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Capitalism and the Third Industrial Revolution
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19569 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
5,587 Words |
| Author
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Joseph Finkelstein
Joseph Finkelstein is a professor of history and economics at
Union College in Schenectady, New York. He is editor of
Windows on a New World: The Third Industrial Revolution. |
Three hundred years ago, when the only computer was the abacus and the leveraged buyout was far in the future, life was almost as different from that of today as were the Middle Ages.
Although economic activity has always existed in many forms, some of them quite exotic, we in the twentieth century have created an era that is truly light-years beyond any period of the past. The "world we have lost" was rich in variety and cultural diversity but frightfully poor in such fundamental material things as bread, shirts, and shelter. Indeed, for most of the millions of the globe's inhabitants during all the previous millennia, life was at best "nasty, brutish, and short."
No single reason explains the seeming miracle that lofted a small portion of our world into a trajectory above the rest. This separate orbit of well-being initially affected only Europe. Later, of course, other areas, such as the United States and Japan, would participate, and many littoral areas around the world would be drawn into the worldwide spiral of economic growth.
The exchange of goods has, it appears, always existed. Ancient ships long buried on the seafloor continue to yield artifacts of trade of the utmost variety--wine, oil, gold bars, pottery, and jewelry. Perishable goods have disappeared, but we have from such records as clay tablets, hieroglyphics, and wampum the account of large and ongoing transactions. No two peoples have lived adjacent to each other without fighting, cohabiting, and exchanging goods.
Capitalism has no agreed-upon definition. The term emerges from the socialist literature of the mid and late nineteenth century as a pejorative. Marx, of course, labeled his great work Das Kapital. Others, like the German economic historian Werner Sombart, labored over capitalism's forms and chronology to little purpose.
What is clear is that markets of many forms and textures have existed for hundreds of years, and capitalist activity for centuries. The celebrated "just wage" and "just price" of Christian Europe really amounted to market wage and market price in practice. Northern Italy was much advanced in long-range trade by the fourteenth century, and the mercantilists of early modern Europe were knowledgeable in economic theory and in bottom-line practice, despite what schoolchildren are taught. For example, the crude bullionism of the Spanish and Portuguese was not the practice of the British, the French, or the
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