MARXISM VS. THE NEW HISTORIANS OF CAPITALISM’:
An academic tendency distorts the history of slavery and capitalism James Miller, 2021
Part 1 of 3
The "new historians of capitalism," a group of scholars sponsored by Cornell's "History of Capitalism Initiative," describes its goal as deepening the analysis of pre–Civil War U.S. history by placing a greater emphasis on the integration of the plantation slave system established in the South with the capitalist mode of production prevailing in the North. (See:
http://hoc.ilr.cornell.edu/
)
The websites for the academicians criticized in this paper are as follows:
https://research.cornell.edu/researchers/edward-e-baptist
https://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/sven-beckert
https://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/walter-johnson
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/john-majewski/
This essay is intended to draw out the contrast between the perspective on slavery and capitalism advanced by the “New Historians of Capitalism” (henceforth abbreviated “NHC,”) and an opposed interpretation provided by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and some of the historians influenced by these pioneers of Marxism. The NHC is an academic political tendency, having emerged after 2010, which in certain respects departs from previously-developed schools of thought among historians over the social and political forces that determined the history of capitalism and slavery in the U.S. in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will explain the important differences between Marxism and the NHC, and how important it is for activists for social change to understand these differences.
The book Slavery's Capitalism, a compilation of essays edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, provides a good survey of the themes treated in the perspective of the “new historians of capitalism.”
The first essay is by Edward E. Baptist, a professor of History at Cornell, which echoes some of the themes in his book, The Half that has Never Been Told.
Another key title in the NHC repertoire is Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton. Beckert teaches history at Harvard University.
Yet another notable entrant in the array of scholarly examinations of this theme is River of Dark Dreams, by Walter Johnson, professor of history and African American Studies at Harvard.
The quality of scholarship of Becker, Baptist, Johnson, Rockman and their colleagues is generally quite accessible and often contains valuable insights into historical conditions and processes. They provide detailed revelations of the horrific abuses involved in the slave system, as well as the many ways in which capitalist exploitation and commercial activity developed interdependencies forms of collaboration with the slave system, particularly in the first 60 years of the 19th century. In this respect, they shed new light on some of the more obscure features of 19th century U. S. history. But their principal objective is to represent slavery and capitalism as amalgamated into a virtually undifferentiated unity.
CONFLICTING ECONOMIC TRAJECTORIES
The ideological urge to create a fusion between capitalism and slavery, or to blur the historical distinction between them, has converged with the rise of “critical race theory” in U.S. academia. Capitalism, in this interpretation, can no longer be seen as free of the taint of Black bondage and white supremacy. Instead, capitalism in the U.S. must be seen as the offspring of America’s original sin: slavery, and therefore peculiarly reprehensible. It's not really useful to lump “slavery’s capitalism” in with “critical race theory,” but there is a definite bond between the two approaches. Matthew Desmond, a contributor to The 1619 Project, (published first by the New York Times Magazine in 2019), is one scholar whose writing relies on the NHC for his condemnation of U.S. capitalism, and in so doing establishes the link between modern “woke” race-baiting and the trajectory of the NHC. But Desmond finds himself challenged by historian Peter Wood, who argues in his book, The 1620 Project:
“As Desmond pieces things together, the United States embarked on this low road during the era of cotton plantations: ‘That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since.’ In this fashion, Desmond joins forces with Hannah-Jones to enunciate a new form of American exceptionalism in which the United States is uniquely awful. For Hannah-Jones, our exceptionalism is that we elevated the concept of freedom but then denied freedom to the slaves and provided only impaired freedom to the descendants of slaves. Slavery itself is bad, but it is much worse, according to Hannah-Jones, in a society that pretends to recognize human dignity. For Desmond, our exceptionalism is that we perfected a way of ‘acquiring wealth without work’ by ‘abusing the powerless.’ We created a culture of ‘staggering inequality and undignified working conditions.’ Our capitalism is ‘a racist capitalism’ that ‘didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes.’”
The conflict between free labor and slavery had developed since the early 17th century in the economies of the thirteen colonies. The economic systems prevailing in the northern colonies were developing along an economic trajectory different from that of the southern colonies. There were many similarities between the North Atlantic colonies and their European counterparts, apart from the fact that the English crown utilized its colonial power to prevent the colonies from developing self-sufficiency in the production of manufactured goods. But in terms of land-ownership, productive methods, forms of labor in agriculture and in manufacturing, there was little difference. And progress was being made in improving productive technology on both sides of the Atlantic.
