Capitalism has never been about Private Property or Laissez Faire Markets

Marxists disagree amongst themselves on the question of whether capitalism is a fundamentally economic or political arrangement. It is obviously an economic arrangement in some sense, but the question is whether the nature of a capitalist economy rests more fundamentally on certain political conditions that are prior to any economic arrangement or mode of production. The tradition of “Political Marxism,” including figures such as Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner, adheres to the position, against conventional Marxism — and conventional libertarian conservatism — that capitalism and indeed all social arrangements are fundamentally political. The capitalist mode of production only produces inequality and the increasing marginalization of working classes because it is based more fundamentally upon a primordial inequality, a primordial dispossesion of workers, that is not itself based on production but upon extra-economic and political violence. This is not only metaphysically but historically true.

The key to understanding this claim is to recall the chapters in Marx’s Das Kapital in which he deals with the historical phenomenon of “primitive acumulation.” In chapters 26–33, Marx corrects the conventional and mythological account of the origin of market economies. Capitalism did not arise out of any natural extension…