The Dictionary of Human Geography

Comp. by: LElumalai Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 9781405132879_4_C Date:31/3/09
Time:21:45:52 Filepath://ppdys1108/BlackwellCup/00_Blackwell/00_3B2/Gregory-
9781405132879/appln/3B2/revises/9781405132879_4_C.3d

but dominates in, and is generic to, capitalism

as a system of generalized commodity produc-

tion. Capital is not a thing, but is a ‘social

relation’ that appears in the form of things

(money, means of production). Capital does

indeed entail making money or creating wealth

but, as Marx (1967) pointed out, what matters

are the relations by which some have money

and others do not, how money is put to work,

and how thepropertyrelations that engender

such a social world are reproduced. Capital,

said Marx, ‘is a definite social production rela-

tion belonging to a definite historical forma-

tion of society which is manifested in a thing

and lends this thing a specific social character’

(Marx, 1967, vol. III, p. 48). Under capital-

ism, capital is ‘value in motion’; that is to say,

it is an expansionary social value that drives,

and arises from, the production process. The

process – multifaceted and unstable – by

which money is converted into labour, raw

materials, capital goods, commodities and

back into money again is what Marx called

‘the general formula of capital’. Capital arises

from the social labour organized for general-

izedcommodityproduction – that is to say, a

competitive system in which commodities pro-

duce commodities. The enormous complexity

of the category is bound up with the ways in

which the meaning of the word ‘capital’ shifts

and transforms itself in Marx’s work, leading

some to note that a word such as capital is

bat-like: one can see in it both birds and mice.

Capital comes to dominate in a capitalist

mode of production. Capitalist societies are

marked by the fact that capital is socially

owned and organized in particular ways – by

a capitalist class. Contemporary forms of cap-

italism have, however, vastly complicated this

class map, not least by the ways in which

shareholder capital (pension funds, individual

shareholders and government ownership of

stock) has refigured the cartography of the

ownership of capital. Geographers have largely

focused on the ways in which capital as a

social relation has spatial and ecological

expressions – for example, the geography of

accumulationorindustrial districts, and

the relations between value in motion and

global climate change – and on the prismatic

ways in which capital attaches natural charac-

teristics to things that are socially produced

(see Harvey, 1999 [1982]; Smith, 1982;

RETORT, 2005). mw

capitalism As a word denoting a distinc-

tive economic system, ‘capitalism’ began to

appear, according to Raymond Williams

(1983 [1976], p. 50) in English, French and

German from the early nineteenth century

(although theOxford English Dictionarycites its

first use by Thackeray in 1854). ‘Capitalist’ – as

a key actor in a capitalist system – has a longer

semantic history, dating back a half-century

earlier, but this term too was clearly being used

to describe an economic system – sketched by

Adam Smith and the Scottish political econo-

mists among others – for which the word cap-

italism had not yet been invented. Capital and

capitalist, says Williams, were technical terms

in any economic system but gradually became

deployed to account for a particular stage

of historical development, and out of this shift

in meaning crystallized the term capitalism.

Marx, who did not use the term until the

1870s, was the central figure in distinguishing

capitalas an economic category from capital-

ism as a specific social form in which ownership

of the means of production was centralized

(through a capitalistclass), and that depended

upon a system of wage-labour in which a class

had been ‘freed’ from property. Capitalism in

this sense, again as Williams observed, was ‘‘a

product of a developing bourgeois society’

(1976, p. 51). The term gained some traction

in the 1880s in the German socialist movement

and was then extended to non-socialist writing,

though its first extensive English and French

usages seem to not have been until the early

twentieth century. In the wake of 1917, and

most especially after the Second World War,

capitalism was rarely used as a descriptor by

its promoters, and was deliberately replaced by

such terms as free or private enterprise and,

more recently still, themarketor free market

system (as part of the neo-liberal discourse of

the 1980s and 1990s).

What, then, are the defining qualities of

capitalism, understood as a distinctivemode

of production? It is a historically specific

form of economic and social organization and

in its industrial variant can be roughly dated to

mid-eighteenth century Britain, but the theor-

ization of its conditions of possibility and its

internal dynamics have necessarily been an

object of intense debate. Classicalpolitical

economy– Adam Smith and David Ricardo –

and its Marxian critique both accepted that

capitalism was a class system, that labour and

capital were central to its operations, and that

capitalism as a system was expansive, dynamic

and unstable. These accounts fasten upon

the economy – or, more properly, the political

economy – and the centrality ofproperty

relations, the market–commodity nexus, the

separation of the workers from the means of

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 59 31.3.2009 9:45pm

CAPITALISM