The American Revolution, starting in 1775 and culminating in Washington’s victory in 1881, gave the thirteen colonies the opportunity to chart their own developmental course. The anti-colonial revolutionary initiative, led by Samuel Adams of Boston and carried through by the Sons of Liberty, was a reflection principally of the need for economic independence, strongly felt in the North. Particularly critical was the freedom from taxation levied upon the colonial products by the British without any representation of the colonists themselves in the British parliament. The goal of the British crown was to prevent the colonies from becoming rivals, and to continue to use them as a source of income for the merchants, bankers and landowners of Britain. But apart from unjust taxation, the thirteen colonies needed to develop their own manufacturing capabilities, so as to avoid paying exorbitant prices for British goods.
The most active and forward-looking elements of the colonial population in the North (mechanics, artisans, master craftsmen, farmers) gathered around the Sons of Liberty, and came to recognize the growing strength of the American colonies and increasingly absorbed the passion for justice that was necessary to motivate the revolution. The self-confidence necessary to sustain a rebellion was promoted by the most active colonists in the coastal urban centers. These active pro-independence elements also became a pole of attraction for the most national-minded and politically insightful members of the planter aristocracy. The forces that could be relied upon to fight the British were generated by the growth of a population conditioned by the hardscrabble pioneer experience and the successes achieved in developing the resources of the new world. Upon winning independence from Great Britain, the leaders of the thirteen colonies recognized that they were finally able to pursue their own course.
But the issue of the existence of slavery was of serious concern to the leaders of the newly-founded nation. The revolutionary leaders Jefferson, Washington, Madison, themselves slaveholders, had come to recognize the necessity and the possibility of liberating the American colonies from Britain. Although they owned slaves, they felt that slavery was unjust and not ideal, for a nation that looked forward to a prosperous and bountiful future. A nation that had founded itself with the slogan, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” seemed morally compromised by the institution of slavery They believed that the future belonged to free labor. Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owner, wanted to blame King George III for imposing slavery on the 13 colonies, George Novack, in his essay “Slavery in colonial America,” published in the volume America’s Revolutionary Heritage (Pathfinder, 1971, p. 182) writes:
“In the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had inserted an indictment of George III for promoting and protecting the slave trade against colonial protests. But, he tells us, “the clause, reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren, also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
Jefferson expressed his opposition to slavery on many occasions. In a letter to John Holmes dated April 22, 1820, he had this to say:
“I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
It is Jefferson’s remark “we have the wolf by the ears,” that is most telling. We cannot live with slavery (because it suffocates our national development), but we cannot live without it either (because the slave states are powerful and wealthy)—and unity between all the states was necessary for national self-defense. Jefferson felt that the union’s existence depended on the mutual accommodation of the slave-owners with the free-labor economy. As the new nation developed further, the gap in national perspectives between the developing free-labor system in the North and the plantation-based slave system of the South became increasingly decisive in determining the course of the two sections of the new nation.
WHY SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD?
Slavery in the tropical and semitropical areas of the new world was a result of the availability of vast tracts of virgin land, the ability of European colonialists to seize them as sites of agricultural production, and the growing demand for the produce of these territories in Europe. The slave-plantation system rapidly developed in the 16th and 17th centuries primarily in the Caribbean islands and in South America, and with a slight delay, also grew rapidly in the Southern American states: Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. The enslavement of Africans became the ideal form of labor for the new plantations, and thus developed the famous “triangular trade:” the shipping of the agricultural products of the American colonies (sugar, rum, tobacco, coffee, cotton, etc.) to Europe, the transport of manufactured goods to West Africa (often to trade for enslaved persons), and the shipping of slaves to the plantations of the Caribbean and South America. The economic development of the southern colonies gradually took on a different character as a result of their growing dependence on plantation slavery.
This trade promoted the development of capitalism in both Europe and North America, as it made use of captive labor on a massive scale in the production of wealth at an accelerated pace. It must be kept in mind that the capitalist mode of production in the 18th century was only in its formative stages. Although fully developed capitalism is characterized by the mass production of commodities for sale and the mature differentiation between owners of property and wage laborers, in the mid to late 18th century—the age of the industrial revolution—this robust stage of development was the music of the future. It required several decades more to arrive at this high level.
As capitalist growth accelerated throughout the eighteenth century, slave labor, resuscitated from pre-capitalist conditions, became solidly entrenched in the Southern states. It became an intractable bastion of captive labor, whose proponents could not see it for what it was: a temporary stopgap for rapid economic development as well as a vehicle for the enrichment of those with capital to invest. Slave labor on the Southern plantations, while initially developing the trade and wealth that was so essential for the development of capitalism, in the long run became an obstacle to the growth of capitalism in the American colonies. At the time of the American Revolution had the upper hand as against the North in terms of the rapid accumulation of wealth and considerable military strength. In contemplating the task of measuring strength against the British colonial masters, it was plain that it would need the strength of both sections of the new nation to successfully confront them on the battlefield.
