The extent to which capitalism makes the world go round
In the heart of Africa as in the old European and North American centres, not only has capitalism no need for everything to be capitalist, but it needs everything not to become capitalist. It's got to have social behaviour, sets of norms, legal rights and respected values to temper (and consolidate) the rule of money and profit. If it ever existed, a purely utilitarian world where everyone anywhere any time would only look for his own personal gain measured in dollars or yen, would make social life and the continuity of firms impossible. (This is one of the limits of globalisation: we'll come back to it.) Capitalism inherits the assets and contradictions of the millenniums that preceded it, it does away with some and transforms others, it reproduces them in its own way, but rarely suppresses them, as is shown by the fate of family and religion.
Why doesn't capitalist domination create a society only made up of bourgeois and proletarians ? Why doesn't it eliminate every non-merchant tie and ideal ? Not because that system has not (yet) conquered the whole planet. Exact opposite. It's for two reasons that result from a conquest which started in the 16th century and was completed in the 20th. First, capital never arrives on a tabula rasa. It does not produce itself: it uses human resources laden with history. Even in North America where it made a clean sweep through genocide, it imported complex and strife-ridden European realities. Secondly, even the country that goes the furthest in turning everything into commodity and wage labour, in reducing family, school, feeling, sex, ideas, art and politics to money relations, and which likes to think of itself as liberated from archaic constraints and tensions, periodically goes back to supposedly outmoded practices: it restricts free competition, infringes on parliamentary and civil rights, puts a clampdown on strikes and collective bargaining, and reinvents protectionism. These backlashes are a modern effect of the reality that's come to be central to our societies: the labour-capital connection, and the necessity for capital to master labour, in forms that are never definitive.
