"The question in front of us now as intellectuals is whether we’ve inherited so much bullshit that our criticism is condemned to be ineffective, or whether we can find escape routes and create a new brand of criticism that recovers its teeth, its ability to bite, to intervene in reality in a more effective way."
Although popularly characterized as capitalist in organization after the end of the cold war, the world economy (and indeed even individual world-economies that self-identify as capitalist) must more accurately be seen to be populated with a multiplicity of economic dynamics as well as commercial assemblages at various levels of scale. Using the work of Fernand Braudel, it is in fact possible to distinguish two kinds of exchange relations, two kinds of economies, in modern world-economic assemblages, namely, what he calls ‘capitalism’ and the ‘market economy’. Braudel (1977) characterizes these two sets of economic relations thus:
There are two types of exchange: one is down-to-earth, is based on competition, and is almost transparent; the other, a higher form, is sophisticated and domineering. Neither the same mechanisms nor the same agents govern these two types of activity, and the capitalist sphere is located in the higher form (p. 62).
It is thus not capitalism but the market economy that is based on competition. A market economy organizes around relatively transparent exchange relationships typical of town markets, “where trade was regulated, law-abiding, transparent - ‘eye to eye and hand to hand’” (p. 51). In such collectively owned and organized commercial spaces, conventions, rituals, and rules tend to be known in advance, such that “the always moderate profits can be roughly calculated beforehand” (p. 50). They are competitive in that small and large scale commercial actors may more or less enter and participate without undue advantage to either.
Capitalism on the other hand is a high profit zone, typically resting above and profiting (even profiteering) from the activities of market economies. Of course there is in reality no single monolithic ‘capitalism’, only populations of counter-market organizations and their individual owners. Such populations are frequently associated with the term ‘private market’ but Braudel uses the term counter-market to emphasize their radical difference from (even opposition to) collective and competitive market economy dynamics. According to him (1977) the counter-market exchange relation “replaced the normal collective market and substituted for it individual transactions based on arbitrary financial arrangements that varied according to the respective situation of the individuals involved” (p. 53). Braudel (1977) considers this form of exchange relation unequal, that is to say, it privileges certain commercial actors over others, pinpointing two mechanisms exploited by counter-market assemblages:
It is obvious that here we are dealing with unequal exchanges in which competition - the basic law of the so-called market economy - had little place and in which the dealer had two trump cards: he had broken off relations between the producer and the person who eventually received the merchandise (only the dealer knew the market conditions at both ends of the chain and hence the profit to be expected); and he had ready cash, which served as his chief ally. Thus, long chains of merchants took position between production and consumption... (p. 53).
Unlike market economies, counter-market economies can thus be characterized by [1] an exploitation of production and consumption at both ends dependent on breaking the more or less direct links between producers and consumers in public markets, and [2] command of accumulated capital, and more recently credit. These trump cards in effect facilitate the concentration of economic power, creating a privileged class of commercial assemblages in the world economy. Concentrated power strengthens and expands an assemblage’s capacity (over that of its peers) to make consequential economic claims and contentions.
Rejecting the entire Marxist edifice, Manuel DeLanda derives a continuum stretching from 'agglomeration' to 'scale' across which are arrayed all the commercial assemblages in existence today. This Braudel-DeLanda framework gives us a far more flexible and useful way to think economic organizing at the scale of individual communities through to the world economy or universal market itself. DeLanda's talk embedded below expands on the ideas given here. [The above is an excerpt from something I am working on...]
There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good- will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.
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