5.

Capitalism
Nicolò Bellanca

MARKET ECONOMY OR CAPITALISM?

The modern economic system is commonly classified as a ‘market economy’. This means
that the allocation of resources is the outcome of individual decisions taken by producers
and consumers. Producers and consumers answer to public signals such as prices which
work automatically as they are the outcome of aggregated individual buying and selling
decisions.
Hence, on the market, anyone plans or rules; the coordinating mechanism is decen-
tralized and voluntary. Prices give incentives which bring individuals to choose behav-
iours which are advantageous for them and, with some other condition, efficient. ‘The
assumption is that society, in spite of frictions, dis-equilibria and evident inequalities can
be interpreted as an equalitarian system in which each subject is rewarded according to
its merits’ (Graziani 1981, 9). Those which disappear are the asymmetries of power: ‘an
economic transition is a solved political problem. Economic science gained the title of
queen of social sciences by choosing as an object political problems which were already
solved’ (Lerner 1972, 259).
Marx opposed himself to this conception by distinguishing the organizational forms
of the economic system through the criteria of the property of the means of production.
He started from a common traditional interpretation (e.g. Sweezy 1942), a system called
‘simple mercantile production’, as a yardstick in which inequalities do not exist: each
subject is at the same time worker and owner of all the goods he uses in the production
process; moreover, in the division of labour, everyone has to offer that part of goods
he produces which he doesn’t use for his own consumption in order to have the goods
he needs. ‘Capitalism’ is an ideal type system which Marx conceives as opposed to the
latter and which is characterized by: the division of labour and the means of production;
private property of the means of production; the legal freedom of the worker, which
sells on the market its own working capacity; the generalization of production and the
exchange of goods. Power asymmetries are embedded in the system as it is made by three
agents: pure workers, owners of the means of production, owners of natural resources.
While workers take part to the production process to gain a wage that they will use
for consumption, and the owners of natural resources tend to enhance their revenues
to buy luxury goods, the aim of capitalists is the maximum expansion in time of the
value of their capital: they are pushed to do so both by the competition with the other
capitalists and by the fact that their social position depends on the amount of money
they control. The means through which they are able to reach this objective is profit
maximization, the difference in the value of the goods sold and the value of the produc-
tion means used. Marx suggests also a third ideal type system called ‘socialist’, which,
despite keeping the separation among work and the property of the means of produc-
tion, it starts reducing the asymmetries of power. Such a system collectivizes property by

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taking it to a particular group of subjects. Moreover it solves the problem of what and
how much to produce through a public authority which plans and manage economic
production activities, admitting that individuals will have the possibility to choose only
on the consumption side (Napoleoni 1967). It is thus the kind of ownership system, as
a peculiar feature of the economic systems, which has to be modified in the transition,
pacific or revolutionary, from one system to another. This main idea has historically
limited the understanding of the features and processes of contemporary capitalism such
as state ownership of many enterprises and industrial sectors, the diffusion of private
property, the public companies, the control of banks on productive enterprises, the role
of financial markets in the process of allocating the control of production. The other
bigger limit of Marxist theory relies on the research of a primum movens of the economic
system, identified in the capacity of giving a value to human labor. More than recalling
the incongruence of the theory of labor’s value, our objective is to underline the epis-
temological approach used to look for the causa causantes from which comes the ‘true’
genetic explanation of capitalism. How much do the limits just recalled influence the
entire approach of Marx? To answer, we have to recall three powerful and still-existing
reasons. According to Marx, capitalism generates a specific historical process of eco-
nomic alienation (Petry 1915; Rubin 1928). As any action is, in the ideal typical system,
mediated by the market, goods are not considered for what they are (value of use), but
for their value (exchange value). Thus the attribution to the relations among people of
the typical features of the relations among things (‘reification’), or the attribution to the
relations among things of typical features of the relations among people (‘feticism’) is
realized. Some social relations appear as relations among things, as when the capacity to
answer the needs from individual works is expressed by the terms of trade of the goods
produced by those works; some social laws show themselves as natural laws, as when
producers operate according to market indexes which are not under their control; other
social relations appear as the nexus between a thing and the thing itself, as when money
generates other money, loosing any trace of its origin; at last, the productive forces of
the labor appear as productive forces of the capital, since in the labor process the former
depend on the latter and vice-versa (Vercelli 1973). The estrangement of inter-subjective
relations causes a serious and systematic opacity in scientific knowledge of capital-
ism: superficial forms do not coincide with the forms through which this system auto-
reproduce itself. Social reality has two levels: the phenomenological one, of the dense
thickness of alienation, and the structural one, which accomplishes the deepest power
asymmetries. Social agents are immediately aware only of the first level, while the objec-
tive of the social science and political practice is to demystify the ‘market economy’,
revealing the conflicting reasons of capitalism.
A second crucial contribution of Marx puts at the centre of his analysis the auto-
reproductive feature of capitalism. The autonomization of money, which historically
starts with the minting of coins, represents the first reversal from means to ends. When
goods are mediated by money, every human objective looks reachable only through
money itself; for this reason, money from the mean becomes an end which imposes itself
on all other things. Now purposes, usually meant as ‘final causes’ of action, become
effects which are the result of doing the procedures required by the mean. ‘Acting’
(praxis), as the choice of ends, is substituted by ‘doing’ (téchne), as production of results
functional to the enhancement of the mean itself. This overthrow among means and ends

