Capitalism

Capitalism

Capitalism- An Introduction

A term for a particular mode of social and economic organization, associated with modern industrialization, and its corresponding political, legal and cultural forms (the capitalist economy and capitalist society) and the complex story of its historical transformation and globalization.

The basic structural feature of the modern capitalist economy is the separation of labour from capital and the means of production, and the concentration of ownership of productive property in private hands. The term 'capitalism' should always be understood as a term for a particular social form of modernity and modernization based on the economic domination of one class over another. This structural definition can then be elaborated into further aspects: the production of goods and services on the basis of the capitalist mode of production with its emphasis upon universal commoditisation, monetary wealth and the social relations of wage-labour and ownership of capital (Friedman.Milton.2002).

'Capitalism' is itself a historically specific and developmental concept (characterized by the idea of generalized commodity production and consumption for spatially distant markets). It is important to observe that the existence of wealth in the form of monetary values and a market-oriented economy does not in itself entail the development of wealth in the form of capital (and even less of capitalist forms of production and the emergence of the social persona of 'the capitalist' and capitalist class).

Emergence of Capitalism in Western Europe

In the middle of the II millennium AD, even in the most advanced countries of that time still continued to dominate the feudal relations. The specific economic form in different feudal countries - China, India, Japan, Korea, Central Asia, the Arabic, Russia, Germany, Italy, France and TE - were very different. In varying degrees these countries have been preserved in the remnants of pre-feudal ways of life - slavery and the primitive-communal relations. Varying degrees of development reached the medieval city. However, all the Old World, are stretching the Pacific in the east to the Atlantic in the west, the principal, most characteristic features of the relations of production were largely identical(Benn.Ernest.1925).

Up until the time specified in the countryside continued to dominate smallholding peasants who worked on the land that was owned by feudal lords, and is dependent on the latter. This is a small farm in some countries, combined with the large aristocratic feudal economy itself, which is based on the exploitation of unpaid corvee labor feudal dependent peasants. In most cities of feudal Asia, North Africa or Europe dominated smallholding craftsmen who had their own means of production and working on an order or to the market, mainly to the limited local market. These artisans were in one form or another direct or indirect dependence of the feudal lords and exploited them.

In the XIV-XV centuries. in most advanced countries of the feudal system of the individual links in the production of small, enveloped in feudal exploitation of the networks are already beginning to disintegrate. In some of these countries (Italy, Flanders) appear first, sporadically shining seeds of new capitalist ...