One of the most important distinctions for understanding the dynamics of the current world and its historical emergence is that between capitalists and capitalism. Capitalists are economic actors oriented toward profit. As long-distance merchants, financiers of princes, and tax farmers they have existed in a wide variety of societies for thousands of years. Capitalism, in contrast, is a system of all-round market dependence that emerged much more recently and in a much more geographically restricted area (in the Low Countries and England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries). It should never be forgotten that capitalists generally loathe capitalism, especially its competitive constraint. They would prefer to make profits through rent-seeking and political extraction without risking their wealth on uncertain investments. Indeed, the most obvious threat to capitalism today comes not from the working class, but paradoxically from capitalists who with increasing success have figured how to profit by plunder rather than productive investment.

These points are far from original, but they are not sufficiently recognized for two interconnected reasons. The first is the suspicion of comparison. For many scholars, even posing the question of why, for example, England and the Netherlands made the transition to market-dependent agriculture is a sign of incorrigible eurocentrism and a retrograde failure to grasp that capitalism was a globe-spanning system ab initio. That naturally leads to enormous pressure to describe all types of profit-making activity, especially merchant colonial activities, as an emergent form of capitalism. The second reason is a more specific pressure to describe various labour-repressive agriculture systems, especially slavery, as capitalist. To support this claim it is endlessly demonstrated that the agrarian elites of these systems kept careful books, were oriented to profitability and entangled in sophisticated systems of finance.

Both tendencies, the anti-comparative one and the recasting of capitalism as any economic system organized around profitability, derive from a position of political weakness. Capitalism seems immune to an immanent critique which takes as its starting point the system in its pure state and unfolds its inherently contradictory character as both social and anarchic; instead, capitalism is to be condemned in terms of its violent past and present, its entanglements with colonialism, racism and oppression, as in ‘racial capitalism’. Accordingly, the object of critique subtly shifts from the system – capitalism – to the actors: capitalists. But rage at rich people with dubious pasts is no substitute for an analysis of the dynamics of the system and the opportunities that its laws of motion open and foreclose.

Read on: Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner, ‘The Long Downturn and Its Political Results’, NLR 155.