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which comes from ancient Greece (Sohn-Rethel 1972), is being replaced, with capitalism,
by the absence of distinction between the two. We are in the presence of a circular coin-
cidence of assumptions and results, of initial premises and terminal effects. As Hannah
Arendt points out:
we call automatic all process of spontaneous movement which are out of reach of human will
and deliberated interferences. In an automated production the distinction between operation
and product, as the bigger importance of the product on the operation (which is only the
mean to produce the end), has no more sense and is exceeded. [. . .] Designing the objects for
the operational capacity of the machine, instead of designing machines for the production of
objects, could reverse the relationship between means and ends, assuming that these categories
will still have a meaning. [. . .] As things are, describing machines in terms of means and ends
is like asking nature whether it produces the seed for the tree or the tree for the seed. (Arendt
1958, pp. 107, 198)

This is the transition from self-regulated social systems to social systems which repro-
duce themselves or are autopoietic. As long as we stop the exchange between goods and
money, we have to take into account the labor process: this exchange doesn’t produce
its effects by itself. We can exchange an unlimited number of times, aspire to unlimited
gains, but each exchange can only involve the volume of goods which has been or will
be produced. We are in a self-regulated system, that doesn’t reproduce itself, though.
In order to get to the latter is needed a process in which – thanks to the circular coin-
cidence between premises and results – there are no limits to growth, which effects its
own reproduction. According to Marx this happened when the emphasis was put on the
production of money and not on its circulation, on accumulating capital rather than on
the monetary gain. The last contribution from Marx which we are recalling concerns the
analysis of the relation owner-not worker and worker-not owner in capitalism: while
in pre-capitalistic societies the command of the former was external to the labor proc-
esses, now it is inside it. This has a great importance. It is in fact how the labor process
works – its technical and productive organization – which reproduces the nexus between
‘the one who appropriates’ and ‘the one who is expropriated’. In order for it to happen,
it is necessary to completely submit the worker, separating him also from the subjec-
tive condition of his work. Any specific ability, professional preparation, or capacity of
comprehending and governing the interconnections of the production cycle of a certain
good (or of its important part) are being subtracted to the producer. The worker’s job is
divided into the most elementary movements, that do not require any specific learning
to be completed, while the whole coordination of the specialized fragmented operations
is up to the technical-scientific direction of the labor process. Thus the passage from the
social division of labour (the social distribution of tasks, jobs and specializations) to the
technical or fragmented or ‘manufacturing’ division of labour (which divides the tasks in
a factory or in an office) is realized. In the labor process, the technical division divides
handwork from intellectual work, and, more generally, the executive tasks from the tasks
of creating and thinking. This thus separates the ‘powers of the minds’ of cooperative
work from the great mass of producers, centralizing them in the hands of capitalists and
their functionaries.
Moreover fragmenting each task makes more complex the entire production hierar-
chy. In this analysis of Marx, due principally to the althusserian school (see La Grassa
1980, 1996), capitalists not only have the juridical-economical ownership of the labor

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 62 Handbook on the economics of reciprocity and social enterprise

process, as it happens in the traditional interpretation, but they own it, which gives them
the possibility to use it to reproduce the social relation.
Summing up, the discussion of the peculiarity of the capitalistic system compared to
the market economy can’t, according to us, put aside at least three features of Marx’s
thought: economic estrangement, the self-reproduction of the system and the separation
between command and execution in the labor process.

