“A supernova produces a burst of light billions of times brighter than the Sun, reaching that brightness just a few days after the start of the outburst. The total amount of electromagnetic energy radiated by a supernova during the few months it takes to brighten and fade away is roughly the same, as the Sun will radiate during its entire ten-billion-year lifetime.” W. Shea, “Galileo and the Supernova of 1604,” in 1604–2004: Supernovae as Cosmological Lighthouses, ASP Conference Series, vol. 342 (2005): 13 →.
“Galileo did not hear about the supernova for several days, and his first recorded observation is dated 28 October. By then the news had become a sensation, and everyone wanted to know what the professor of Astronomy at the University of Padua had to say about it. Galileo had held that position since 1592, but this was the first time in twelve years that he was called upon to give a public lecture. The subject was so hot that he gave not one, but three lectures. Only the first page and a fragment of the end of his first lecture have survived, and we do not know exactly when he delivered these talks, but it was probably during November while the star could still be seen in the evening sky. From the last week in November until after Christmas, it was too near the Sun to be visible. When it reappeared it could be seen just before dawn in the East.” W. Shea, “Galileo and the Supernova of 1604,” 15.
The last major stateless market city was Antwerp, which was sacked in 1576.
I use “spontaneous” in its thermodynamic sense, as a natural tendency. There is nothing spontaneous about capitalism.
Much to the disappointment of Leibniz, the Dutch cloth merchant Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) treated the microscope not as a scientific object but as a secret asset an enterprise can use to maintain what Marx called “relative surplus value.”
Christiaan Huygens (1629–94) is credited with determining the connection between mass and velocity. This resulted in one of the most famous equations of the first mechanical age: F = mv²/R.
James Gleick writes that the African talking drum “was a technology much sought in Europe: long-distance communication faster than any traveler on foot or horseback. Through the still night air over a river, the thump of the drum could carry six or seven miles. Relayed from village to village, messages could rumble a hundred miles or more in a matter of an hour.” The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (Pantheon, 2011).
Ronald L. Meek writes: “This line of inquiry, says Stewart, began with Montesquieu, who ‘attempted to account, from the changes in the condition of mankind, which take place in the different stages of their progress, for the corresponding alterations which their institutions undergo.’ As a description of Montesquieu’s approach this is a little inept: few clear traces of a stadial view of this type can in fact be found in the Spirit of Laws. As a description of Smith’s approach, however, it is very accurate indeed.” But the stadial theory of human development begins with Francis Hutchenson, the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, which might be more important than the French Enlightenment (referred to as “the Enlightenment”). Smith, Marx & After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought (Chapman & Hall, 1977), 21.
Though György Lukács’s masterful The Young Hegel substantially describes Adam Smith’s impact on Hegel, he doesn’t connect Smith’s stadial theory of history with Hegel’s theory of history progressing, as Geist (Spirit), from lower to higher stages. Hegel’s Spirit might very well be a combination of Spinoza’s unmoving substance (“the oriental conception of emanation as the absolute is the light which illumines itself” but doesn’t reflect) and the motive force of the stadial theory elaborated by the Scottish Enlightenment.
Though Marx did emphasize the cultural specificity of capitalism, particularly in Grundrisse and Capital volume one, he never really broke with the stadial view of history, made clear by his late and unproductive statement that “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.”
Giovanni Arrighi writes: “It so happens that Braudel’s notion of financial expansions as closing phases of major capitalist developments has enabled me to break down the entire lifetime of the capitalist world system (Braudel’s longue durée) into more manageable units of analysis, which I have called systemic cycles of accumulation. Although I have named these cycles after particular components of the system (Genoa, Holland, Britain, and the United States), the cycles themselves refer to the system as a whole and not to its components.” The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (Verso, 1994), xiii.
Giovanni Arrighi includes China in the list of capital’s dominant accumulation cycles in his final book, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2007).
The steam engine also played an important role in concentrating capital in cities. The machine was, unlike rivers, portable.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, who provides an excellent summary or the long and as yet unresolved “transition debate” in The Origin of Capital: A Longer View (Verso, 2002), writes: “The central question at issue between Sweezy and Dobb was where to locate the ‘prime mover’ in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Was the primary cause of the transition to be found within the basic, constitutive relations of feudalism, the relations between lords and peasants? Or was it external to those relations, located particularly in the expansion of trade?” p. 38.
Does a cultural system see what it wants to or can believe? I ask this question because it’s curious that entropy, which now plays the role of the leading description of the motion of the whole universe, was discovered by engineers and scientists seeking to improve the efficiency of the steam engine.
