ហេតុអ្វីបានជាមូលធននិយមនៅតែបន្ត
How Tensions and Resistance Can Drive Reinvention
The world has entered an era of autopsies and prophecies. According to many scholars and commentators, the order that the United States presided over after the end of the Cold War is dead. After the Soviet Union imploded, many assumed that the defeat of communism would augur the ineluctable spread of both capitalism and democracy—all stewarded by the United States. But it is now liberal democracy that finds itself in crisis, with democratic backsliding common around the globe, public mistrust of liberal institutions on the rise, and growing doubt about the wisdom of free trade and open markets. The convulsed domestic politics and foreign policy of the United States have thrown this crisis into stark relief. In his now famous speech at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered a valediction for the U.S.-led order and urged others to accept its passing without mourning or nostalgia.
What comes next after this “rupture,” to use the prime minister’s phrasing, is the subject of great debate. On the right in Western countries, the rupture is considered a restoration, an opportunity to make capitalism great again by reversing generations of the cosmopolitan embrace of free markets. Critics on the left worry that states are seizing control of markets not in service of stronger social safety nets and protections for the vulnerable, but to elevate and entrench a new oligarchy of tech elites. Lamentations abound. Market fundamentalists bemoan the return of tariffs, soaring public debt, and what they consider excessive regulation. Centrist liberals survey the turbulence and see the end of the Enlightenment altogether, with its commitments to reason, moderation, and cooperative self-interest.
A rough consensus emerges from these swirling narratives. Liberalism, the political and philosophical system once seen as capitalism’s cornerstone, is spent. Proponents of liberalism championed the belief in personal autonomy and the unobstructed right to property, ideas that supported the opening of markets and underpinned modern gospels of free trade. The nineteenth-century liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, for instance, insisted that a healthy economic system rested on distributed property rights and access to market exchange. And yet such systems in the current age have produced glaring inequality and strong concentrations of personal wealth and state power.
A postliberal world now awaits, one in which a capitalism shorn of its liberal qualities may predominate. The alliance of democracy and capitalism, born in the wake of the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century and the widening suffrage of the nineteenth century, may simply have been one chapter in a grander epic, a phase that conjured the illusion that people had to be free for societies to prosper. After all, before its liberal phase, capitalist societies often depended on slave labor and colonial monopolies. This gloomy consensus holds that now, in its postliberal phase, capitalism may just be returning to some version of its past. The impression that China can thrive unconstrained by the niceties of pluralism and debate helps seal this conclusion.
In Capitalism: A Global History, the acclaimed Harvard historian Sven Beckert offers a narrative for these times. He insists that capitalism, the world’s now universal economic system, does not depend on liberalism. Anchored in the defense of private property and the imperative of profit seeking, capitalism has deep roots in a pre-liberal age and can thrive when freed from normative commitments to liberal values. In Beckert’s view, capitalism relied less on individual freedom than on coalitions of moneyed men and muscular states. Even as the dysphoria about free trade and unregulated markets deepens, countries appear to be turning back the clock to a more unvarnished age, marked by exploitation and the ruthless pursuit of profit. In that light, perhaps it’s not surprising that a 2025 Gallup poll found that only 54 percent of Americans have a positive view of capitalism, the lowest level since Gallup began tracking such attitudes in 2010.
And yet these dark prophecies obscure what has made capitalism distinctive compared with its predecessors and its alternatives. Capitalist societies have had an uncanny ability to translate tensions and resistance into renovation. That was especially the case in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when liberal political systems allowed for contestation and debate that prompted the adjustments that helped reinvent economic systems. Each time observers predicted its end—beginning with the sages of the apocalypse, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—capitalism rebounded anew. Its pluralist forces found ways not just to survive but to take production and distribution to new levels. And even now, as so many take a dim view of the direction of capitalism, that past holds out the possibility of meaningful and positive renewal.