MOVING TO A DEFINITION OF CAPITALISM

Among the attempts of conceptualizing capitalism after two and a half centuries from
the first ‘industrial revolution’ we will focus on those by Manuel Castells and Samuel
Bowles.2 According to Castells (1996, 2000), ‘capitalism’ is a social system in which the
economic surplus is taken by who retains the control of the economic organizations and
the objective is profit maximisation, while in ‘statalism’ the surplus goes to who has the
power in the State apparatus and the objective is power maximization. These two catego-
ries bifurcate themselves in ‘industrialism’, a growth model in which the principal factors
of productivity are the quantitative increment of productive factors (work, capital and
natural resources) or in ‘informationalism’, a growth model in which the biggest factor of
productivity is the capacity of optimizing the combination of production factors on the
basis of knowledge and information. By combining systems and models – ‘industrialist
capitalism’, ‘industrial statalism’, ‘informational capitalism’ – Castells interprets the
evolutionary phases of the modern economy.
Bowles (2004) draws upon the neo-institutionalist theory of property rights
(Groosman and Hart 1986; Hart and Moore 1990). To benefit from specialization and
economies of scale, economic activities become social instead of individual. Conflicts of
interest between participants are settled by contracts – as binding mechanisms – which
are necessarily incomplete. In fact, contracts can’t specify what each part has to do in
each possible circumstance, as: (i) not all occurrences can be foreseen, (ii) there is not an
optimal action for all (iii) there cannot necessarily be certainty, due to the opportunism
and limited rationality of the agents, that the contract terms will be honored. The pecu-
liarity of ‘capitalism’, as Bowles says, is about solving the incompleteness of contracts
through the enterprise as main form of economic organization.
Power in the enterprise manifests itself when someone decides the asset of a resource
when not directly defined by a contract. The implementation of power occurs when,
among a group of technological and interdependent subjects and capitals, everyone
tends to reduce its effort, being aware that they will still receive benefits from the others’
results. With the aim of fighting that common damage, it’s convenient to incentive
someone to follow the management and innovation of the entire economic process. The
given incentives consists of the ‘residual claim to income’, so that, after the contractual
terms are fulfilled, s/he can never be excluded by the economic process; and in the ‘resid-
ual claim to control’, for which s/he can exclude whoever eludes his orders. That institu-
tional and fundamental gear of capitalism is also identified, besides Marx, by Coase and
Simon: as, according to Marx, the worker stipulates an incomplete contract in which s/he
assumes her/is duty of compliance for a given number of hours; according to Coase and
Simon the capitalist is the one who imposes a contract in which the worker exchanges

