Beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, Western European societies entered a fast-track track of economic development, ushering in what the thinkers of the time called "capitalism," which manifested itself in the overall growth of population, market size, and material achievements. Broadly speaking, all the factors that can be used to support production can be called capital, and its forms include cash, land, plant, manpower, equipment, etc. Thinkers have different reasons for naming the era with the term capitalism, but they can be roughly divided into two categories: first, they examine the social situation at that time from the perspective of economic development, arguing that the main driving force for economic development (dynamism) comes from standardized production driven by capital accumulation; second, the ability to accumulate capital as a sign of the degree of development of the state and the various sectors of society has become an era trend. The difference is that the former type of reason is based on an instrumental perspective, while the latter is based on a value view.
Standardized production in the capitalist era has increased so markedly in terms of the diversity and scale of production compared to the previous feudal model of production, so much so that Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto that "the productive forces created by the bourgeoisie in its less than a hundred years of class rule are greater and greater than the total productive forces created by all previous generations." The conquest of the forces of nature, the adoption of machines, the application of chemistry in industry and agriculture, the movement of ships, the passage of railways, the use of the telegraph, the reclamation of the whole continent, the navigation of rivers, as if by spell calling out a large number of people from the ground,—— which century in the past expected such productive forces in social labor? ”
The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, about two hundred and fifty years after the academic consensus of the beginning of the capitalist era. From today's point of view, the promotion of standardized production through capital accumulation to achieve economic growth is not only a historical common sense, but even used by many countries as the primary strategy for development, but before the middle of the nineteenth century, we will find that this mode of production is not obvious in the world, and some thinkers believe that this is a phenomenon unique to Western European society. This uniqueness begs us with two questions worth pondering: What made this model first originate in Western Europe? And, what are the forces that have made this model universally available? Adam Smith was the first to submit the answer in his 1776 treatise The Wealth of Nations: free exchange.
Free trade
In daily life, people are accustomed to using "rich and no money" as a criterion for measuring the wealth of a person or a country, but how to count "rich" and how to count "no money"? A simpler answer is to look at how much money is in the bank account. For individuals, this standard is OK, but for a country, it is not, because "money" is a credit certificate issued or recognized by the state, and a country uses the amount of deposit as a measure, which means that if the country wants to make itself rich, it only needs to print the money desperately and then distribute the money through the credit mechanism. Today, it is well known that printing money desperately is a practice of both refereeing and athlete, and the result is inflation rather than the country becoming richer, but in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, not many people realized this, so the mainstream doctrine of the time was mercantilism, which advocated that national policy should be aimed at obtaining more "gold and silver" – gold and silver can be understood as a credit certificate endorsed by the state.
The problem here is that the mercantilist doctrine is proposed by people engaged in overseas trade who measure the success of their businesses according to how many "vouchers" they have in their pockets, but the individual and the state are not a unit on a scale, and the standard of personal wealth cannot be used directly to guide the state unless this criterion can be independent of state intervention. Adam Smith believed that the appropriate criterion should be the productivity of labour, i.e., the sum of all the products produced by a unit of production in a given period of time, and he wrote at the beginning of His Introduction to The Wealth of Nations: "The labour of a nation is the source of all the necessities and conveniences of life that the state consumes every year." Such necessities and conveniences are constituted either as a direct product of domestic labour or from goods purchased from abroad. Smith meant that the more productive a country's labor, the richer it became.
But won't the productive forces of labor be manipulated by the state? For example, if the government orders the people of the whole country to come together to make steel, and as a result, it becomes the world's largest steel producer within one year, does this mean that the country has become the richest country in the world in just one year? Apparently not. In order to avoid including such production in statistics, Smith introduced an application principle when introducing labor productivity as an indicator, that is, the existence of competitive markets as a premise. Competitive markets are systems where there is no government intervention – at least weak – and where supply and demand determine whether deals are made or not. Smith realized that the wealth of the country is closely related to people's feelings about life, and the feelings of life are closely related to the ability to consume, so he introduced the keywords "necessities and conveniences" in his expression, which is intended to tell us that production that cannot be converted into consumption is just useless inventory. In other words, a country that can only export products continuously on a "competitive market" can be considered a rich country.
