Alexander Anievas

Kerem Nişancioğlu

The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism

How the West Came to Rule

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Eurocentrism tends to overlook the multiple and interactive character of social development. In doing so, it sets up an epistemological distinction between Europe and 'the Rest' as theoretically incommensurable objects of study, turning the study of the origins of capitalism into an exclusionary process in which the agency of non-European societies is erased or over-looked. From these two assumptions emerges a third predictive proposition: that the European experience of modernity is a universal stage of development through which all societies must pass.

Capital 'as a thing' is often understood simply as 'profit, or an accumulated pool of money, or perhaps machinery, whose existence is independent of wider social relations. Treating capital solely as a 'thing' therefore tends to naturalise and eternalise capitalism.

In contrast, we follow Marx in conceiving capitalism as encompassing historically specific configurations of social relations and processes. Such a relation-al-processual approach helps us move away from 'abstract one-sided' self-rep-resentations of capitalism and toward uncovering the 'concrete living aggregate' of 'definite social relationships'

Here, non-waged forms of production - cooking, house-keeping, childbearing and so on - are fundamental to the reproduction of wage-labour, and capitalism as such. As we demonstrate throughout the book, such relations (and others) were absolutely crucial to both making the accumulation and reproduction of capital possible, and producing forms of subordination, exploitation and social stratification that were at the heart of alienating workers from their labour and from each other.

We must call out all such ahistorical reificatory and essentialist perspectives for what they really are: thinly veiled rationalisation (intentional or not) of power politics in attaining states' putative 'national interests'. In short, they are particular representations and articulations of the hegemonic ideologies of modern world politics masquerading as social 'scientific' theories - traditional IR as the Discipline of Western Supremacy', as Kees van der Pijl aptly terms it.

How the West Came to Rule quotes

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