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the power of the goals of his activity for the wage (Bowles 2004, 268–269). In brief, for
Bowles capitalism is an economic system in which, considering the constitutive incom-
pleteness of the contracts, the capitalist-manager imposes, within the enterprise, those
decisions that, according to him, maximize the net income that s/he takes for himself.
The theoretical schemes by Castells and Bowles capture some important aspects.
Though, Castells drops one of Marx’s crucial knots: that only in capitalism two ‘reality
levels’, one phenomenical and the other structural, unravel almost on parallel lines.
Bowles, on the other hand, reclaims the idea of control within the working process, but,
just like Castells, he drops the other two crucial aspects that, in the reconstruction here
suggested, connote the Marxian theory of capitalism: the autopoietic nature of the system
and the economical estrangement. We suggest, in brief, a definition that gathers and gen-
eralizes the Marxian one. ‘Capitalism’, as an ideal type, is a self-expansive social system
that destroys all the forms of human relations based on personal constraints, turning them
into transactions (of buy-and-sell trading, but also about relational or legal exchange)
among subjects endowed with contractual freedom. The universal transaction is thus the
way capitalism shows up: it does not include only goods, capital and work; it leads to the
involvement of nature goods and the most unique aspects of everyone, from personal pride
to poetry, from erotic affection to religious prayer and sons. In this system people build
relations as they are owners of things: from this, it seems that things themselves have the
ability to set up connections. The reification of relationships among people and the person-
ification of things is, together with that of transaction, a universal dimension of capitalism.
Under such a phenomenical level, in which all the subjects seem formally equal and are
equally alienated, there is, rooted in the productive processes, a structure of asymmetrical
links among who, step by step, controls the critical resource – without whom the others
have a reduced or any value – and who obeys (Emerson 1963; Rajan and Zingales 1998).
Therefore, the specific feature of capitalism stays in the ‘double level’ of the reproduc-
tion of society: that of everyone’s equality, as exchangers and in front of alienation, and
that of everyone’s inequality, towards the current critical resource, in terms of being pro-
ducer of goods and services to exchange. Historically, the critical resource has changed
several times. A usual and not far-fetched manner of classifying those changes consists in
involving all of them under the term ‘capital’: starting with physical capital (that makes
private property of production means critical), through monetary and financial capital
(that make decisive the access to purchasing power), to technological and organiza-
tional capital (that gives importance to innovation processes), to human capital (that
enhances competences, abilities and knowledge as features that make the difference), to
social capital (for whom the quality of inter-subjective connections creates a competitive
advantage). The change of the critical resource entails, or can entail:

the passage from a total helplessness situation (besides the union and politic response) of those
who didn’t owe the esosomatic tools of production, to a situation in which the endosomatic
tools (productive knowledge first) give the worker a market power [. . .That] worsen the posi-
tion of the capital owners towards those workers endowed with productive knowledge, and
among these it improves the one of those who owe a knowledge that is requested by the market,
though not very reproducible nor transferable. (Becattini 1999, 68–69)

If we accept this comfortable taxonomy, we are probably legitimized to still name

the major part of modern societies, in the several versions they assume, ‘capitalisms’.

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 64 Handbook on the economics of reciprocity and social enterprise

Whatever is the chosen label, what really counts is that, while the definition of ‘market
economy’ appears strongly ideological and a-problematic, the historically qualified
concept of ‘capitalism’ points to an autoreproductive economic system with no limits,
featured by universal transactions and alienation, as well as the control of critical
resources within the material and cognitive conditions of production.

CAPITALISM BEYOND CAPITALISM

Relying on the previous definition of capitalism, it is necessary to distinguish three main

angles from which this economic system can be expanded: that of ‘capital-less market’,
that of ‘ownerless capital’, and that of ‘ownerless enterprises’. There are several argu-
ments claiming those changes. Though it is not necessary to face them all here. It is
enough to reason on the evolutionary (or involutionary) possibilities of a historically
fading system. The first angle suggests that, while the market is a regulation mechanism,
capitalism is a type of economic society. The former can still exist without the latter.
Universal alienation starts, in capitalism, not simply because of trading goods, but
because they implement interpersonal relationships. On its own, that mainly happens
because only in capitalism is the market charged with the function to allocate (also)
the social consideration (Hirschman 1977): the amount of money, thanks to the uni-
versality of transactions, coincides with the level of success, of others’ consensus and
of power. The construction of subjective identity, solely relying on everyone’s ability to
obtain money on markets, generates the inversion between person and thing that Marx
names economic alienation. To eradicate alienation it is necessary, then, to loosen the
link between money and virtue, revenue and prestige, goods possession and individual
fulfillment.

The possibility, that capital achieves, of reducing the working time needed to produce basic
means, can be used to change the relationship between time that people spend in production
and time that people dedicate to self-care. [. . .] It is not a matter of going out from capitalism
to get into another thing, but a matter of enlarging as widely as possible the difference between
society and capitalism, of extending thus the non identification zone of man towards the back
warded subjectivity. (Napoleoni 1986, 215–16)