After the Revolution, more people grasped that the nation was composed of two opposed “sections,” although how these sections related to one another was perceived in different ways. John C. Calhoun, South Carolina cotton planter and seventh vice-president of the U.S., promoted the unity of the two sections as a foundation of stability. He argued, “The day that the balance between the two sections of the country—the slaveholding States and the non-slaveholding States—is destroyed is a day that will not be far removed from political revolution, anarchy, civil war, and widespread disaster.” (John C. Calhoun: Selected Writings and Speeches, p. 636) Calhoun, among others, recognized that the influx of wealth to the United States from the sales of plantation products around the world, was a vital source of national income. Most of the farming or
The sixth president of the U.S., John Quincy Adams, on the other hand, recognized that slavery was an obstacle for the further development of the country. As Fred Kaplan writes in the introduction to John Quincy Adams: American Visionary, “from his earliest years, Adams detested slavery; he was one of only two anti-slavery presidents between the founding of the country and the election of Lincoln. … Slavery was an abomination that needed to be contained and ultimately eliminated … All his life he feared the dissolution of the union. Slavery would destroy it, he believed, unless some future president would use the war powers inherent in the Constitution to end slavery. There would be rivers of blood. He both dreaded and hoped for the Civil War.”
SECTIONALISM
“Sectionalism” became a euphemism for the division of the country between free labor and slave labor. The NHC recognizes very well the basis of the “sectionalism.” But the problem is that the NHC don’t recognize the time-delimited nature of all social systems. Instead of seeing the relationship between the two sections as a phase of growth powered by capitalist innovation, expansion and exploitation, they rely upon a static conception of capitalism which they derive from the observable features of economic life during a limited period of time when capitalists were involved in a lucrative collaboration with the slave-masters and profiting from slavery itself. Thinking about how strong the ties were between capitalism and slavery, and how profitable the arrangement was, obscures their ability to recognize this system as a transitory phase, based on an underdeveloped capitalist economy which was just beginning to show its dynamic potential. In this early phase slavery was a boost to economic development, but later turned into an obstacle.
They don’t recognize the historical transitions the capitalist system passed through as it developed its own social relations and overpowered the remaining precapitalist economic regimes in the world. Their impressions of the nature of capitalism remain limited to the more obvious outward appearances of economic phenomena, such as banking and finance, accounting, landed property, purchase and sale, commodity prices and transport systems. They fail to perceive that the heart of capitalist development depends on the basic mode of production, which involves capitalist property in the means of production as the organizing center of society, and free labor as the source of the generation of wealth. It’s true that capital was capable of employing slave labor in this early phase, but only because it had not yet developed far enough in the new world to reveal its full inner potential. It was a limited form of labor that could be performed by people who were not able to speak the local language, and had no need of literacy to accomplish the tasks required. Plantation slavery became an important contributing factor to the growth of the capitalist system in the Americas, but this did not mean that slavery was a component of capitalism or an alternate form of capitalism. Slavery was a transitory mode of production, brought about by the lack of an adequate supply of manual laborers in the new world for production work on large-scale agricultural estates. Slavery was bound to be overcome when the conditions that brought it into existence no longer prevailed.
The NHC writers have produced a range of sharp criticisms of the inhuman, profit-mad oppression of enslaved human beings in the Americas, and does a good job of cutting through the euphemisms and evasions often found in previous academic traditions which tried to whitewash or downplay slavery. But at the same time, they create confusion about the differences in origin and evolution of the two systems of production that became intertwined during a limited historical period. They ignore, or belittle, the economic contradictions that were working toward a rupture of national cohesion and propelled the nation into the slaughter of the Civil War. In this sense, they represent a step backward from the past Civil War historians, such as Kenneth Stampp, Eugene Genovese, Charles and Mary Beard, Phil Foner, Eric Foner, C. Vann Woodward, George Novack, and W.E.B DuBois, as well as the historically-contemporary commentaries of Marx and Engels.
ESSENTIALS OF CAPITALISM
At this point we should provide a thumbnail description of the basics of capitalism in order to clarify what is left out in the shallow version of antebellum capitalism offered by the NHC. Marx, Engels, and their followers analyzed capitalism as a system that arose historically in the course of the growth of commodity production (fabrication of products of labor for sale) in Europe. As commodity production became more extensive, the medieval guild system of masters, journeymen and apprentices gave way to larger production workshops with more journeymen and helpers. Throughout the 18th century, as technology and machinery improved, the system of factory production with machinery developed. The industrial revolution of the 1780s accelerated the process. This budding capitalism attracted the investments of bankers and merchants, enabling ever more rapid expansion of production.