THE MERCHANT AND THE STATE
Beckert is best known for his award-winning 2014 book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, an epic account of the cotton industry and its shaping of the global economy. That work presaged this latest book, which significantly widens the aperture. Beckert insists that in the sweep of human history, the emergence of capitalism in the last millennium marked a “radical departure and discontinuity in human affairs.” It pulled economies and societies out of long periods of slow growth and out of the systems that generated opulence for entitled rulers while consigning the rest to subsistence. Beckert describes capitalism as “a global process in which economic life is fundamentally driven by the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital, is structured by the state, and propels the ever-expanding commodification of inputs and outputs,” one that supplanted a multitude of other ways of organizing production, labor, and social relations. That definition allows him to range broadly in this monumental achievement of a book, from Bengal to Buenos Aires, from Marco Polo in the 1280s to the Midland miners’ strikes in the United Kingdom seven centuries later.
Before capitalism, there were capitalists. The conventional origin story of capitalism fixes on urbanization in medieval Europe and the rise of the merchant classes that would eventually upend feudal systems. Beckert, by contrast, begins his tale not in Europe, but among the merchants of twelfth-century Yemen, where the port of Aden sat in a constellation of Indian Ocean entrepôts humming with traders and moneylenders. They created financial instruments, such as bills of exchange that functioned as an early form of credit, and practices, such as long-distance partnerships, that brought riches to the ports that dotted the Indian Ocean trading world. Over time, these merchants gathered strength and power. Their instruments became more complex and effective, and they accumulated capital, a fungible resource that could be loaned, invested, or squandered. Similar processes unfolded elsewhere, including in parts of Europe. In this early period, capitalists could be found in a few clusters around the world, going about their business without the power to really shape the affairs of great kingdoms with their agrarian power bases.
After 1500, something peculiar happened among the fractious states of western Europe. Capital became more than a private instrument for conducting trade and demonstrating status; it became a resource to lend to states so they could build armies and navies. This historic pact turned commercial hubs into empires. Merchants depended on the power of states to protect their property, but states found in merchants something that they could not get from agrarian grandees: deep, replenishable reserves of money that could be used to clear land and build the infrastructures of expansion, starting with fortified ports, navies, and the armies of sprawling monopolistic trading companies that seized footholds in Asia and the Americas. The money that laced together merchants and states came, above all, from making labor a commodity that could be sold and bought. This became essential to the development of capitalist systems. In the coming centuries, capitalists would commodify labor, for instance by enclosing formerly open lands, thereby eliminating the self-sufficient communal life of peasants, nomads, and autonomous villagers, forcing them to sell their labor for wages and purchase their necessities in the marketplace. Capitalists would do this through enlisting the backing of both kings and warriors, lawmakers and security services.
Capitalism may just be returning to some version of its past.
Beckert claims that this reciprocal dependence between merchants and monarchs produced in the Atlantic world after 1492 the first incarnation of capitalism, what he calls “war capitalism,” in which Spain and Portugal, followed by France, the Netherlands, and England, relied on coercion to impose new rules while warring with rivals on the high seas and in distant lands. In this economic system, aggressive and expansionist states allowed merchants opportunities to accumulate money and to plow that money into enterprises that privatized land and made it harder for workers to be independent and self-sufficient. But capitalism’s writ was still limited. Even by 1800, he writes, “much of capitalism was confined to just a few islands in a vast sea of economic life organized around other principles—subsistence production, tributary rule, and almost no economic growth.”
But soon, more parts of the world succumbed. “Industrial capitalism” emerged in the late eighteenth century in the North Atlantic. Mechanized production transformed societies, as did the accelerating need for raw inputs. Steam power and factories spurred demand for cotton and coal, and intensified a European drive into hinterlands for fibers, foods, and fuels. Two hundred years later, the expansion of commodity frontiers continues even as many Western economies have turned from manufacturing to services as countries elsewhere have industrialized.
