What Capitalism Isn’t
Which brings us to what capitalism isn’t.
I keep talking about capitalist market imperatives, and what I’m suggesting is that there’s an essential difference between imperatives and opportunities.
Highly developed commercial networks have emerged throughout human history, on various continents; and, just to mention some major European cases, there have been societies, such as the Florentine or Dutch republics, in which commercial interests have been dominant, politically and economically.
France too had an advanced and far-reaching commercial network. But even such highly developed commercial societies were not subject to the specifically capitalist principles of constantly accumulating to meet constant competition — the unrelenting pressure to increase labor productivity to reduce costs.