Of course, Smith believed that the formation of competitive markets was not only a necessary condition for the prosperity of the country, but even a sufficient condition, because it could bring about two results of optimized production, namely, the deepening of the division of labor and the increase in the number of employed people. Take, for example, a pin factory. When the demand is small, workers can only independently produce pins, due to the complexity of the process, per capita output is very limited, but when the market is formed to make demand increase, producers will try their best to improve production efficiency in order to meet market demand, so the production process is divided into multiple independent operation links, so that each worker only performs one of the links, for workers, this is a way to use standardized means to simplify operations, so efficiency is improved. Smith pointed out that when the production process was divided into 18 independent operating steps, the per capita daily production increased from 20 to 4800 pieces. At the same time, due to the deepening of the division of labor, many types of jobs have been added to any type of industry, so that many people who used to be dependent on the land can now "sell" themselves as a kind of labor, from a self-sufficient small farmer state to an office worker state that "can contribute to the prosperity of the country".
The deepening of the division of labor and the increase in the number of employed people directly contributed to the explosion of productive forces in the capitalist era, so from Smith's point of view, capitalism spontaneously emerged in Western Europe precisely because Western Europe took the lead in forming a competitive market that made free trade possible. Marx, however, did not accept this claim, arguing that Smith had made the mistake of putting the cart before the horse in his account of causation. For Marx, the focus is not on trading but on production, and the fact is that the formation of the market does not lead to the improvement of productive forces, but the increase of productivity leads to the formation of the market.
Productivity as a force
Standardized production in the capitalist era not only rapidly increases production, but also rapidly raises the threshold of production activities. Imagine a producer hiring 18 workers at a time to produce 4,800 pins per day, if such a large product cannot be quickly digested, how much pressure will the producer face? Producers and operators carry out production for the purpose of profitability, but there is usually a long or short time interval between production and profitability, because no operator can accurately predict where the market boundaries of their products are before production starts, and they can only "learn by doing". In order to be able to persist in productive activities until the moment when profits are generated, the operator must have sufficient capital accumulation before production can begin, which is the condition for "learning by doing". In this respect, the conditions of capital are equally important as the conditions of production. This is the case in any epoch, except that in the capitalist epoch the requirements for the accumulation of capital upfront are particularly high. Where exactly to find so much money to hire 18 workers at once? Smith didn't spend much time digging into the issue.
In order to survive, everyone will work, because labor can bring rewards, and these returns are various forms, including money, food, etc. Most people will exchange these returns for necessities of life or directly consume them, but a small number of people will free up some of them to invest and organize people to produce, at this time, the identity of this part of the people is upgraded from laborers to operators. When all the products produced are sold, the operator will get an income, and some of it will be used to pay the salaries of the personnel, rent and other miscellaneous expenses, and the rest is what contemporary economists call profits. These profits can be invested in the next round of production – or they can be used to buy a variety of necessities and conveniences. For Smith, the capital that initiates production comes from the "thriftiness" of the operator, the result of his "extraction" from the past labor remuneration, and the so-called profit is also the return to the operator's labor. It is worth reminding that the labor form of the operator is not a manual operation of the worker, but an operation that includes continuous activities such as inspecting the industry, tapping potential opportunities, organizing personnel, and calling capital.
Smith did not consider capital conditions in a position equal to market conditions, not because he ignored the importance of capital conditions, but because from his point of view, capital conditions themselves are derived from market conditions, which are formed in a certain link in the free trading chain, so there is no need to treat them equally. But Marx disagreed, feeling that Smith's approach was entirely evasive. The so-called free trade refers to trading based entirely on voluntariness, but since the era of capitalism, all growth trends have followed the principle of indexation, not only the growth of achievements is exponential, but even the widening gap between the rich and the poor, if trading is based on voluntariness, it means that those who become poor are voluntary. Marx intuitively asked: Is there such a reason? He wrote in the Communist Manifesto: "Our epoch, the bourgeois epoch, has a peculiarity: it simplifies class antagonisms. Increasingly, society as a whole is divided into two antagonistic camps, into two classes that are directly opposed to each other: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. "Although the gap between rich and poor has always existed, why does the capitalist stage make the problem more serious?
