifically was the role of the urban land nexus in accommodating and fostering this overall system of production and social life? INDUSTRIALIZATION AND URBANIZATION The Driving Force of Capitalism The capitalist economy revolves centrally around the activities of private firms in which labor and materials are combined to produce final outputs in quantities and with qualitative attributes that reflect the pressures of market pricing and profitability criteria. Efficiency and competitive advan- tage are therefore critical to firms, and the quest to achieve these forms of leverage has important effects on the space and time dimensions of pro- duction. The urban land nexus—in the context of the external relations of 3 INDUSTRIALIZATION AND URBANIZATION IN EARLY CAPITALISM 41 the city—plays a critically important part in helping to underpin this quest through its copious agglomeration economies. Capitalist society is also marked by deep class divisions as represented on the one side by owners, managers, professionals, and other social fractions that benefit dispropor- tionately from the status quo, and on the other side by wage-earning workers subject to economic and social subordination at the workplace and in the society at large. The precise social composition of these classes and the boundary line between them differ from place to place and from time to time, but they have remained as enduring elements of work and life throughout the history of capitalism.

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  Machines

  • Abraham P. DeLeon(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Information Age Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Machines, pages 21–36 Copyright © 2015 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 21 2 Capitalism and Its Machines The automatic machinery of the big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been. —Frederick Engels (1978, p. 731) Here, then, is the “curse” of our factory-system; as improvements in machinery have gone on, the “avarice of masters” has prompted many to exact more labour from their hands than they were fitted by nature to perform, and those who have wished for the hours of labour to be less for all ages than the legislature would even yet sanction, have had no alternative but to conform more or less to the prevailing practice, or abandon the trade altogether. —John Fielden (1836, pp. 34–35) T he emergence of machines occurs through such a wide variety of dis- cursive and epistemological domains that it becomes an intellectual feat in which to pull all of these disparate traditions together. Science, education, fictional accounts, and capitalist industries are just a few of how these are actualized. As Chapter 1 indicated, the representations of machines and their existence over a wide social sphere demonstrate their central role in our collective social consciousness. Returning to Figure 1.1, 22  Machines it aptly demonstrates how the forces and flows of Empire and global capi- talism shape the visions, metaphors, and actualizations of how machines emerge in particular historical conjunctures. In one particular facet of life in the West, machines have been integral to transformations experienced through capitalist enterprise and the organization of labor and production (MacKenzie, 1984).

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  Marxian Economics

  A New Japanese Tradition

  • Hiroshi Onishi(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  3

  Capitalism in Industrial Societies: The Qualitative Character of Capitalistic Production and Capital as the Command Over Labor

  The previous chapter discussed the characteristics of capitalism as a commodity-producing society and ended with the concept of capital as self-valorizing value. That is, we started from the concept of a commodity and ended with the concept of capital. We found that a capitalist society is not only a commodity-producing society but also one in which capital reigns as the ruler of labor.

  This chapter starts by explaining why labor must be ruled and what exploitation is, deduced from the qualitative characteristics of productivity. The previous chapter stated that only a certain quantitative level of productivity could realize commodity-producing societies, but here we explain that the new quality of productivity of great mechanized industries, which was achieved after the industrial revolution, formed the capitalist societies as the industrial societies.

  3.1 THE COMMAND OVER LABOR

  3.1.1 Another Definition of Capital: The Command Over Labor

  The last part of Chapter 2 defined capital as a self-valorizing value, which is understandable because the original meaning of the word “capital” is “a fund,” that is, the originally invested money G . It is invested because it increases to G ´; that is, it self-valorizes. This valorization is the purpose of capitalists, as Marx discusses in Capital , Volume 1, Chapter 4.

  However, Marx’s Capital provides another definition of capital, which is, “the command over labor, i.e., over functioning labor-power or the laborer himself” and “Capital further developed into a coercive relation, which compels the working class to do more work than the narrow round of its own life-wants prescribes” (Marx, 1887, 216). These words are not occasional. This part summarizes the first complete analysis of capital in the last part of Capital , Volume 1, Part 3: The production of absolute surplus value.1

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