The Origin of Capitalism
An alien explanation to most vulgar libertarians, that capitalism could have ever arisen out of anything else other than the “nursery tale” of its existence seems unthinkable.
Unthinkable as it is, however, Kevin Carson, the 21st century’s Benjamin Tucker, points out quite fluently in the fourth chapter of his book, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, that the common tale of our class condition is by no means the full story.
Capitalism, arising as a new class society directly from the old class society of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of robbery as massive as the earlier feudal conquest of the land. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable. The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called “market” economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called “laissez-faire” was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.
Accordingly, the single biggest subsidy to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer’s terms. The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale corporate organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centuries.
I personally recommend this book - and especially this chapter - to any left-libertarian wishing to point out the origins of contemporary class conflict to Marxists, “moderate-socialists”, and vulgar libertarians alike. For those searching for the proof of capitalism’s exploitative nature, you’ve found it in Kevin Carson’s work.