The Embrace of Capital by Don Milligan

Author:Don Milligan [Milligan, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2022-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Fully Engaged

For most people, commercial society, or capitalism, if you prefer, does not involve “participation.” By and large we don’t think about the way we live as “taking part”; we don’t think about our lives in abstract terms. We simply live in the here and now, worrying about the future, regretting the past, enjoying memories, hoping for the best. In these reflections, commerce is central to the cultural matrix within which the assumptions that frame our lives take shape. We don’t often think much about this stuff. This is because, in general, we don’t relate to the world as Marxists or revolutionary socialists; we don’t think about “modes of production,” but of ways of life. Commercial society is where we are, where we have always been. Capitalism is not a “mode of production” or some weird conspiracy of bosses against the workers, it’s the fully functioning society in which we live. Most of us are well aware of inequality and injustice, but for most men and women these features are simply the inevitable consequences of people living together – they can get worse, or better, depending on the weather, earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, pandemics, or the policies of governments, but they can’t be abolished altogether.

The truth is, however, somewhat different from these working assumptions. History is fantastically popular in stories of the battling Plantagenets of fifteenth century England, to the kings and queens of the sixteenth, and on to the world wars of the twentieth. People are fascinated by the lives of cowboys and cattle barons, midwives in Limehouse and Bow in London’s East End during the late 1950s, and just love misery fiction like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. Tracing one’s ancestry has also become a popular pastime, along with sending off for DNA tests to discover your genetic inheritance, finding out if you’re more Viking than Celt, or just a rather dull mish-mash of Anglo-Saxon. Whether a person’s ancestors hale from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, or mainland Europe, the quest and interest in one’s origins, of our historic families, is similar.

Strangely, all this historiographical industry and effort has little impact on how commercial society is popularly seen. It is as if commerce and capitalism have no history, it’s as if the way we live now, just is. Of course, we know about the railways, about the industrial revolution, about dark satanic mills, of children up chimneys, and down coal mines with mum and dad, working in the flickering light of a candle, but commerce, the history of a society based more or less entirely on trade and trading, is rarely if ever approached by the general public.

It does, of course, have a history. Commerce has not always dominated production or ruled society in the way in which it began to do in the later years of the seventeenth century in the Netherlands and England. As it came into existence, free thinking and inquiry was greatly strengthened. Religious restrictions and exclusions became less rigid, and the right to criticize and

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