Marx's reasons are twofold: First, the reason for the gap between the rich and the poor is the uneven distribution of capital, because the standardized mode of production allows each round of production to expand the degree of accumulation of capital, and production is continuous, so the gap between the rich and the poor is also getting bigger and bigger, in short, the development of the productive forces has expanded the gap between the rich and the poor, and strengthened the inherent position between the two. Second, the productive forces are a kind of power, power has both the function of production and the function of elimination, production is reflected in the ability to continuously promote the expansion of the market, and the elimination is reflected in the fact that the producer can rely on the absolute advantage of the productive force to lower the remuneration paid to the laborer, so as to avoid the possibility of the laborer having any accumulated capital and thus becoming an "independent person". Therefore, Smith's free trade is nothing more than a glorification of oppression in Marx's eyes, so he simply tore off this layer of "painting skin" and told us that profit is the "fruit" of the oppressive laborers by the operators, and the market is a killing field for the rich to push out with the bulldozer of capital.
Of course, Smith certainly did not agree with Marx's criticism, although he admitted that the capitalist mode of production will bring about a variety of problems, such as mechanical repetitive operations will make workers feel depressed, but from the results, whether it is a total calculation or a local calculation, he believes that the arrival of the new era is more beneficial than harmful, at least the majority of individuals can be freed from food shortages and other troubles. In comparison, the fundamental difference between Smith and Marx is that they have different understandings of the market, labor, and the way capital accumulates: Smith believes that all participants in market transactions are equal, but Marx believes that these participants are strong and weak; Smith believes that all acts related to market transactions are labor, but for Marx, only the operations of workers are labor, and the activities of producers and operators, whom Marx called bourgeois, are not counted; and Smith believes that the accumulation of capital is " The result of frugality", marx believed that exploitation created the accumulation of capital.
However, both Smith and Marx's views have loopholes in Max Weber's view. "Whether the productive forces make the market or the market creates the productive forces" is a question similar to "whether there is a chicken first, or an egg first", which cannot be answered, because the growth of the productive forces and the market is always in the shadows, and there is no way to separate the two from the time series, and Smith and Marx only described capitalism from different aspects. Weber believed that capitalism was the product of the transformation from feudalism, and to ask what gave birth to capitalism, it was necessary to go back to the era before capitalism, look for the trajectory of human behavior, and see which switch changed the trajectory of history. The answer Weber himself offers is this: the ideological shift brought about by the Reformation.
Ideological shift
The development of capitalism, like the growth of man, has both an outward and an inner side, and if smith and Marx adopted an instrumental perspective that drew them to focus on the appearance of capitalism, Weber's foothold was the axiological perspective, and he focused on the heart of capitalism—in his own words, it was called the spirit of capitalism. Weber chose a different perspective from Smith and Marx because capitalism in the latter two senses is not unusual in Weber's view, and phenomena such as standardized production, capital accumulation, competitive markets, and the pursuit of profits were common in ancient China, ancient Babylon, and even anywhere else in the world, but they were not seen. For Weber, if there is anything worth discussing about capitalism in Western societies, it must be based on capitalism with Western characteristics. He believes that the spirit of capitalism is a characteristic that only Western capitalism has. So, what is the spirit of capitalism? How did Webber perceive this?
Capitalism as Weber understood it was actually very simple: "making money." Compared with other types of capitalism, Western capitalism is more expansive and independent in behavior. Expansionary means that Western capitalism is highly computational, inventing a variety of tools that help to improve the efficiency of making money, such as double-entry bookkeeping; as for independence, it means that people are very paranoid about making money, and the purpose of making money is not to satisfy the desires of life, but to make money itself. The so-called spirit of capitalism is the "social ethos" that makes this expansion and independence continue. Smith mentioned in The Wealth of Nations that the producers who appear in the market strive to provide products to others not out of moral altruistic considerations, but because they want to profit by selling them. But "self-interest" can only explain why capitalism came into being, why capitalism expanded, and why people at that time were so paranoid. Weber introduced the concept of spirit in order to provide a dynamic explanation for the development of Western capitalism, and as for Smith and Marx's theory, it can only be regarded as staticism in his eyes.
Intuitively, making money should be incompatible with the Western tradition, which is dominated by Christianity, because making money is a secular matter. In the era of feudalism, which preceded the rise of capitalism for a thousand years, Western society maintained a state of theocracy, and although the Decameron recorded many of the absurdities of the priests' private greed, in terms of public propaganda, asceticism was a value that the ruling class vigorously defended from beginning to end, because it seemed sacred. The sacred and the secular are a set of opposing categories. In the New Testament Gospel of Matthew, Jesus said to his disciples, "It is difficult for my rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven," and "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God!" "In such a public opinion environment, as a secular affair, the money-making behavior should be low-key wherever it goes." But after the sixteenth century, the matter of making money suddenly became more and more public. According to Weber, this is not because there has been a reconciliation between Christianity and secular affairs, but because ideological iterations within Christianity have made the matter of making money sacred.
