CAPITALISM

Jaenette Winterson’s Book, The Economist, Riccardo Bellofiore’s article

The spread of the Industrial Revolution, which started in Britain around 1780s, then developed throughout Europe and the whole world, has brought with it the shift from an agrarian and maritime economy to an industrialized economic system, which you can sum up using the word “capitalism”. Up to now, a lot of people have tried (and they are still trying) to understand and explain the true nature of this economic system, as did Jeanette Winterson in her book “Why be happy when you could be normal?”.

In particular, in chapter 2 Jeanette makes a detailed description of Manchester.

he world’s first industrialized city and the most relevant feature is that it is a town “full of contradiction”. So the reader come directly into touch with the multiplex face of capitalism, in the sense of: the new economic system led to two opposite consequences ( “Manchester was all a mix”):

on one side there was the massive increase of wealth of the urban mercantile class and factory employers,

on the other side the conditions of lots of labourers, come into town after the enclosure of cultivated fields and the consolidation of small farms into larger ones got worse day by day. Their wages fell and their living conditions were very hard.

So, Jeanette wants to underline that capitalism is not a “popular” economic system, that is it spread the difference between rich and poor people.

Well, Winterson’s point of view about capitalism can also be found in an extract from “The Guardian” written by Riccardo Bellofiore a year ago. Indeed he agrees with the view of capitalism as a multiplex system: considering the European Union, it has brought enrichment and improvement of Germany, while some countries were completely damaged, such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Then, Bellofiore considers Italy’s situation and the reader come easily across to the effects of capitalism as described by Jeanette in his book. So, it turns up again the idea of capitalism as wealth only to a few number of people.

Now, as said at the beginning of the essay, there were and there are a lot of people who tried and tries to give a proper interpretation of the phenomenon of capitalism. To that aim, the economic blog called “Schumpeter Business and Management”, from the name of John Schumpeter, an Austrian-American economist who likened capitalism to a "perennial gale of creative destruction”, shows us the multiplex face of capitalism, providing a lot of quotations about it. Choosing some of them, the two quotations by John Schumpeter display his negative vision about capitalism, defined as “a process of Creative Destruction”, in the sense of it can be a danger weapon against whom will be not able to control it.

Going on, the Italian –American gangster Al Capone, lived in the first half of the 20th century, stated that capitalism is “the racket of the ruling class”, in the sense of it is very close to power and it aims to bring more wealth to people who have some importance. So, the vision of capitalism as a “no popular” economic system, comes back again. Next, the quotation by Thomas Friedman, an economy writer, affirms that capitalism should be “freemarket”, in order to bring wealth not only to rich and important people, but also to poor and common ones. In that way capitalism would be right and without favouritisms.

Summing up, you can notice how the vision of Jeanette Winterson about capitalism as a multi-faceted system, without an exact form and meaning, returns both in the extract by Riccardo Bellofiore and in the blog dedicated to John Schumpeter. What’s more, the vision of capitalism as an economic system which favourites a little circle of people and damages the rest of them is widespread, so people like Friedman states that it has to change from unpopular to popular, in order to guarantee all-people well being.