From consumption, to working, to politics, to interpersonal relations behaviors, today

there are several social pushes in this direction (La Valle 2004). According to the
answers to these questions the relevant forms of social and solidarity economy affirm
themselves.
On the ownerless capital side, let’s start by mentioning copartnership. For example,
the workers’ involvement in productivity, the risk and the company profits, can be real-
ized through the dual governance model, that separates surveillance from management.
The trade union takes part in the surveillance board and, according to the strategic
goals sharing the enterprise, it agrees to bond the dynamic of workers’ income to that
of the production of wealth, agreeing to transfer a certain part of the retribution into
shares. John Roemer (1994) suggests a more radical approach, introducing two types
of currencies in capitalism: the ordinary one would be used for trading goods, while
the purchase of property rights in corporations would be possible through the use of

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coupons. Exchanging coupons with euros, or using euros to purchase shares in a corpora-
tion would be illegal. Companies (only) would trade their shares for coupons; then, they
could convert coupons into euros in a public bank, to purchase capital goods. The term
of trade between euros and coupons would be defined by the central bank, who would
aim the investments in specific directions. The companies would compete to keep the
value of the coupons, because they could gain more capital in this way. The value of the
economy expressed in coupons would initially be divided into equal parts for each adult
citizen. On reaching their 18th birthday, everyone would receive her/is quota. It could
be spent to buy shares, that would provide bigger or smaller dividends and the right to
vote in assemblies, or placed in some investment fund. Shares would not be tradable
among people, nor they would be inheritable: in this way, the different earnings in the
stock exchange during the whole life would not be accumulated in time. One interesting
point of this reform consists in keeping the ‘market economy’ and the capitalistic sphere
separated: the two exchange circuits, the money and the coupon ones, would prevent the
summing of power asymmetries and the use of an advantage in one sphere to gain more
advantage in the other. This is an extension of the non-profit idea: Roemer’s corpora-
tions, as non-profit entities, can’t distribute dividends which must be reinvested in the
activity.
But not every sector of the economy is made to be organized in the competitive way
that Roemer suggests: this is the case of commons, the set of gifts that we inherit or create
collectively. They include air and water, habitat and ecosystems, languages and cultures,
science and technology, politic and legal systems, social infrastructures, and way more.
One suggestion, by Peter Barnes (2006), starts from the statement that, in capitalism,
commons are either collected into the hands of minorities, that use them to maximize
profits, or managed by the public sector, that, besides great deficiencies, is almost never
able to make a single persons pay for the social costs of their use. It is, despite this, neces-
sary to create, when ‘windows of opportunities’ open up in the power relations among
groups, a ‘common sector’ that comes alongside the enterprises sector. In that sector, the
commons property would be assigned to trusts, that are bonded to administrate them
first focusing on the interests of future generations. The common goods would thus be
‘proprietized’, not privatized or statalized. Whether they are scarce or threatened, their
use should be limited and, thanks to the prices required for their utilization, the trust
would generate a revenue to be shared among citizens, ensuring a minimum income and
reducing the capitalistic tendency to inequalities. When, on the other hand, they are
illimitate, such as culture and the internet, the trust intends to give, at the lowest possible
price, the biggest benefit to the largest number of people, further improving equality
and well-being for everyone. In both cases the ‘common sector’ of the economy would
proceed with a logic that is opposed to the capitalistic sector. The three reforms (dual
governance, Roemer and Barnes), besides details and the examination of their condi-
tions of applicability, all seek the introduction of diarchy and counterbalance among the
opposed powers in capitalism: in the enterprise’s strategies, in the allocation of money,
in the management of economic goods. They point out the way the ‘cromosomic set’ of
capitalism, besides the change depending on time and places, can be modified by collec-
tive action, up to alterate its basic features such as the illimitate push to accumulation
and the universality of the mercantile transactions.
There is still something to add about the last feature, that may be the hardest to be

