This post is part of a symposium on Jason Jackson’s Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry. Read the rest of the posts here.
** ** **
In 2017, I was living in India studying transformations in agrarian capitalism. In a country where most agricultural products make their way to consumers via a network of smallholder producers, small trading firms, and small vendors, I spoke with many corporate retail managers who were trying to change all this. They told me that by replacing disaggregated markets of small capitalists with modern supermarkets, they would “add value” to supply chains and to the country more broadly. That is, they explained how they were market actors of a qualitatively different kind than already existed. Local firms, it had to be conceded, moved produce from farm to fork with remarkable agility and efficiency. But these firms were mere “traders,” economic actors singularly devoted to the opportunistic pursuit of profit margins. By contrast, large retail chains would create new quality economies for consumers and “develop” producers—helping them improve technological and agricultural know-how. Or at least that was the script I heard over and over.
Jason Jackson opens his masterful book with an anecdote that captured months of this fieldwork in a single sentence: “I know those guys—they are banias [traders]!,” his own interlocuter declared. Jackon’s interlocuter, however, was not describing the agrarian merchant capital that I had been studying. Rather, he was discussing the owners of Thumb’s Up, one of whom had graduated from MIT. These owners had created a beloved home-grown soft drink. But they sold it to Coca-Cola, rather than endeavor to continue to develop their product, once the foreign multinational had gained entry to India following the liberalization of relevant foreign direct investment (FDI) rules.
In this characterization—those guys are banias—lies a world of historical meaning and explanatory power that Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry luminously unpacks. Beginning in the 19th century with the East India company and stretching to the present day, Jackson shows how people use distinctively moral categories to articulate what organizational forms and economic goals count as legitimate or illegitimate under capitalism—across both industry and agriculture and across domestic and foreign firms. The book, in other words, is an extended and deeply compelling contribution into how economic behavior and market ordering is, in part, a function of meaning making.
Two overarching claims organize this history. The first is India specific. Jackson shows that the moral categories have stayed remarkably stable over time even as people’s evaluations of what firms fit what categories is historically contingent and shifting. On the one hand, there is “modern” capital as the desirable and legitimate category. It is populated with firms understood to be rational and bureaucratic (in the Weberian sense), organized around formal legal institutions and governable by the state, and desirous of linking profit to societal and national gains. On the other hand, there is “traditional” capital, which is the subordinate and illegitimate category. It is populated with firms understood to be personalistic, organized around closed kinship, caste, and family networks, engaged in speculative and rapacious business practices, and hard to regulate or govern.
These categories help to explain how and why the Indian government enacted a legal regime favorable to Walmart and similar retail chains. Policymakers could deploy widespread and sticky policy and cultural norms to suggest that the ethical orientation of these large corporations was more desirable than those of local firms with their putatively insular, self-regarding, and rapacious practices. To be clear, farmers did not themselves agree, as the 2020-21 protests illustrated in abundance. But it is hard to make sense of how debates over FDI in retail unfolded in context without attention to Jackon’s larger powerful claims: that capitalist societies develop a moral order and discursive hierarchy of market actors that is led and entrenched by state policymakers; and that this order helps explain how and why some capitalist firms but not others can position themselves as desirable and legitimate: good for society not simply for the capitalist’s own self-interest and thus deserving of regulatory protection.
As this summary suggests, Jackson’s second overarching argument extends beyond the Indian case. Moral categories, he contends, are intrinsic to capitalist development and change. As he quotes Marx and Engels, “For each new class which puts itself in the places of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.” Or in Jackson’s words: “The role of the state using regulatory and legal tools to order capital according to locally embedded moral imperatives is a fundamental feature of modern capitalism. The Indian case is thus representative of a general phenomenon.”
Reading these sentences now, I am reminded of sociologist Melinda Cooper’s recent work tracing a reconfiguration of the organizational forms of capitalism in the present in United States. In brief, Cooper charts a shift from the large modern public corporation (i.e., shareholder driven, publicly traded, and regulated in particular ways) to the large patrimonial private firm—one that is the opposite of the Weberian bureaucratic rational ideal and that, in this sense, is reminiscent of the “traditional” and always subordinate category in India’s moral hierarchy of market actors. Cooper illustrates how a series of regulatory changes helped facilitate the emergence of a new kind of American firm financed by private equity and actively embracing an autocratic and patrimonial business model. Think of the tech start-ups (e.g., PayPal) organized around a charismatic founder that reaches an enormous valuation before floating its shares.
These firms are no longer reliant on public finance or its regulatory requirements to grow, and they are explicitly committed to the pursuit of intergenerational wealth within their own rarified communities. Indeed, Cooper argues that when such private start-ups do decide to go public, it is increasingly with the means to preserve insider control such as dual- or multiclass share structures (that is, unequal voting rights), which are sometimes structured in perpetuity bequeathable to one’s children. These firms need not speak in the wider language of public-regarding profit. In Cooper’s telling, Americans are witnessing the “insurrection of one form of capitalism (the private, the closely held or unincorporated, and often family-based) against another (the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned).”
How should we understand this insurrection in Jackson’s terms? I think his book offers two kinds of research agendas. One would involve working out the particular social and cultural reconfigurations of the content of the moral categories that will potentially govern and restabilize capitalist legitimacy in the United States in the coming decades. Here, analysts would want to make sense of how and why a familiar moral hierarchy has seemingly flipped. But Jackson’s book also offers something else—a sense that we are witnessing a rupture in capitalism as we know it. What looms now on the horizon is perhaps a post-moral turn that no longer asks its privileged market actors to represent their interests as about advancing a shared future. Productively, Jackson’s book shows up offering analysts the tool to theorize what it will mean, and what we should see, when the links he has traced over two centuries—between markets and the advent of liberal democracy and between capitalism and moral ordering—have faded.