Helmut Reichelt: “In Marx’s thought the expansion of the concept into the absolute is the adequate expression of a reality where this event is happening in an analogous manner … Hegelian idealism, for which human beings obey a despotic notion, is indeed more adequate to this inverted world than any nominalistic theory wishing to accept the universal as something subjectively conceptual. It is bourgeois society as ontology.” Helmut Reichelt, Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalsbegrifs bei Marx (ça ira-Verlag, 2001), 76–77, 80. Translated by Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva as “The Neue Marx-Lektüre: Putting the Critique of Political Economy Back into the Critique of Society,” Radical Philosophy, no. 189 (January–February 2015).
Moishe Postone writes that Marx “explicitly characterizes capital as the self-moving substance which is Subject. In so doing, Marx suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian sense does indeed exist in capitalism, yet he does not identify it with any social grouping, such as the proletariat, or with humanity. Rather, Marx analyzes it in terms of the structure of social relations constituted by forms of objectifying practice and grasped by the category of capital (and, hence, value). His analysis suggests that the social relations that characterize capitalism are of a very peculiar sort—they possess the attributes that Hegel accorded the Geist. It is in this sense, then, that a historical Subject as conceived by Hegel exists in capitalism.” Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Following the Neue Marx-Lektüre and Moishe Postone, the young Marxist scholar Søren Mau writes: “The resemblance between capital and the subject in this Hegelian sense comes out very clearly in Marx’s analysis of capital. For him, capital is fundamentally a movement, or ‘value-in-process.’ The beginning and the end of this movement are qualitatively identical: with capital, value ‘enters into a private relationship with itself,’ thereby elevating its being-for-others—that is, being-for-consumption in the case of simple circulation (C-M-C)—to ‘being-for-itself.’” Mute Compulsions (Verso, 2024).
The most rewarding chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Ithaca,” moves between the cosmic and the commercial with great ease. The two cannot be separated. Measuring economic activity and the distance to stars are directly related. The accounting intensity (or mania) of the former made the latter inevitable. How much did you spend today? How bright is the moon tonight? How long does it take for a ship to cross the ocean? How long does it take for light to arrive from that galaxy? What are the assets in your mother’s will? What is the composition of water? “Ithaca” is the stuff of a disenchanted society.
Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the 17th Century (University of Chicago Press, 1984), 83. In the way Alpers’s book was inspired by Foucault’s The Order of Things, this essay is inspired by Roland Barthes’s brilliant but too-brief “The World as Object.” Barthes’s reading of Dutch Art: “The Dutch scenes require a gradual and complete reading; we must begin at one edge and finish at the other, audit the painting like an accountant, not forgetting this corner, that margin, that background, in which is inscribed yet another perfectly rendered object adding its unit to this patient weighing of property or of merchandise.” Critical Essays (Northwestern University Press, 1972), 7.
We know this line in the same way we know Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner.” It’s not an accident that Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx ends with a classic tune by Bob Dylan.
Wu-Tang Clan, “C.R.E.A.M.,” Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (Loud Records, 1994).
Marx writes in Capital volume one: “In the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an overriding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears” →. I must here point out that what Marx calls “socially necessary,” I call “culturally necessary.” The social is transhistorical; the cultural is not. A society is the object investigated by sociobiology; a culture is the subject of anthropology. The productions of the former are spontaneous; those of the latter are not.
I transport this concept coined by Raymond Williams in 1954 to the post-Althusserian structuralism spelled out in Stuart Hall’s 1973 lecture “A ‘Reading’ of Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse” (Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham). Personal feelings are structured by the culture one is in. In our case, that culture is capitalism. It must also be noted that Hall’s Althusserian point of departure has greater explanatory power than Foucault’s.
The oldest known book about the stock market is Joseph Penso de la Vega’s Confusión de Confusiones, which was published in the twilight of the Dutch Golden Age (1688) and presents the speculative mania in way not so different from how films like Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962) and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) depict it.
Not long after Donald Trump was reelected on November 5, 2024, Bloomberg reported that Elon Musk’s market value exploded from $200 billion to over $400 billion →.
Charles Mackey, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). The description of tulip mania is not as competent as the book’s description of the “Mississippi Scheme” that gave us the expression “bubble.”
