The Origin of Capitalism Quotes

“Capitalism is also incapable of promoting sustainable development, not because it encourages technological advances that are capable of straining the earth's resources but because the purpose of capitalist production is exchange value not use value, profit not people.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

“Capitalism differs from other social forms because producers depend on the market for access to the means of production (unlike, for instance, peasants, who remain in direct, non-market possession of land); while appropriators cannot rely on 'extra-economic' powers of appropriation by means of direct coercion - such as the military, political and judicial powers that enable feudal lords to extract surplus labour from peasants - but must depend on the purely 'economic' mechanisms of the market. This distinct system of market dependence means that the requirements of competition and profit-maximization are the fundamental roles of life. Because of these rules, capitalism is a system uniquely driven to improve the productivity of labour by technical means. Above all, it is a system in which the bulk of society's work is done by propertyless labourers who are obliged to sell their labour-power in exchange for a wage in order to gain access to the means of life and of labour itself.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

“[C]apitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, or of the age-old social tendency to 'truck, barter, and exchange' It is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions. The expansionary drive of capitalism, reaching a point of virtual universality today, is not the consequence of its conformity to human nature or to some transhistorical law, or of some racial or cultural superiority of 'the West', but the product of its own historically specific internal laws of motion, its unique capacity as well as its unique need for constant self-expansion. Those laws of motion required vast social transformations and upheavals to set them in train. They required a transformation in the human metabolism with nature, in the provision of life's basic necessities. Second, capitalism has, from the beginning, been a deeply contradictory force. The very least that can be said is that the capitalist system's unique capacity, and need, for self-sustaining growth has never been incompatible with regular stagnation and economic downturns. On the contrary, the very same logic that drives the system forward makes it inevitably susceptible to economic instabilities, which require constant 'extra-economic' interventions, if not to control them then at least to compensate for their destructive effects.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

“[T]he characteristic ideology that set England apart from other European cultures was above all the ideology of 'improvement': not the Enlightenment idea of the improvement of humanity but the improvement of property, the ethic - and indeed the science - of profit, the commitment to increasing the productivity of labour, the production of exchange value, and the practice of enclosure and dispossession.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

“Now if we want to look for the roots of a destructive 'modernity' - the ideology, say, of technocentrism and ecological degradation we might start by looking in the project of 'improvement', the subordination of all human values to productivity and profit, rather than in the Enlightenment. Might we say that it is no accident that the mad cow disease scandal happened in Britain, the birthplace of 'improvement', or that, more recently, Britain has seen the most massive outbreak of foot-and- mouth disease, widely attributed to intensive farming and marketing practices”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

“People acquire a right to property by giving it value - which Locke makes very clear means exchange value. This had vast implications not only for the domestic practice of enclosure but also for the dispossession of indigenous peoples in colonial territories - and on that score, Locke was quite explicit. [...] The measure of labour is not effort but profitability. We can, then, easily deduce that the Indian has failed to establish his right to the land, which becomes fair game to more 'industrious' and 'rational' colonists. Unimproved land is waste, and a man who appropriates it to himself in order to improve it has, by increasing its value, given something to humanity, not taken it away.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

“So far the argument of this book has been that the main problem in most standard histories of capitalism is that they start - and end - with assumptions that obscure the specificity of capitalism. We need a form of history that brings this specificity into sharp relief, one that acknowledges the difference between commercial profit- taking and capitalist accumulation, between the market as an opportunity and the market as an imperative, and between transhistorical processes of technological development and the specific capitalist drive to improve labour productivity.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View