Disorganized Capitalism

Organized capitalism originates in Marxist political sociology. Capitalism as an organizing social principle refers to the role market forces play in our contemporary world. Market forces favor the concentration of the modes of production in the hands of a minority, may work against government control, and become the underlying cause of social inequalities. With the revolutionization of production to achieve savings in labor time comes a restructuring of human relations across time and space and the rise of a working class that is destined to overturn the status quo and dissolve class boundaries. Marxist theory found various implementations in centrally planned economies of communist and socialist countries that worked against capitalist principles to restrict, if not abolish, private ownership and lay the foundations of a classless society. Organized capitalism inspired cross-national research, focusing on the changes economic development introduces in social and political structures. Coming under the label of dependency theory or world-system theory, such cross-national analyses compose part of globalization studies.

The concept sprang from the political writings of Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, and other political figures of the left, but also from economic theorists such Rudolf Hilferding and social historians such as Jürgen Kocka, who noted the emergence of some socioeconomic and political changes from the mid-1870s. These involved the centralization of industrial, banking, and commercial capital and an increasing interconnection of banks and industry that revolutionized consumption practices. A bureaucratization of control placed the state at the center of large monopolies or collective organizations and favored the growth of a managerial hierarchy. These changes produced their own nemesis—they contributed, for example, to the growth of collective organizations in the labor market, including trade unions and employers' associations.

Multiethnic administrative complexes (empires) contributed to the development and increasing control of new overseas markets. For Marxists, colonialism's organizing principle was capitalism, as it encouraged the exploitation of human beings and resources of countries of settlement, leading to a reorganization of their economies that favored the colonial machine rather than native cultures. This led to sociocultural restructuring with global repercussions, with migrations to (of travelers, traders, administrators, and missionaries who wanted to learn about, govern, and civilize “natives”) and from colonial peripheries (slaves from Africa to Americas to produce sugar for European consumption). Organized capitalism produced an administrative machine whose primary aim was not to safeguard “order” but to promote the national good even at the expense of imperial peripheries (e.g., Indian raw cotton would be sent to English factories for cloth manufacturing, only to be sold back to India, generating economic crisis in the Indian colonies). Simultaneous ideological changes relating to the glorification of science and technology displaced humans from the center of universally shared values, promoting ideological hierarchies (e.g., racism) that haunt developed and developing societies to date. Organized capitalism bolstered the cultural-ideological configurations known as modernism and nationalism: the principal causes of global conflict are often associated with imperialist competition that transmuted in colonial centers into the sort of rampant nationalist feeling that produces authoritarian regimes (German Nazism and Italian Fascism). These changes intensified between 1882 [Page 466]and 1945 (the era of both world wars), leading to an even tighter organization of capitalism.

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