Capital is often personified as this simultaneously organic and mechanical demigod, a self-augmenting machine, sometimes with moods and appetites, which takes inputs and reliably and repetitively manufactures products and/or services, and in realizing that production, accrues award and resource, which it plows back into itself, and so then augments and grows, continuously taking in more input and producing more product, augmenting further, and so on.
And this is sort of a rough way to imagine and conceptualize it. It captures part of its general character. But capital is also built and maintained by human beings, human beings that are responding to very deep and old historical traumas, and who through personal instinct and collectively produced custom and institutional structure have developed particular ways of imagining and organizing labor.
One could do well to investigate the conditions of that crucible where modern capital emerged: the crisis of the late Middle Ages. The story I got in high school European history was that Middle Ages Europe was a violent and tumultuous place, which starting in the 14th century, experienced a series of religious wars, popular revolts, and civil wars, eventually leading to the Western schism in the Catholic Church, further weakening the hold of the Church, and sparking the Protestant Reformation.
Further on down the line, modern nations were continuing to centralize and spread their wings as the Church's public roles disintegrated and localized, further shedding religious ideology and iconography in favor of newly emerging Enlightenment principles. Beyond the high school story, with further research one could make out early capital emerging in that process, becoming ever more private as the states conversely centralized. Indeed, capital developed first in England where the state was centralizing the quickest, which was poised to muscle out and destroy the commons on behalf of its budding oligarchs.
All well and good. All of that did happen. But for me the more interesting question was why? What was it that was impelling all of that tumult? Where was all of that violent and explosive energy coming from?
One thing that immediately becomes apparent upon investigation is how bad things got in the late Middle Ages. The formation of feudal Western Europe was a violent enough process, as we explored in the era of the Migration Period of the Germanic tribes and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the subsequent smashing together of classical antiquity and the nomadic tribes as they settled into the decaying shell of the Western Empire and propped back up those crumbling foundations, which happened in waves, such as when the Viking Era was set off, and so on.
Eventually that process stabilized and Western Europe enjoyed several centuries of stability, in which a centralizing Catholic church oversaw a period of growth and prosperity, with that latent violence nevertheless lurking, at the ready.
It was in the early 14th century when the Little Ice Age began - there were several cooling events before that, but nothing quite this dramatic - which was called "little" because it didn't resemble a proper global ice age, but a more regional one, with various speculated causes such as volcanic eruptions, changes in solar radiation, and changes in oceanic circulation and planetary orbit. And these changes could have been intensified and elongated by depopulation from Genghis Khan's campaigns, the Great Famine and Black Death, and then the conquest of the Americas some time after that.
The Great Famine and Black Death largely resulted from the cooling, which fed back into that process. The Great Famine of 1315-1317 was bad enough for Western Europe: even the summers became cold and rainy, which resulted in widespread failed grain ripening and harvest, among other failing crops. This led not only to human hunger, but to livestock hunger as well, which weakened them and made them vulnerable to disease, killing more of them off. If that wasn't enough, even the brine couldn't be evaporated in the wet weather, cutting off salt production, a key ingredient for preserving what meat there could be had.
So, you had a massive contraction in population, not only from hunger, but from various diseases like tuberculosis resulting from the hunger, and so the plummeting of the agricultural labor pool ensured that the food supply wouldn't recover for some time. And this was even before the Black Plague, which hit a famine-weakened population all the harder, further destroying the labor pool and stunting the food supply.
Yes, the sharp contraction of the labor pool did eventually benefit labor, and the dramatic effects of the plague eventually completely upended existing hierarchies, but it would take centuries for the population to recover, especially considering the extended effects of depopulation and reforestation on the climate cooling.
Given this grim process, the ensuing population revolts, civil wars, and religious wars (including the Hundred Years War) make a lot more sense, in which the unity of the Church was shattered, partially sparking the Renaissance and then the Protestant Reformation, among the many knock-on effects.
It was in the tumult of this great contraction and its extended effects that you begin to see early capital gaining its legs. The population collapse and the steep resource cliff hit the regional feudal lords hard, making them more aggressive about military conquest and seizure of productive land, which squeezed what labor was left. And so there was a new kind of merchant/landholding class that split off, interested not only in arbitrage and global trade, as per its historical lane, but also in the land and production on the land itself, and improvement of the land and of production, which began opening up as the feudal kingdoms disintegrated.
There was an existing level of human development and standard of living - especially as experienced by the aristocracy - that was suddenly rapidly degraded and cut off, and so there was a rapacious effort to claw back those gains. But suddenly those communally organized and church-directed bodies of organized labor were in steep contraction and fragmenting.
Part of the solution to this could be seen in the intellectual output in the 17th and then the 18th centuries. There was a growing distrust of the fragmenting church to direct governance over an organic whole: the church and that enforced sense of piety didn't go away immediately - which you can make out in the odd contortions of Descartes' thought. However there was a growing emphasis on personal "autonomous reason" which then gave way to "technical reason," a solution to a profound and collective loss of religious feeling which gradually became more and more material, with a growing emphasis on material development.
The organized laboring bodies of the Middle Ages were losing their temper, and so the individual was breaking away, guided by reason. But something had to pick up the slack for the collapse in organized labor and the loss of human resource. This was to be the machine, organized by the budding merchant and then capitalist, who was to midwife the birth of capital.
Simultaneously as the necessity for intensified productivity was biting, a population was growing of landless laborers who had to sell their labor as enclosure set in, who would first be absorbed into the consolidating farms selling for a market that was also growing, and then into the factories as urbanization advanced.
It was apparent that the laboring body of wage earners was what was first to be seen as the machine: a manipulable mass of depersonalized individuals, ideally interchangeable and bought and sold, placed together in a specific organization that is continuously refined so as to maximize efficiency and production.
Eventually the machines gelled out of the mass of human technological development and were inserted into this process. Iron and then steel could brace and then bind together organized labor, maintaining its shape and function against the sloppiness of the individual.
To circle back to our humans, capital could be seen as a profoundly selfish impulse, in which labor is sharply organized into a steep hierarchy, controlled at the top by a single individual or a couple of individuals, controlling a lion's share of the resources coming in from those efforts, who trusts neither the land that is seized upon nor the organized labor that transforms the products of that land, who is content to expropriate those products and sell them into an impersonal market, always hovering above the ground and above beastly labor, accumulating ever more wealth and power, getting as far away from the earth - that great betrayer - as possible. The emerging capitalist might have asked himself: "The king seemed to have it good, but how to get it for myself as I broke away?"
The average individual may have a poor intellectual grasp of this history, but the instinctual and spiritual sensibilities in a given age go long, and impress themselves in the individual whether welcomed or not. And besides, the interactions of a multitude over generations tends to pass on those sensibilities socially and culturally and snap them in for some time, producing model individuals to be emulated as well. Though now that sensibility is rapidly breaking down in the face of climate catastrophe, among other pressing issues.
