From Proletarianization to Commodification: The New Plot of the History of Capitalism

Jeffrey Sklansky’s first book—The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (2002)—occupies an equivocal place historiographically. On one hand, it stands at the tapering end of the “culture of the market” school that flourished mostly in the 1980s and early 1990s. The Soul’s Economy has a great deal in common with the scholarship of Christopher Lasch (especially The True and Only Heaven {1991}) and Wilfred McClay, whose The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America was published in 1994. This literature—as the subtitles of McClay’s and Sklansky’s books indicate—often focused on the ways that capitalism had over time dissolved much of the firm structures of the self and of society, homogenizing and etiolating both character and communitas.[1]

On the other hand, The Soul’s Economy just as clearly looked forward to the new history of capitalism: although it was certainly “high” intellectual history, it was interested in markets not just as occasions for the circulation of symbols and the transaction of meanings but also as locations where physical currency and actual goods were bought and sold by real people. Looking back, a reader could feel that perhaps it was here that the intellectual history of capitalism began pulling out of its Geertzian nosedive into the ocean of thick description and started to pay attention again to business qua business—to the accounts payable and accounts receivable that bind together an economy and not just to the webs of significance on which a culture dangles. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I have not yet read Sklansky’s new book—Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America—but it also promises to balance, one might say, the abstractions of semiotics with the hard facts of silver. In fact, if I’m reading the two essays mentioned above correctly, he almost certainly sees silver and semiotics (as probably most of us do) as two sides of the same coin.

For Sklansky, that coin is commodification:

The ceaseless process of churning work and wealth into prices and profits effectively converts qualities into quantities, rendering all things countable and commensurable by subjecting them to a single standard of pecuniary value. Joining material life to the abstract power of capital, commodification requires for its comprehension a more capacious kind of historical inquiry, transcending the old division of labor between intellectual and social history. It calls for an interpretive history of the political imagination, of the terms and parameters of public discourse about rights, resources, property, and power, whether they appear in the implicit notions and norms “through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day,” as Barbara Jeanne Fields has written, or in formal intellectual systems such as Newtonian mechanics and neoclassical economics. (“The Elusive Sovereign,” 234)

Sklansky, I believe, feels that the new history of capitalism is trying to live up to that tall order, and has done so by analyzing capitalism in three different modes: “as a form of selfhood or way of being, a system of representation or way of seeing, and a framework of trust or way of believing” (ibid.).

Sklansky synoptically reads the new history of capitalism as a departure from older historical understandings in different ways. First, it no longer treats capitalism as a “stage” in a linear pattern—à la the teleologies of either Rostow or Marx. Instead, Sklansky borrows William Sewell’s formulation: capitalism is “hypereventful but monotonously repetitive”: it is better to speak of “capitalist temporality” than capitalist development.

Second, historians spend less of their energy, he argues, on identifying residual or emergent ideological alternatives to capitalism springing up before, within, or alongside capitalism’s hegemony. “Scholars have become less intent on recovering ideological alternatives such as the ‘moral economy’ and ‘civic republicanism,’ and more inclined to think of capitalism as constituting the entire terrain of social struggle instead of counterposing it to the roads not taken” (ibid., 236).

If the new history of capitalism has tended to blur both the temporal and the ideological boundaries of capitalism, it has also challenged prior tendencies to focus on the capitalist geographic “core” as exemplifying the essence or natural development of the form. The “transnational turn” “has supplanted distinctions between core and periphery with a language of global networks and flows” (ibid.).

Finally, the new history of capitalism has sought to demolish the borders of its subject in one further way: by annihilating—or at least greatly lowering—the boundary dividing free labor from slavery. “A new generation of scholarship shows how industrial capitalism relied from the start on the labor of a heterogeneous array of paupers, prisoners, ‘coolies,’ peons, sailors, servants, contract laborers, sharecroppers, and many others who worked the wide borderland between freedom and slavery alongside the rising ranks of wage earners.”[2]

Sklansky’s article is from 2012, but much of his analysis holds true six years on. Although the energy of the “transnational turn” has slackened somewhat, most of its principal arguments of nation-state-centered history have been assimilated into the discipline’s mainstream, and that has meant a continued tendency to examine core and periphery dialectically, especially in regards to the development of capitalism.

On the second point, I feel that there certainly is a good deal more enthusiasm for identifying ideological alternatives to capitalism in the past, although within the subfield of the history of capitalism, the results have not been as dramatic as the two “discoveries” from the 1970s that he names: the recovery of civic republicanism and the first articulations of the “moral economies” that have existed in the interstices of capitalist hegemony. And if anything, I think Sklansky’s fourth point about the blurring of paid and unpaid, free and unfree labor has been amply borne out as scholars continue to examine the more granular details of hybrid labor regimes and focus more on more on the coercion intrinsic to both the employer-employee and the master-slave relationships.

Coercion, though, is not what Sklansky really means by “commodification.” The market, in his estimation, commodifies by homogenization and abstraction, by reducing people as well as items to a pecuniary value: it liquifies and ultimately liquidates everything in search of profits.

That process of abstraction is an undeniable feature of market logic, and Sklansky is surely right that it has been an increasingly important subject of recent scholarship. He is further correct in tying this greater attention to this process of abstraction to “[t]he epochal transfer of profits from industry to banking over the past thirty years.” Recent work by historians like Dan Bouk, Josh Lauer, and Eli Cook as well as Jonathan Levy’s work from a few years ago have advanced this line of scholarship brilliantly.

Quantification can be a kind of subtle violence; its reductiveness can be experienced as a loss of individuality and a loss of control. It can, moreover, be an instrument of control. And certainly, if we think back to Sklansky’s argument about the way the new history of capitalism has shifted away from the classic narrative plot of proletarianization to a new plot of commodification, quantification looks and feels like a different kind of story from proletarianization. (Even if E. P. Thompson’s “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” perhaps adumbrated this new plot to some extent.)

Yet I am hesitant to make quantification identical to commodification: the latter term suggests something more than abstraction. Where I think the narrative of commodification departs most from the older plot of proletarianization is in the way that capitalism coerces more and more aspects of the self—well beyond one’s labor power—into the market, alienating personal qualities or attributes like one’s friendliness or creativity, one’s attention or one’s enthusiasm. If the proletarianization plot was primarily about how the labor power of workers was coerced into a market exchange, the commodification plot understands coercion as much more insidious, comprehensive, and oblique.

That argument depends, of course, on a fairly limited notion of what “labor power” means—it must exempt or be agnostic about the kinds of work-performances we call “affective” or “emotional labor,” as well as “reproductive labor.” It primarily means dexterity and brawn—Marx’s Arbeitskraft is fundamentally Kraft, not Stimmung—force, not feeling.

In my next post, I want to think about where this new idea of market coercion came from—how we can contextualize this broader, more diffuse notion of coercion and reconnect the elements that combined to make it the master plot for the new history of capitalism.