The discursive emergence of ‘the market’ in capitalist political economy: crisis system and the Longue Durée

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a longue durée account of the discursive emergence of ‘the market'. It seeks to develop understanding of the ‘crisis system' by showing that the crises of the present have their origins earlier than some critical realist scholars have suggested and can be better understood by the theorization of the generative mechanisms that emerged from the economic and political chaos of the early 1600s. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is employed to show that in the context of the emergence of capitalism in England, these generative mechanisms resulted in the meaning of the word ‘market’ slipping loose of the geo-spatial semiotic bounds by which it had commonly been delineated – i.e. as a physical space in a town or city where goods were bartered or sold – and being re-semioticised to refer to abstract space where all acts of capitalist economic exchange, including those impacting upon the natural world, take place.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis system
• critical discourse analysis
• economy
• enlightenment
• market

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Whereas Marx examines primitive accumulation from the viewpoint of the waged male proletariat and the development of commodity production, I [Federici] examine it from the viewpoint of the changes introduced in the social position of women and the production of labour-power. Thus, my description of primitive accumulation includes a set of historical phenomena that are absent in Marx, and yet have been extremely important for capitalist accumulation. They include (i) the development of a new sexual division of labour subjugating women’s labour and women’s reproductive function to the reproduction of the work-force; (ii) the construction of a new patriarchal order, based upon the exclusion of women from waged-work and their subordination to men; (iii) the mechanization of the proletarian body and its transformation, in the case of women, into a machine for the production of new workers. Most important, I have placed at the centre of my analysis of primitive accumulation the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, arguing that the persecution of witches, in Europe as in the New World, was as important as colonization and the expropriation of the European peasantry from its land were to the development of capitalism’ (Federici 2004, 3).

2 It is notable that in recent years, the sustainability of traditional uses of the commons has been recognized by several scholars who also note the destruction of the natural world that tends to accompany the transfer of the commons into private ownership. As a result of this, Boyce claims that ‘the “tragedy of the commons” is no longer a serious thesis’ (Boyce 2021, 188). See also, (Pryor 2019; N. Hayes 2022; Federici 2004).

3 Much of the wealth plundered by the Company can still be seen in the stately homes of politicians from the time, as documented in Fatima Manji’s enlightening Hidden Heritage (Manji 2021).

4 With the appearance of patterned fabrics and disposable wealth, a new consumer culture was born which was centred on the Royal Exchange, established in 1570. (Hickel 2022; Roos 2020; Erikson 2016)

5 Biel warns that the ‘big issue’ of any revolutionary struggle is to ‘avoid becoming the thing you are fighting’ and it is worth noting that as well as Cromwell’s son engaging in transportation, Cromwell himself might be seen as having become what he was fighting when he ordered the summary execution of the leaders of the Leveller regiments to force them under his control at the Battle of Burford in 1649 (Hill 1972), 158; (Biel 2016).

6 Both the formation of the English East India Company and Williams’ thesis on Capitalism and Slavery fulfil Wallerstein’s characterization of capitalism: ‘In my view for a historical system to be considered a capitalist system, the dominant or deciding characteristic must be the persistent search for the endless accumulation of capital – the accumulation of capital in order to accumulate more capital’ (Wallerstein 2013, 10).

7 Notwithstanding that Smith’s care is deeply racialised and neglects the care of both lands and people who are not perceived to be ‘civilised’.

8 A longue durée approach to the social sciences whereby we maintain an awareness of the ‘capricious’ and ‘deceptive’ short term existing within more episodic and structural histories, is an approach proposed by Braudel and Wallerstein (Braudel and Wallerstein 2009).

9 In 1909, the British government took control of the Hansard publication rights and since that time Hansard has been published under the auspices of the British Parliament.

10 While Parliament does not hold records of legislation this far back, The Triennial Act can be found in (Gardiner 1906)

11 Cobbett’s PHE has been digitized and is available online with a word search function.

12 N.B. the cover page of volume 4 of Cobbett’s Parliamentary History (1660–1688) indicates that the dates covered are 1660–1668. However, the record actually continues to 1688, so it is assumed that the dates on the cover page were written in error.

13 The use of the term is attributed to a statement made by Sir John Riggs Miller MP on 5th February 1790.

14 While it is perhaps beneficial to explore this account of the Clerk of the Market for it's historical proximity to the discursive shift being investigated, there has also been little written on the Clerk of the Market since.

15 Records of market regulation via governmental price setting can also be found in local government records in England before 1642 (Parker 1975, 114)

16 Price goes on to suggest that, ‘Whether or not the balance falls on using resources for protecting the “self singularity”, or using resources for protecting the whole, out of which the self is an unfolded singularity, is entirely dependent on the empirical circumstances of each different situation’ (ibid.).This idea might be elaborated by reference to Johnathan Dancy’s proposal for moral particularism. (Dancy 2006)

17 Recognition of this connectedness is the basis for modern ecological movements which tend to offer an alternative, rather than direct critique, of the market economy and can be seen in the popularization of the research of Simard, Sheldrake and Wall Kimmerer. Boyce and Hill trace the foundations of this site of resistance to the enclosure and destruction of the commons, which has since the 1600s progressively denied people’s connectedness to the land (Simard 2021; Sheldrake 2020; Boyce 2021; Hill 1972; Wall Kimmerer 2020).

18 ‘There it is (sic) a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx 1961/1887, 48).

19 While Bhaskar refers to non-European systems of thinking to find examples of non-Cartesian ways of understanding, we can find notions of universal connectedness in the mid-twentieth century writings of Martin Buber and can trace a direct lineage to pre-Cartesian European ways of thinking via the ‘Family of Love’ and the Quakers – the Family of Love being a sect that survived the Reformation to emerge as the Quakers today. The Quakers’ activist stance against imperialist wars might therefore be seen as an active expression of the change required to resolve the crisis (Buber 1947; 1923; Marsh 1994; Ebel 1967; AP 2021; Buchanan 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council: [Grant Number ES/W005786/1].

Notes on contributors

Rob Faure Walker

Rob Faure Walker is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at IOE, Faculty of Education and Society, University College London, where he runs the Critical Realism Reading Group with Prof Priscilla Alderson. His most recent book is The Emergence of ‘Extremism’ (2022) with Bloomsbury Academic.

John P. O’Regan

John P. O’Regan is Professor of Critical Applied Linguistics at IOE, Faculty of Education and Society, University College London. He is IOE Vice-Dean (International) and Deputy Director of the International Centre for Intercultural Studies. His most recent book is Global English and Political Economy (2021) in the Routledge Language, Society and Political Economy series.