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 66 Handbook on the economics of reciprocity and social enterprise

modified: the control within the working process. This is the perspective that we have
been calling ‘ownerless enterprise’. Can the existing hierarchy in the workplace be
relieved or even eliminated? The function of authority is structured at three levels: (a) the
definition of goals, (b) the action and (c) the control. Traditionally, the one who holds
the hierarchical authority merges the three moments. But we can imagine that (a) and (c)
are managed by collective subjects: in several organizational contexts, the formulation
of a strategic planning, as well as monitoring, work well under ‘peer-to-peer’ pressure.
Concerning the monitoring activity, in the traditional structure of the capitalistic firm,
the result of a working team is better than the one single workers would obtain by them-
selves. Although, due to the difficulty of measuring the contribution that each of them
would give to the collective results, in the end expedience wins: everyone feels less bonded
to the commitment, all wages being equal, thinking that the others will work. It is neces-
sary thus to have a central inspector, who decides who deserves to be employed and who
needs to be fired. This organizational mode, nevertheless, is not unavoidable. Imagine
stipulating a contract with the entire team, for which its members are paid as much as
when the team reaches an equivalent productive level to the one potentially obtained
with no one acting as a free rider: in those circumstances, monitoring would be useless
and the hierarchical structure of the company would be relieved (Holmström 1982). An
alternative mechanism contemplates:

the concession from a public body (or from a private grant-making foundation) of a fund,
on condition that the company provides on its own an optimal confinancing, and that is
withdrawn otherwise. That would operate exactly as dissuading everyone from acting as free
riders, because the lack of each contribution would probably be decisive for the loss of the
contribution. (Sacconi 2002, 268)

The biggest difficulty concerns (b): when it is necessary to decide and realize, can the
hierarchy be actually reduced? Generally, the criteria a democratic company refers to
consists in maximizing the number of people that are able to effectively participate to
the formulation and the accomplishment of relevant decisions; minimizing the number
of positions of authority; charging, for all or almost all of these positions of authority,
individuals that are freely elected from the members of organizational units that contain
the relative positions as coordination centres; making everyone responsible for the other
members of the organization; offering the biggest number of people the possibility of
being trained with the purpose of giving them a chance to occupy a wide range of posi-
tions of authority, and to introduce themselves as eligible candidates to several types of
charges; making the number of individuals that compete for occupying the authority
positions wider than the positions themselves, and letting them freely compete among
them to obtain the collective mandate; making a statement, when taking decisions, that
the subjects cannot achieve any advantage without considering privations (negative
externalities) for other subjects, inside or outside the company. According to Luciano
Gallino (2007), to whom we owe the criteria just pointed out, the analysis of the technical
and economic possibility of a democratic enterprise, thus not capitalistic, has just seen its
birth.

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NOTES

1. All quotations have been translated by the author.

2. We don’t report on the several elaborations of the concept of capitalism, we just limit it to a few telegraphic
recalls. In classic German sociology, Werner Sombart (1902–16) defines capitalism for the pre-eminence
of profit pursuit and for the economic rationalism, while Max Weber (1919–20) enriches the analysis by
proving that the peculiar institutional constructions – city, state, law – strengthen the market economy,
that still maintains the central position (Collins 1980, Trigilia 1988). The Austrian school of the economic
theory, with Eugen Böhm-Bawerk (1887), denies that capitalism is a category of historical differentia-
tion and relates it to the mere use of the so-called indirect or prolonged in time methods of production.
Moreover, within the Austrian context, Joseph Schumpeter (1911) points out instead that capitalism is
specific for the constant dynamism in that it’s conferred by the innovative individualistic initiative of entre-
preneurs, as for the social sieve of investments projects from the financial banks. The strategic projects of
integration between enterprise and finance appear increasingly important, together with the imperialistic
processes of direct and indirect control of Countries in which capitalism is less developed, also to the neo-
Marxists of either the beginning of the 20th century, like Rudolf Hilferding (1910), or the second part of
that century, like Paul Sweezy (1942). With the historic French school of Annales the notion of capitalism
is radically reformulated: according to Fernand Braudel (1967–79, 1977), capitalism is that superior level
of the economic system in which large amounts of financial, commercial and productive capitals operate:
a level that, instead of being submit to market and technology, tends to dominate both. At last, according
to the Heideggerian Emanuele Severino (1993), capitalism is a mere intermediate historical passage. It is
still located in a pre-technological and thus humanistic horizon: the capitalist uses the technique as a tool
to obtain profit, alienating himself and the workers. But, since pursuing the goal of the capital growth
requests technical availability, it’s the technique itself that becomes crucial, and it has no other goal but
its own generic empowerment. Therefore, man is no longer a subject that capitalism alienates, but rather a
product of technological alienation, that establishes itself as a subject and the man as its own appendix.

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