The basic core of the capitalist mode of production took the form of the investment of capital in the means of production—the purchase of raw materials, productive machinery, tooling and accessory equipment—and the payment of wages for the workers hired to labor in factories, workshops and other worksites. Workers interacted with the means of production and produced commodities, which then became the property of the capitalist. The commodities were sold at a price which was determined, on average, by the time necessary to produce them. This selling price, on average, guaranteed a higher return to the capitalist than the amount invested. The profit was a result of the fact that the workers created more value in production than was represented by the wages they were paid. This unpaid labor value, which Marx called surplus value, once pocketed by the capitalist on the sale of the commodities, constituted the profit reaped by the capitalist. This profit was the prime motivation of the capitalist for investing in the production of commodities.
In building this analysis, Marx and Engels developed their materialist outlook, enabling them to view the entire sweep of historical change and the different social systems that humanity had developed throughout the millennia. Engels described this perspective as follows (preface to the first edition of Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884):
“According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.”
This places the evolution of capitalist production in the context of the previous social regimes that prepared the ground for it. At the heart of capitalism is a system of extracting profit from the labor of wage workers. The tentacles of capitalist production reach out to all economic activities and draw them into its embrace. Capital gradually achieves control over banking and merchant trade; these monetary and credit relations had existed long before capitalism and are not essential to its definition.
Historically, it is trade that served as a handmaiden to the growth of capitalist production in Europe. International trade, and the growth of commodity production it facilitated in Europe, as well as the increasing quantities of loanable money that were attracted to productive investment, spurred the gradual emergence of a money-based economy in the centuries after the European crusades to the Middle East (Thirteenth Century). As for credit and banking, these economic phenomena had developed in the ancient world, whether to finance purchases of land or slaves, or to fund merchant ventures. All of these tendencies combined to form the early phase of the capitalist system in the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet the NHC characterize capitalism as though it were synonymous with trade and finance. Generally, these economic categories do not define capitalism, but serve as historical precursors of the capitalist mode of production, and within capitalism serve as dependent sectors. With the growth of capitalist production, centered in the production and distribution of the bulk of the products of labor as commodities, trade and finance become subordinated to the needs and rhythms of this industrial production and its expansion.
In an appendix to Vol. III of Capital, “Law of Value and Rate of Profit,” Karl Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels explained the evolution of international and local exchange of commodities (products of labor made for sale), from their origins in the early years of ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean civilizations. Engels explained how this historical evolution paved the road for the emergence of capitalism once commodity production and exchange had gained sufficient economic weight and extension in the 17th and 18th centuries. The key feature of the capitalist mode of production was the conquest by private wealth of the ownership of the means of production and the purchase of labor power by these owners—the capitalists. The completion of this process registered the highest stage in the evolution of the exchange of commodities. It was the purchase and sale of labor power that became the defining characteristic of capitalism, and its central form of exchange. The capitalist system proved to be the most dynamic method for the production of wealth that had come into existence, in a world-historic sense. It was the rapidly increasing generation of surplus-value by wage labor that enabled this system of production to become dominant throughout the world, overcoming the resistance of the feudal and slave-based powers. However, capital did make use of slave labor in circumstances that promised high returns in areas of the world where wage laborers did not exist.
CAPITAL IN THE NEW WORLD
It is true that capitalism, in its conquest of the Americas, resurrected slave labor from the reserves of historical experience. This was by no means accidental, and in retrospect proved to be the fastest and most convenient way of implanting profitable agricultural enterprises in the tropical and subtropical areas of the New World. This happened in the 16th century, in a period of the advanced development of the mercantile systems of trade and navigation. The Spanish conquistadors, arriving in new lands teeming with great masses of primitive peoples, did what one would expect them to do. They enslaved these peoples and exterminated those who proved to be recalcitrant. The British soon followed suit, as did the European colonizers of Africa and Asia. Marx explained this in Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 31, as he dealt with the early phase of the conquest of the Americas:
“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c. … [C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”[15]
Marx shows how capital, whenever it seizes upon a ready source of higher profits, as in the Southern U.S. with the rise of cash crops grown with slave labor, it jumps in without reservation, as he indicated in Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 10, Sec. 2:
“But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour, &c., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now a question of production of surplus-labour itself.”
