How to study contemporary capitalism, then? My first answer is: not as an economy but as a society – as a system of social action – and a set of social institutions. […] A capitalist society, or a society that is inhabited by a capitalist economy, is one that has on a current basis to work out how its economic social relations, its specific relations of production and exchange, are, to connect to and interact with its non-economic social relations. […] For this reason.alone, capitalism must be studied, not as a static and timeless ideal type of an economic system that exists outside of or apart from society, but as a historical social order that is precisely about the relationship between the social and the economic. (Streeck 2016, 201 & 203)
Streeck (2016, chapter 9) argues that analysing capitalism as a society means analysing it as an economic system, historical social order, culture, polity, and way of life.
Not all Marxist theorists share Marx’s view of capitalism as a formation of society. For example, Dobb (1946) sees capitalism as an “economic form” (p. 9), an “economic system” (p. 11), and “a distinctive economic order” (p. 13) where “a leisured class can exploit the surplus labour of others” (p. 17) and that is based on commodity production, labour-power as a commodity, the capitalist class’ control of the means of production, and surplus-value (pp. 7–8). Another example is the works of Erik Olin Wright. Wright (2006, 100) defines capitalism as an economic system that combines a) “a class structure characterized by private ownership of the means of production, whereby most people earn their living by selling their labour on a labour market“ and b) “ economic coordination organized through decentralized market exchange. Capitalism is not simply a ‘free market economy'; it is a market economy with a particular form of class relations“. Wright (2006, 101) reduces the notion of the capitalist society to “a society with capitalist economic structure“, which is not wrong but overlooks that the logic of capitalism is not limited to the economy but also shapes non-economic systems where it takes on emergent properties.
A formation of society (Gesellschaftsformation) is the totality of all dialectics of practices and structures and all dialectics of objects and subjects that humans produce and reproduce and through which humans produce and reproduce their life and relations in a routinised manner in space-time. The formation of society is a fundamental unity and totality of humans’ social production processes (see Fuchs 2020a, chapter 5). That such a totality of human life is routinised in space-time means that a formation of society’s dialectics of practices and structures are not just produced once, but are again and again recreated (reproduction) based on routines and social roles.
Chapter One | Introduction: What is Digital Capitalism?
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What is Capitalism?