Capitalism

The study of capitalism covers a wide range of issues from the economic to the civilizational, which can easily overwhelm the scholar. For the purposes of clarity, capitalism is best defined as an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and in which goods and services are freely exchanged by means of the market mechanism. It can be contrasted to various models of “state socialism” in which the means of production are collectively owned either through the state or in a cooperative relationship at the plant level and in which economic production and exchange are centrally planned and controlled. It is also to be distinguished from “market socialism,” which is a hybrid economic system in which critical areas of the economy, especially finance and core production functions, are collectively owned by the state but a large range of consumer enterprises are privatized, allowing market exchange to play a major role in economic transactions albeit within a framework of selective central planning and administrative oversight and regulation. The outstanding case of a capitalist economy today is the United States; the classical case of “state socialism” was the Soviet Union; and the best current example of “market socialism” is the Chinese economy. Given the vital issues of human development, political freedom, and ideology that are involved, these distinctions are highly controversial and contested. For example, debate is ongoing as to whether China is to be understood as a market socialist economy or simply a capitalist economy with a veneer of socialist rhetoric and an authoritarian political structure. Notwithstanding these debates, which cannot be avoided, the distinctions made above offer a useful point of departure to embark on the study of capitalism in an organized and logically coherent fashion. While focusing on the core economic aspects, this article attempts to cover the central cultural issues that would most interest anthropologists. It discusses the critical “peasant question” that occupied anthropological debates in the 1970s; the relationship between capitalism, development, and neoliberal globalization as well as the problem of capitalism and alienation, race, and the increasingly important study of place and space. Finally, toward the end, selections of some of the main studies that address the critical issue of money and the alternatives to capitalism are brought to the reader’s attention.