What Does Capitalism Really Mean, Anyway?

"Beckert here refers to commodities in the loose, colloquial sense of products that can be bought and sold, but for the most part he uses the word as the technical term for a tradable good, like grain or copper, that is standardized, fungible, and divisible into arbitrary quantities."

"Its substance is homogenous, uniform, and interchangeable, as if it had been extruded page by page to meet the needs of procurers at any scale. Beckert has evidently assessed the consumer landscapea sluggish demand for exegeses of feudalism, a frothy bubble for tracts that put capitalism in its placeand banked on product-market fit. He explicitly frames his own enterprise as a speculative wager, a bet that capitalism's historyall of itmight be understood, if not wholly contained, between two book covers."

"If his competitors' merchandise is defective, it is because the attempt to tie capitalism to any monocausal explanation, any fragmentan institution, a technology, a nationdoes not explain much. Beckert believes that capitalism cannot be reduced to a discrete essence. It has neither a fixed origin nor a fixed trajectory. It is compatible with a variety of forms of political and social life, and it is never the same from place to place or moment to moment."

Capitalism's endgame is near-universal commodification, converting products and aspects of life into standardized, fungible, divisible tradable goods. Commodities are both everyday purchasable items and technical tradable goods like grain or copper. Capitalist development resists monocausal explanations tied to a single institution, technology, or nation; it lacks a fixed origin or trajectory and appears in diverse political and social forms. Capitalism emerges from the nexus of many human actions rather than singular actors. The persistence of the term capitalism implies a referent, but defining it requires avoiding static, essentializing, abstract, or presentist approaches and recognizing its variable manifestations across times and places.

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