When Ignacio T. Granados talks about “modern capitalism,” he resorts, without explicitly accepting it, to a dialectical notion that would have to take shape in opposition to “old capitalism,” and such a thing does not exist. Just as there is no such thing as the “capitalist spirit” that Max Weber arbitrarily placed in Protestant Calvinism as a historical force because of its relationship with work as an ontology of religious-economic resonance, and which is nothing more than an economic update of the Hegelian Geist; the articulating knot of modern (German) Western metaphysics, which has in the activation of the North Atlantic as a new center of exchange that displaces the Mediterranean, the previous centripetal force of Europe on which this historical teleology is imposed. Precisely, the recognition of capitalism as an artificial technology, because it is counterintuitive (saving/reinvestment), which underpins an objective effect on reality—extensive expansion of wealth—is where we must start in order to avoid ideological derivations, such as those executed by nineteenth-century liberalism in favor, and the radical/social democratic left against it (leftists who will gradually end up in the liberal party apparatus). These derivations are ultimately systematized by the corporate state; for this reason, they end up being normatively arbitrary institutions.
Therefore, whether it be Phoenician trade or the aforementioned and opposing models of Greece and Sparta—the latter used by Antonio Escohotado to shape a binary and presentist theory of capitalism—they do not explain the economic derivations, even in their incipient mercantilism on a large scale, that gave rise to capitalism, and they do not do so because of their close integration with theological and political structures, fundamentally agrarian in nature, which limit the emergence and transaction that, rather than economic, occurs financially due to the possibilities of investment and decentralized participation, which will emerge in 17th-century Holland, where participation, rather than mercantile, adds a new element: investment in futures and the banking credibility that supports it. The tension would be the ideological emergence that arises from the political theorization of wealth creation, a project of the enlightened conjunction of public officials and private investors who shape a foundational androgyne of monopolies: commercial companies. It is true that Adam Smith, an employee of the East India Company, as a moral and enlightened philosopher, draws on the great fallacies of the Enlightenment or translates them into economic language: if Rousseau speaks of the “general will,” Smith speaks of the “national interest,” and the “invisible hand” is the hand of the legislator who regulates what has previously been created: the capitalist wealth of medium-sized enterprises that does not begin with The Wealth of Nations, but with the prior development of the manufacturing industry that will make the Industrial Revolution possible.
Finally, the great ideological misunderstanding arises from the contradiction between real capitalism, in terms of its lack of systematicity from an ideological regulatory perspective, and adjectival capitalism, in terms of its metanarrative use. One has created real wealth through its popular—not socialist—basis in the participation of economic synergies that macroeconomics does not contemplate in its sophisticated and false “general equilibrium” tables, and the other, a capitalism that is adjectivized from the market, the state, or technocratic corporatism as a “filler ontology” to justify various fiscal and political impositions.
The operational frameworks of nation states have given rise to global institutions (FED, IMF, WTO, etc.), from political decentralization, which is also part of the emergence of capitalism, to a phenomenon we have come to call “charismatic central planning,” which translates that tension between universalists and nominalists, now applied to a financial market that has stripped away its industrial structure to replace it with a growing debt that is increasingly difficult to sustain. Whether the stony-faced Federal Reserve entertains the public in a theatrical standoff with the executive over interest rates, or a button is pressed in some cold office of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, creating money ex nihilo to indebt a state, we are witnessing a simulated financial act, not in a postmodern sense, but in the very denial of real capitalism.
Image: Portraits à la Bourse (1879), by Edgar Degas. Musée d’Orsay.