What Beckert calls the “neoliberal capitalism” of the last half century saw a fundamental rewiring of the international division of labor, with the relocation of industry to Asia and Latin America from Europe and North America. The label neoliberal denotes the state’s retreat from labor protections and the opening of national markets. International financial networks and fleets of container ships sent global trade soaring, but the hollowing out of industrial belts in the United States and Europe triggered today’s populist and nationalist backlashes—and a return to coercive competition between rival powers. One might call this war capitalism 2.0, with an emphasis on coercive extraction, feuding over resources, and trade wars in the name of national security.
A LOST CAUSE
Capitalism inarguably produced great wealth, even as it often engendered extraordinary violence. Between the Napoleonic Wars and Trump’s trade wars, global GDP per capita rose by a factor of ten. Life expectancy tripled. And yet violence was capitalism’s through line. “The capitalist revolution entailed an astounding amount of coercion and violence,” Beckert writes. “Vast expropriations, huge mobilizations of coerced labor, brutality in factories and on plantations, fierce destruction of noncapitalist economies, and massive extractions of resources for private gain.”
Beckert understands capitalism as restless and ever-expanding in the way it continuously severs people from control over the means and ends of production, to borrow from Marxist language. Capitalist pressures pushed peasants off the land and led to the enslavement of millions. During the Industrial Revolution, the slave population that produced coffee, cotton, sugar, and other commodities in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States swelled from one million in 1770 to six million by 1860, a number far larger than the proletariat working in Europe’s factories at that time. “The golden age of industrial revolution,” Beckert notes, “was thus also a golden age of slavery.”
The same period saw the rise of a defining modern doctrine. Liberalism, as it emerged roughly in the nineteenth century, is enmeshed in capitalism’s duality of endemic violence and undeniable prosperity. By the nineteenth century, as Western powers imposed capitalism around the world, they devised mechanisms to justify coercion as liberation. In China, India, and parts of Africa, European powers advanced formal and informal campaigns to push societies to embrace unregulated market forces. Mostly, this was a cover for some horrific behavior, such as carving up Africa among themselves and forcing unfair treaties on China. Liberal theorists defended this conduct by “naturalizing” capitalism, by which Beckert means that they insisted that capitalism was a system ruled by disinterested principles and invisible hands even as it was assiduously managed by a professionalized clerical class.
By the twentieth century, it was received wisdom in many quarters that liberalism and capitalism were inseparable. Buoyed by the spread of mass consumption and deepening markets for commodities, such as automobiles and consumer durables, Cold War liberals championed a Western synthesis of freedom to shop and freedom to vote in the ideological contest with communism and Third World radicals. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the embrace of market liberalization in many countries in what is now often called the global South convinced many liberals that they were triumphant.
But the afterglow of the end of the Cold War soon faded. A series of shocks, starting with the 2008 global financial crisis and the uproar caused by the bailout of major banks while millions lost jobs and homes, discredited liberalism. Waves of migration out of Africa and the Middle East into Europe, and from Latin America into North America, not only strained immigration systems but also brought liberal values of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism into question. The rise of China—at the cost of industrial workers in advanced economies—has made globalization a dirty word. And populist nationalist governments around the world have been steadily eroding past democratic gains. Formerly the victorious ideology of the twentieth century, liberalism now appears to be losing.
In recent years, many left-wing and right-wing critics have converged: liberalism, they suggest, is a lost cause. Beckert insists that capitalism seeks to commodify ever more of the world and of human experience, a defining feature of the system that ensures that the arc of capitalist history has always bent toward the degradation of dignity and the shrinking of freedom. No matter the many ways people have resisted the spread of capitalist power, their victories were always fleeting, their stories repeatedly ending in defeat, resignation, and submission. Although peasants defied enclosure, slaves in the Caribbean burned sugar plantations, and British miners fought police constables, the logic of profit always triumphed in the end. Even decolonization, arguably the most important phenomenon of the twentieth century, invites Beckert’s suspicion. “Postcolonial societies, without exception, continued to push core features of the colonial project,” he writes. From the harvesting of sugar to the harvesting of data, Beckert’s story leaves little room for alternative courses other than the relentless commodification of the world and its people in the service of generating profits for a few.
