What Is Capitalism?
An Introduction
As I have been trying to finish my dissertation, I have been running into the problem that I want to say much, much more than my committee would ever possibly let me get away with. This is mostly a good thing - I need to finish after all - but it does mean that I have certain ideas that I have been fixating on that aren’t getting out of my head. And they are crowding out the dissertation thoughts I should be having instead. So, I shall instead inflict them on whoever happens to stumble across this blog from my various social media accounts.
If you’re looking for other people to blame for these posts, look to the Mimbres School. That’s not to say that they’re responsible for anything I say, I of course, but part of why I’m thinking about this so much is that I’m signed up for Sean Capener’s “When Is Capitalism?” class:
https://mimbres.study.garden/courses
I’ve been very influenced by conversations with Sean and others at Mimbres on these topics. Colin Drumm often says something along the lines of “Marx goes wrong from the very first sentence of Capital” (if I could find the original, I’d cite it), and part of my goal here is to explain how I understand that statement. I also think the first sentence of Capital is wrong; we can make this about capital if you’d like, but I don’t think it’s about commodities.
The final chapter of my dissertation tries to reconstruct a non-Marxist theory of capitalism from some Haitian sources that come immediately before and probably influence Marx, either directly or indirectly, and so here I’m trying to lay out (at least for myself) what that theory may look like outside of the narrow bounds of the early 19th century.
What do I understand capitalism to be?