What Is Capitalism?

My Grandfather and the 407

I got involved in politics the same way many people do: through my family. My grandfather, a lifelong union man, had been volunteering for political campaigns as long as I could remember. He started by helping the NDP but drifted to the Liberals to keep the Conservatives out of power in his rural GTA riding, which was always an uphill battle. My first time volunteering for an electoral campaign was in the aftermath of the 2008 federal election, helping my grandfather take down signs after the Liberal defeat.

My grandfather would rant about rightwing politicians whenever he got the opportunity. I was too young to understand what it meant at the time to have grown up in Ontario under Mike Harris, but he made sure I understood it in retrospect. Among my grandfather’s favourite words for Harris and his crew was that they were a “scurrilous” lot. While he would happily list off the damage that the PCs had done to the various aspects of the provincial government – health care, education, infrastructure, and so on – it always seemed to be the sale of the 407 that galled him most particularly. A secret deal to give away a public highway for a song came to epitomize rightwing corruption in so many of his stories.

My grandfather is certainly not alone on the centre-left at being appalled by privatization in general or this privatization in particular. This privatization in particular was widely regarded to be a bad deal; the highway was evidently worth much more than the amount for which it sold. Privatization, in general, is considered to be an important part of the neoliberal turn after Reagan and Thatcher (and Mulroney, for us in Canada), and thus an important part of so-called late capitalism. But what about privatization is capitalist?

Privatization – selling off government assets, converting them from public to private – is usually understood in Marxism using the framework of “so-called primitive accumulation”. Marx describes it as “so-called” because the term “primitive accumulation”, taken uncritically, serves to naturalize preexisting property relations. We know capitalism is not a level playing field since some people start out rich while others start out poor; interrogating primitive accumulation means asking why that is. Marx can be a bit vague on the specifics, but he talks about enclosure (kicking peasants off the lands so that they can be used to raise sheep) in late (late) Medieval England to sell wool in the Flanders wool market (Capital 878) as an early example, and then spends quite a bit off time thinking about it in relation to colonization in Chapter 33. Whether Marx intends this to be solely primitive, as in originary, and thus a discrete stage before capitalism, or whether it can be understood as well as an ongoing process internal to capitalism is a matter of some debate, which I shall not rehash here. Suffice to say, if we understand the sale of the 407 in Marxist terms, we would understand it as a part of capitalism or, at least, its preconditions.

So, what about the 407 is incompatible with pre-capitalist economies? Since feudalism is often used as capitalism’s foil among Marxists, another way to ask this might be to ask what about the sale of the 407 is incompatible with feudalism? Tolling roads is obviously not restricted to any one economic form. Furthermore, it would not necessarily be the government doing the tolling; as king, I could I appoint someone else to toll a road. High tolls are not unheard of either; abusing the power to toll that comes with public office is where the term “robber baron” comes from. Obviously, what separates these feudal examples from the 407 is that, in the modern case, that public office has been sold and is now in private hands.

But selling a public office is not restricted to capitalism; an office that can be sold is referred to as a venal office. And while venality is often associated with its proliferation in the Early Modern ancien regime in France, and thus definitionally part of France’s transition to capitalism in the Marxist sense, it is not limited to that context. There’s a long history of money being used to attain noble status, so I’m not sure that the sale part of the sale of the public office giving one the right to toll the 407 for 99 years is what makes it capitalist. The definition must be in the definition of the word private.

In every non-capitalist example of which I am aware, the rights to toll came with some kind of responsibility. In the original example of the robber barons, we know about these 11^th century German nobles rapaciously tolling the Rhine because people were complaining about them to the Holy Roman Empire, and thus the Empire put a stop to it. In a pre-capitalist context, the sale of the 407 would have invited complaints that would have increased, presumably until they were answered.

In Ontario, Harris’s successor was defeated, in part, by the promise by the Liberals to do just that: to undo the 407 deal. McGuinty tried (I’m too young to know how hard), but he failed. He told his constituents that the secret deal could not be undone. The right to toll that road – that venal office – had become private property and thus could not be violated. People more or less stopped complaining to the government. (That said, Doug Ford, this story’s Napoleon III, is purportedly looking into undoing his political uncle’s mess – by buying it back, of course, keeping private property inviolable.) When we talk about the 19^th century railroad owners as “robber barons”, perhaps the operative term is baron rather than robber. (Indeed, similar terms like tycoon and mogul seem to be both derived from words for nobility as well, in Japan and India respectively, Orientalism providing an even clearer link to despotism.)

The tolling of the 407, this public office, by becoming private property, now seems to confer rights without responsibilities. If we think of it as a venal office designed to be abused, maybe that explains why my grandfather was so angry.