Capitalism Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Capitalism

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Zusammenfassung von Capitalism

Name: Capitalism
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Author: James Fulcher

James Fulcher

A Very Short Introduction

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Capitalism & The Free Market

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What’s in it for me? Discover the inner workings and history of our modern capitalist society.

Capitalism; it’s the lifeblood on which most of the world’s economies and societies are run.

We all have varying degrees of knowledge about what capitalism is, but its history and how we got to where we are today aren’t as well known.

From why it first took in England, or how it led to the financial crisis of 2007-2008, capitalism’s influence on humanity throughout its 200-year history cannot be understated. And by combining capitalism’s history with an understanding of its basic mechanism of using money to make more money, we can begin to predict how it might affect humanity in the future.

Although capitalism was initially restricted to Europe and North America, the fact that its implications are now omnipresent in nearly every corner of the world makes the understanding of it more pertinent than ever.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

how capitalists use money to make more money;
why refugees helped capitalism come about in England; and
what the subprime mortgage crisis is, and how it helped cause the Great Recession.

Capitalism is a socioeconomic system where money is used to make more money.

The majority of the world runs, to varying degrees, on capitalism. But while there is no monolithic form that governs everyone who lives under a capitalist system, there are a number of common principles that all varieties of capitalism share.

Put simply, capitalism’s most characteristic feature is the investment of money to make more money. This sort of invested money is known as capital. Those who use money in this way are capitalists, and the excess money made out of this process is profit.

Capital can be anything that can somehow be transformed into money. Take homeowners, for example. They can choose to sell their homes for money, rent it out to others, or use it as collateral for a mortgage.

Another characteristic of capitalism is its reliance on wage labor. Combined with capital such as machines, buildings and raw materials, labor is necessary for the production of goods and services. In return for their work, laborers receive wages from employers.

Wage labor isn’t only important for production under capitalism, however – it’s integral to capitalist consumption.

As individual workers cannot produce all the goods or services they might require, such as food, or a place to live, they have to purchase it. This drives demand for the goods and services resulting out of capitalist production, thus providing jobs for wage laborers in the first place!

Wage labor therefore constitutes a fundamental interaction between capitalist production and consumption.

Finally, capitalist consumption and production all take place within the confines of capitalist markets.

Unlike in pre-capitalist times where much of humanity only consumed what they produced – and produced what they themselves consumed – today’s dynamic capitalist markets allow the consumption and production of practically anything, as long as there is demand for it.

Markets can take the form of the traditional marketplace, grocery store or, more recently, online spaces, where people buy and sell goods electronically.

Within markets, capitalists seeking to make more profit than others generates competition. This is a key tenet of capitalism.

Competition can take many forms, including cost reduction. One way of reducing costs is to lower workers’ wages. Another might be to increase innovation through creating machines that can replace human labor.

By lowering costs, capitalists can sell their products for less money than their competitors, thus generating more profit for themselves.

The roots of capitalism can be found in medieval Europe, particularly in England.

While it’s true that capitalism in its modern industrial form first became fully-fledged in nineteenth-century England, its roots can be found in medieval Europe.

It’s impossible to identify a single cause behind the advent of conditions that allowed for capitalism in Europe. However, one determining factor that brought together various possible causes was the lack of a cohesive and all-dominating elite throughout the continent.

Industrial capitalism started out anarchic, but quickly became increasingly managed.

As schoolchildren, most of us learn about the progress made during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We’re told how it was responsible for so many of the technological breakthroughs we’re completely dependent on today, such as mass transport and electricity.

But central to industrialization was the advent of industrial capitalism. And it began in England.

In the 1980s, capitalism transformed into a remarketized form known as neoliberalism.

In the 1970s, state-managed capitalism began to run into trouble.

One of the main reasons for this was the rapid increase of international competition. The growth of free trade meant that capitalist enterprises, now faced with competitors around the world, had to find ways to further reduce costs. This involved lowering wages, outsourcing production to countries with cheaper labor costs, or replacing workers with increasingly productive machines.

While displaying differences, capitalism’s remarketization had similar effects in Sweden and the US.

As neoliberalism became the ruling capitalist model in the UK under Margaret Thatcher, the same international market forces and increased individualism caused neoliberal dominance elsewhere.

Sweden, for example, also succumbed to neoliberalism, albeit less so than in the UK.

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 was the culmination of remarketization policies.

The remarketization that took place in powerful capitalist economies such as the UK and the US changed the way capitalism in the rest of the world worked. Because of this, in addition to increasing international competition and deregulation, two other factors would come together to create the perfect storm that would be the 2007-2008 global financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession.

The first of these was the financialization of capital, constituting a shift toward capital being invested in high-risk and potentially high-profit financial contracts on the stock market as opposed to in the traditional capitalist production of goods and services.

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 led to questions on how such crises can be avoided in the future.

After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, further bankruptcies followed, faith in investment banks was shattered, and credit became scarcer. The Great Recession was now truly underway – international trade, employment, wages and consumption fell all over the world.

The effects of the crisis were hard for anyone to ignore. But sadly, lessons haven’t been learned. The low interest rates put in place after the crisis, while helping to solve economic woes in western nations, have led to increased borrowing in developing countries. In China, Brazil and Turkey, for example, debt-to-GDP ratios have increased far beyond 2007 levels, meaning that something similar to the subprime mortgage crisis might happen again.

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Worum geht es in Capitalism?

Capitalism (2015) chronicles the history of the dominant socioeconomic system that society runs on today. From its humble beginnings in medieval Europe to its present global dominance, capitalism’s history is marked by its dynamic – and sometimes unstable – nature. Nevertheless, its influence on how society has developed over the last 200 years is paramount to understanding the modern human condition.

Bestes Zitat aus Capitalism

[Elizabethan Englands] openness to refugees contributed significantly to the development of capitalist production in England.

—James Fulcher

Wer Capitalism lesen sollte

Anyone hoping to understand our modern, capitalist world
Those affected by the 2007-2008 financial crisis and wondering how it came about
Students of political science or history

Über den Autor

James Fulcher is a fellow at the University of Leicester, where he teaches sociology. Aside from Capitalism, he also co-authored Oxford University Press’ Sociology textbook, now in its fourth edition.

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