USable PAST
In this narrative, liberalism created a pressure release valve for an exploitative system. It offered the illusion of inclusion while capitalism concentrated power and wealth among a rarefied elite. It’s hard to dispute the record. Many capitalists have had skittish commitments to liberal values. German big businesses did not lament the destruction of the Weimar Republic by the Nazis. Argentine magnates were happy to accommodate the generals during their country’s dictatorship of the 1970s.
Beckert’s view collides with the conventional narrative, familiar especially in Western countries, of capitalism’s fundamental bond with liberty. That notion holds that liberalism transformed capitalism. The belief in the rights of the individual, personal autonomy, and the right to property freed people from previously oppressive governments and entitled elites. This creed constrained the actions of the state. In doing so, liberalism, however gradually and unevenly, tamed capitalism. The most famous defender of this optimistic position was the economist Milton Friedman, who argued that freedom and prosperity were inextricably linked; personal choice was the condition for capitalist flourishing, and capitalist flourishing in turn made people free. Friedman and his acolytes insisted that institutions and policies that curbed individual choice would choke the spirit of capitalism. (Of course, Friedman infamously ignored the notably illiberal atrocities, such as those committed in Chile after 1973, carried out in the name of freeing the market.) The eventual collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to confirm Friedman’s view. Many liberals gloated that capitalism was the only game in town, the only form of economic organization capable of upholding personal liberty.
One need not subscribe to this Panglossian view to acknowledge that capitalism and liberalism are entangled. Capitalism has evolved in nimble ways, especially in liberal societies that created opportunities for the less fortunate to demand greater shares of the pie and for citizens to make claims for greater political power. Political liberalism helped make capitalist systems flexible by opening spaces for debate and contestation. It was in liberal regimes in Canada and Europe, for instance, that organized labor exercised the most influence and that capitalist societies recovered fastest from war. In the three decades after 1945, Western Europe saw a remarkably rapid recovery from the devastation of World War II and the generation of strongly inclusive growth. Peasant societies that pursued deep agrarian reforms had high growth rates: in Japan and South Korea, breaking up estates through processes of land reform was a boon to postwar growth. By contrast, in Latin America in the 1970s, it was autocratic regimes’ reversals of agrarian reforms from the 1950s and 1960s that slowed growth and led to austerity.
It was also under postwar liberal regimes in Europe that empires began to be taken apart and decolonization gathered steam. Dismantling empires and spreading self-determination in turn produced the conditions that remade the international division of labor after 1945. The transformation of daily life and the rise of shopping malls and consumer lifestyles in booming cities such as Bangkok and Nairobi defy the caricature of capitalism as the cause of unremitting failure and misery—even if millions of Thais and Kenyans still struggle to make ends meet. In 1990, over two billion people lived in extreme poverty. By 2025, that number had dipped to around 800 million. The reduction of extreme poverty took place in postcolonial societies, especially in Asia, where, between 1970 and 2016, the share of global manufacturing output rose from roughly four percent to 40 percent. The distribution of wealth away from the North Atlantic as more societies were folded into the world market can only be construed as a “failure” if breaking the old colonial headlock is seen as a tragedy. Liberal capitalism’s adaptive power rewired the world economy to make this change possible.
The tensions inherent in capitalism gave it energy, yielded many variations, and brought the world into interdependence. The last two centuries attest to capitalism’s ability to mix consensus with conflict to renovate itself. Neither Beckert’s dismal view nor Friedman’s rosy one does justice to the complexity of this record. They miss what is truly distinctive about capitalism, especially in its ostensibly liberal periods. If Carney is right and the current moment represents a rupture with the past, it is nonetheless in that past, in that contradictory tangle of liberalism and capitalism, freedom and hierarchy, that societies can find sources for their renewal.
No comments