The metaphysics of seventeenth-century philosopher and courtier Gottfried Leibniz maintained that the world we live in is the best of all possible worlds because God realized a world with the greatest number of mutually compatible possibilities. And so, for a possibility to efficiently become real, it must be compossible—in agreement with other possibles. He wrote in the brief piece “A Resume of Metaphysics” that from “the conflict of all possibles demanding existence this at least follows, that there exists that series of things through which the greatest amount exists, that is, the maximal series of all possibles.” Compossibles are what determine what can pass easily into the reality of a given culture.
I’m on the side of Marxist theorists who recognize the Dutch Golden Age as the birth of capitalism. Thinkers like the late Ellen Meiksins Wood marked its starting point in eighteenth-century rural England.
Moishe Postone’s use of Newtonian time to explain capitalist temporality might fruitfully be compared with David Harvey’s Newtonian space. In the 2004 paper “Space as Keyword,” Harvey organized space into three types: 1) absolute, which is fixed, Newtonian, and represents “the space of private property and other bounded territorial designations (such as states, administrative units, city plans and urban grids)”; 2) relative, which is Einsteinian, and concerns the movement of commodities; it is “the space of transportation relations”; and finally 3) relational, which is Liebnizian and collapses Einsteinian space-time into monadian internal relations—“external influences get internalized in specific processes or things through time.” From the perspective of economics, the first space represents classical liberalism, the second the neoclassical moment (which includes Keynesianism, or at least its bastard form, as Joan Robinson put it), and the third neoliberalism. See David Harvey: A Critical Reader, eds. Noel Castree and Derek Gregory (Blackwell, 2006), 270–95.
Dolly Parton: “Workin’ 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’ / Barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’ / They just use your mind and they never give you credit / It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it! / 9 to 5, for service and devotion / You would think that I would deserve a fat promotion / Want to move ahead but the boss won’t seem to let me / I swear sometimes that man is out to get me!” From the album 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs (1980) →.
This point was made by Adam Smith in Book 5, chapter 2 of An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. He writes: “By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life … But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt … Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them … Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend, not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people” →.
It’s important to keep in mind that a high-degree of sociality (or hyper-sociality) does not always result in a sophisticated or complex culture (or ultra-culture). Ants, for example, are highly social, but they don’t have much of a culture. This point is made in an important 2018 book by Gary Tomlison, Culture and the Course of Human Evolution. But there is a reason I emphasize the difference between culture and the social. The confusion of the two leads to attributing what is transhistorical (the human as a social animal) with that which is historical, and therefore plastic or can change quickly (the human as a cultural animal). It is at this point that my own theory (which draws from sociobiology) meets Postone’s post-Marxian assertion of the historical specificity of capitalism.
Value is purely cultural, and use value is part cultural and part social. In his 1973 book The Mirror of Production, Jean Baudrillard argued that both value and use value were cultural. This insistence was inspired by his very loud break with orthodox Marxism.
Gary Tomlinson writes: “What are the general differences between the semiosis that is widespread in the animal world and the much rarer elaboration of semiosis that constitutes culture? What are the features that have enabled a few animal taxa to elaborate semiosis into culture? Such questions can easily exhaust themselves in debates about the extent of animal culture in the world today. These are of immense inherent interest, of course, and they have greatly raised our awareness of the complexities of nonhuman animal behaviors. They suggest that we should draw the borders of nonhuman culture liberally, to include at least a small range of mammalian and avian lineages: certain primates, some cetaceans, a few other mammals, and some birds. All the same, we must be careful not to confuse animal culture with the far broader category of animal sociality. Ants have complex societies, but they do not have cultures. Many instances of highly developed avian and mammalian sociality also exist without giving rise to culture.” Gary Tomlinson, Culture and the Course of Human Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2018), 79.
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 74.
Postone writes: “The reconstitution of value and the redetermination of social productivity entailed by the dialectic I have outlined are the most basic determinations of a process of reproducing the relation of wage labor and capital which is both static and dynamic; this relation is reproduced in a way that transforms each of its terms. This process of reproduction, as analyzed by Marx, ultimately is a function of the value form and would not be the case were material wealth the defining form of wealth. It is, as we have seen, an aspect of a necessary treadmill dynamic, in which increased productivity results neither in a corresponding increase in social wealth nor in a corresponding decrease in labor time, but in the constitution of a new base level of productivity—which leads to still further increases in productivity.” Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 347.
Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 293.
Hegel was one of the first philosophers to recognize capitalism. But he did not name it as such. In his 1803 text “System of Ethical Life,” parts of which appeared in his mature work Philosophy of Right, he vividly describes a capitalism that’s so developed that much of it can’t be distinguished from the capitalism of our day.
The separation of wealth as value from wealth as stuff results in what John Maynard Keynes described in his General Theory as “poverty in the midst of plenty.” For more on this, read Geoff Mann’s “Poverty in the Midst of Plenty: Unemployment, Liquidity, and Keynes’s Scarcity Theory of Capital,” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 1 (Fall 2015).