Loving computer games is not a very good thing, and is recognized as a manifestation of the loss of playthings, but if a great scientist, such as Newton, stood up and said that "entertainment is part of human nature", the negative image of playing games can be immediately reversed. If another great scientist, such as Einstein, came out and said, "Playing a good game is a proof of scientific talent," then playing games will not only be encouraged, but will also be popular throughout society, and even various private primary and secondary schools will include playing games in the evaluation standards for further education. The experience of making money from "being despised" to "being encouraged" is like the process of computer games from "everyone shouting and beating" to "popular in society", except that in Weber's version of the history of Western capitalism, the key figures who played a role in advancing it were Martin Luther and Calvin, not my fictional Newton and Einstein.
Around the 1620s, Martin Luther initiated the Reformation and founded Lutheranism, emphasizing the concept of "calling." Originally work was a purely mundane affair, and when Lutheranism used this concept to describe work as an innate responsibility given by God, work was cloaked in divine clothing, and because Luther pushed the value of vocation to universalism, everyone's work was an illustration of vocation. Later, the wind of reform spread across the European continent, and when Calvin in Switzerland felt this trend, he immediately founded Calvinism and proposed the concept of predestination. By ordination, God establishes the path of salvation for individuals by assigning work to them. With an interpretation of this concept, work becomes a necessary condition for the path to salvation, and the harder one works, the closer one draws to God, the more likely it is to redeem. Although Lutheran Christianism and Calvinist Christianism have different propositions, they are highly consistent in specific behavioral strategies, both try to seize the right to interpret religious values from traditional Christianism, and match the values of abstinence with secularized behavior, which effectively clears the ideological obstacles for secularization.
For the individual, secularization means increased autonomy and a decrease in the control exerted by external powers. Because work is closely related to money-making behavior, once secularization is on track, making money becomes a mainstream recognition. Since then, the sign of pure heart and widowhood has changed from "rule by doing nothing" to "single-mindedly seeking development". When enough people share an idea, the so-called spirit of capitalism is formed. Subsequently, capitalism entered a period of rapid expansion in Western society. Based on time series extrapolations and comparisons of path expansion, Weber found a high correlation between the development of capitalism and the spread of protestants— both Lutheran and Calvinist—and thus concluded that post-Reformation Christian ideology, collectively known as the Protestant ethic, drove the expansion of Western capitalism.
summary
Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Max Weber each offered three different theories for the development of capitalism. In my personal reading experience, I recommend that readers pay attention to three points when exposed to these ideas:
First, from a diachronic point of view, the three authors lived in different historical epochs and did not know each other, but this did not prevent us from taking the position of synchronicity and putting their works together so that dialogue could arise between them. Through comparison, it can be found that although Smith, Marx and Weber are all talking about the social development of the capitalist era, their focus is different, Smith takes a micro perspective, Marx takes a macro perspective, and Weber is in between;
Second, although there is tension between the three theories, they are not completely opposed, because the three theories originate from different problem consciousnesses. Smith was concerned with "what makes the country richer", Marx was concerned with "why the general public is becoming more and more destitute", and Weber was concerned with "why people are in a frenzied pursuit of profit". Grasping the problem consciousness of thinkers is the premise of understanding their theories, and it is also the premise of assessing whether their theories are valid;
Third, any theory is a formulation of specific words, and different thinkers use the same words when proposing their own theories, but these words do not always convey the same meaning. For example, all three use the words division of labor, market, and productivity, but Smith and Weber deliberately weaken their value color when they use these words, while Marx will strengthen their value color. Therefore, when explaining their theories, it is important to pay attention to the differences between words.
In general, although the age of these theories is far away, in terms of academic value, these theories are always new, and familiarity with these theories helps us understand how the current world works, for example, we can describe and explain China's development over the past four decades through the methodologies and conceptual tools they propose. Of course, I do not mean to apply their theories to our own experience, but I hope that more readers can adopt a more open attitude and use the theories of different scholars as ladders for their own thinking to help themselves reach the high point of cognition.