However, one thing that can said about Adam Smith’s sprawling survey of commercial society is that all the defining positions of the leading schools of economics, from Marxism to modern monetary theory, can be found, in some form or another, expressed in it. For example, Smith is aware that capitalism is not about needs but desires. This fact is captured in the famous diamond-water paradox. Smith writes in Wealth of Nations: “The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarcely anything; scarcely anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarcely any use-value; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.” “Of the Origin and Use of Money,” in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. This is only a paradox if you refuse to recognize capitalism’s reenchantment. Tulips and diamonds, property values and AI—what matters is not what you can eat, but what melts into air.
John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (W.W. Norton & Co., 1963), 358–73.
Marx thought capital produced its own gravediggers, the workers. Keynes believed capital was its own gravedigger. It could dig its own grave by becoming too abundant. In the latter case, the Sweezy school of Marxist economics borrowed from an early American Keynesian, Alvin Hensen, to solve this enigma. Abundance, the result of capitalist re-enhancement, is wasted in one way or another. In Monopoly Capital (1966), Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran identify the growing importance of marketing in the postwar US as serving the key function of wasting capital.
John Maynard Keynes on capitalism in the nineteenth century: “Thus this remarkable system depended for its growth on a double bluff or deception. On the one hand the laboring classes accepted from ignorance or powerlessness, or were compelled, persuaded, or cajoled by custom, convention, authority, and the well-established order of Society into accepting, a situation in which they could call their own very little of the cake that they and Nature and the capitalists were co-operating to produce. And on the other hand the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. The duty of ‘saving’ became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion. There grew round the non-consumption of the cake all those instincts of puritanism which in other ages has withdrawn itself from the world and has neglected the arts of production as well as those of enjoyment. And so the cake increased; but to what end was not clearly contemplated. Individuals would be exhorted not so much to abstain as to defer, and to cultivate the pleasures of security and anticipation. Saving was for old age or for your children; but this was only in theory—the virtue of the cake was that it was never to be consumed, neither by you nor by your children after you.” The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Macmillan & Co., Limited), 1919.
To use the words of Depeche Mode, “A Question of Time,” Black Celebration (Sony Music, 1986).
For a fascinating examination of Marshall’s theory of waiting, and also his adoption and then abandonment of Marxian socialism for what we now call marginalism (the cement of the neoclassical school that has ruled economics since the 1980s), see Kiichiro Yagi, “Marshall and Marx: ‘Waiting’ and ‘Reproduction,’” Kyoto University Economic Review 62, no. 2 (October 1992).
Much of political economy can be boiled down to a dreamer refusing to believe they are dreaming.
Noam Yuran, What Money Wants: An Economy of Desire (Stanford University Press, 2014), 39–40.
John Stuart Mill: “When a country has carried production as far as in the existing state of knowledge it can be carried with an amount of return corresponding to the average strength of the effective desire of accumulation in that country, it has reached what is called the stationary state; the state in which no further addition will be made to capital, unless there takes place either some improvement in the arts of production, or an increase in the strength of the desire to accumulate.” Principles of Political Economy, vol. 1 (Parker, 1857), 210.
His concept of transeconomics should not be confused with transhistoricism. The former is about the market as totality specific to a culture we call capitalism; the latter naturalizes the categories of our market culture: wages, profits, money, exchange, and so forth. Baudrillard on transeconomics: “There is something much more shattering than inflation, however, and that is the mass of floating money whirling about the Earth in an orbital rondo. Money is now the only genuine artificial satellite. A pure artifact, it enjoys a truly astral mobility; and it is instantaneously convertible. Money has now found its proper place, a place far more wondrous than the stock exchange: the orbit in which it rises and sets like some artificial sun.” The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (Verso, 1990), 33.
Baudrillard writes: “Exchange value is what makes the use value of products appear as its anthropological horizon. The exchange value of labor power is what makes its use value, the concrete origin and end of the act of labor, appear as its ‘generic’ alibi. This is the logic of signifiers which produces the ‘evidence’ of the ‘reality’ of the signified and the referent. In every way, exchange value makes concrete production, concrete consumption, and concrete signification appear only in distorted, abstract forms. But it foments the concrete as its ideological ectoplasm, its phantasm of origin and transcendence (de passement). In this sense need, use value, and the referent “do not exist.” They are only concepts produced and projected into a generic dimension by the development of the very system of exchange value.” The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (Telos Press, 1975), 30.
It’s telling that Victorian anthropologists saw Aboriginal Australians as inhabiting dreamtime, but themselves. They, the masters of progress, were in the real; their subjects were lost in a dream. But a culture, no matter what form it takes, demands for its coherence a good deal of dreaming.
Mike Dash, Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused (Crown, 2001), 167.