Critique de Capitalism par Josh

Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History adopts such a broad definition of capitalism that it comes to encompass nearly the entirety of the last five hundred years of economic history. It recalls the old joke about the compulsive gambler who loses his shirt every night at poker. Eventually someone tells him the game is rigged and he has no chance of winning. “I know,” the gambler replies, “but it’s the only game in town.” Capitalism, in Beckert’s telling, is similarly inescapable: rigged or not, an ever-growing share of the world’s population has had no choice but to participate in it.

But this raises an obvious question: what exactly is capitalism? What are the rules of the game?

At its core lies the sanctity of property rights. Owners of capital cannot be dispossessed of their property without consent. Closely tied to this is the sanctity of contracts: if two parties freely enter into an agreement, both are obligated to uphold it.

Yet, as Beckert shows, Europe’s growing commitment to property rights coexisted uneasily for centuries with the large-scale expropriation of land, labor, and resources abroad. In his view, this is capitalism’s dark counterpart—so central to its historical development that expropriation may be as fundamental to capitalism as property rights themselves.

Much of this expropriation unfolded under intellectual frameworks associated with figures like John Locke. Locke argued that unused “waste land” could be legitimately claimed by those who mixed their labor with it. In practice, such doctrines were often extended to justify colonial seizure of land and even slavery itself. Enslaved people were portrayed as inherently idle or incapable of productive self-direction, making coercion appear not merely permissible but economically necessary.

A modern defender of capitalism might argue that slavery and colonial extraction were not truly capitalist systems, but rather the “non-capitalist materials,” as Joseph Schumpeter put it, from which capitalism emerged. Whether one classifies the slave and colonial eras as capitalist is, to some extent, a matter of terminology. Critics of modern capitalism tend to emphasize the continuity between those systems and the present order, while defenders are more likely to stress the profound discontinuities and transformations that have taken place since.