Capitalism - The Awakening

In order to properly qualify the semantic scope of the term capitalism, Nancy Fraser (2018) poses a very pertinent question. If capitalism cannot be reduced to an economic system, then what does it refer to ? Her answer allows us to extend the semantic field to a reality that is not purely economic but societal. Capitalism would allow us to qualify the particular arrangement of a societal order with such a spatial and temporal scope that it would affect a set of societies, not to say all the societies of the planet. From this point of view, capitalism would share with feudalism the characteristic of being a structuring civilizational order.

Therefore, to speak of capitalism as an institutionalized social order based on such [institutional] divisions is to suggest its structural, non-accidental intertwining with gender oppression, political domination (both national and transnational, colonial and post-colonial), and ecological degradation — all three of which are linked, of course, to the equally structural, non-accidental foreground dynamic of labor exploitation.¹

Speaking of an instituted social order has the advantage of highlighting the regulative capacity of a societal configuration and identifying the institutional divisions at the source of the mechanisms of domination and exploitation. However, this all-encompassing focus obscures and ignores the presence of counter-hegemonic processes and dynamics. In other words, the order makes less apparent the tensions and contradictions that are part of the systemic instituted by a dominant order. If capitalism succeeds feudalism as a new institutionalized order, this means that within feudalism itself the transformations required for the transition to capitalism have emerged.

The concept of economic and social formation, derived from the work of Marx and Engels, has the advantage of presenting the functioning of an institutionalized social order in a dialectical way, that is, as a system subject to more or less disruptive tensions. Calls for change, often taking the form of technical or social innovations, question, question or propose adjustments, in a positive or negative way, to the components of the established order. In other words, their reading of the process that led to capitalism is based on the uncovering of evolutionary processes and dynamics arising from systemic contradictions, institutional tensions or struggles between social actors.

Maurice Godelier has given new life to the Marxist concept of economic and social formation. According to his analysis of this notion, its “evolutionary” dimension appears just as important as the hegemonic dimension generally attributed to the dominant class in control of the instituted social order.

An economic and social formation designates “what, in England, France, Germany, etc., constitutes a new mode of social existence and thought engendered by the development of the capitalist mode of production in these societies. Several concrete societies thus belong at the same time and in an unequal way to the same economic and social formation, insofar as their material life rests on the mode of production which serves as a basis to this social formation…

The concept of economic and social formation thus aims at making appear the laws of correspondence between modes of production and other forms of the social practice, and at releasing, the global logics of social and organic totalities…

The notion of transition… designates the forms and the processes of transformation of a mode of production in one or several others, and of an economic and social formation in one or several others².

To consider capitalism as an instituted social order exercising hegemony over the whole of contemporary societies implies that the reproduction of this order is continually at stake, that its hegemonic components must, day after day, deal with advances, but also with criticisms and questionings aiming sometimes at overthrowing it to institute a new order.

Notes

1
Nancy Fraser (2018), “Behind Marx’s ‘Secret Den’. For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism, Paris, Gallimard, p. 18.
2
Godelier, Maurice (1990). “La notion de transition chez Marx”, Sociologie et sociétés, vol. 22, n. 1, p. 56 and 57.