Capitalist development, as it conquers one field of production after another, requires the availability of a class of free wageworkers—free to learn new skills, free to move about in search of gainful employment of, free to organize their own family lives and raise their own children—laborers who have the potential to spring into action at the capitalists’ bidding and to provide a new generation for the capitalists to exploit. Although in the antebellum period the capitalists were doing everything they could to squeeze the maximum possible quantity of labor value from them on a daily basis, the life of a typical wage worker in the U.S. back then was much more rewarding than the life of a slave. As hard as working life was for most wage workers in North America in the 19th century, there always beckoned the prospect of advancing to higher positions within the company, or of striking out to become an independent farmer, craftsman or entrepreneur. Capitalist growth depended upon the ability of capitalists to build up professional and managerial layers in industry, infrastructure, education, the military and government—all the social elements necessary for securing the needs of a capitalist class with broad aspirations. The availability of a flexible and mobile mass of legally free workers in city and countryside provided the basis for the expansion of these social layers. The wageworkers themselves constantly had before them the hope of a better way to live, especially in the growth phase of capitalism in North America. The development of free labor in the North was the antithesis of the soul-crushing misery of the slave that was emblematic of the South (see comments by Cairnes, below).
Engels noted the special features of capitalist development that existed in the period before the Civil War, and to a certain extent after it. Writing in a letter to Marx in an 1886 appendix to The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844:
“There were two circumstances which for a long time prevented the unavoidable consequences of the Capitalist system from showing themselves in the full glare of day in America. These were the easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the influx of immigration. They allowed, for many years, the great mass of the native American population to “retire” in early manhood from wage-labor and to become farmers, dealers, or employers of labor, while the hard work for wages, the position of a proletarian for life, mostly fell to the lot of immigrants. But America has outgrown this early stage.”
Capitalist growth requires the utilization of the laboring population to constantly create new technologies, new industries, new infrastructure and new professions. As capitalism boomed in the United States, millions of immigrants were drawn into the expanding workplaces and farmlands. Throughout this process of capitalist expansion, the free laborers experienced firsthand the travails and penury of exploitation in factory and workshop. This was especially true of the immigrants who had no possibility of escaping from the drudgery of factory life in the early period of their residence in the new world. But at the same time the expansion of the western boundary of capital’s reach offered many of the bolder and better-prepared proletarians a chance for a better life. Capitalism had an expansive future before it in the vast new world, but to do so it needed to escape from the stranglehold of the “lords of the lash” (a designation applied to the slave-owner class by Congressman Charles Sumner, a Radical Republican).
At the same time, it must not be assumed that capitalist development in the new world was a straightforward transition from precapitalist conditions to the newly emerging capitalist mode of production. History always provides examples of similar forces operating in divergent pre-existing environments. In Europe, commodity production and exchange strengthened throughout the 16th and 17th centuries providing an example of a patchwork of contrasts between regions that lurched ahead while many others lagged behind. Capitalism emerged as dominant in England by the early to mid 18th- century, while Germany remained relatively bound up in semifeudal relations until the early 19th century.
As for the American colonies in the 18th century, they had much work to do in order to develop the national conditions for the successful growth of a capitalist economy. Above all, they needed to acquire the material forces, together with a skilled labor force, which would be capable of building the infrastructure productive facilities needed for the widespread production and exchange of commodities. But their underdeveloped status in the years preceding the American Revolution, taken together with the availability of expansive tracts of undeveloped land, left these colonists open to alternative means of money-making that could be implemented quickly. Not having to wait until the prerequisites for European-style capitalism had been built up, they simply took advantage of the prevailing plantation slavery that had already been developed by the Spanish and Portuguese, and utilized the fertile soil of the southern North American colonies to follow their example. The slave-owning entrepreneurs who possessed what they called “capital” invested in the plantations of the West Indies, Virginia and the Carolinas. They were certainly not “capitalists” in the fully developed meaning of the term, since their wealth was not dependent on free wage labor, but they had hit upon the quickest way to get rich by taking advantage of this colonial opportunity. Marx commented on this anomalous circumstance in Grundrisse (MECW Vol. 28, p. 436):
“The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour.
“… The conceptual specification of capital encounters difficulties which do not occur with money; capital is essentially capitalist; but at the same time again as an element of his existence distinct from him, or production in general, capital. We shall likewise find later that many things are subsumed under capital which do not seem to belong within it conceptually. E.g. capital is lent out. It is stockpiled etc. In all these designations it appears to be a mere thing, and to coincide entirely with the matter in which it is present. But this and other questions will be cleared up in the course of the development.”