Capitalism's Slow Creep & The Struggles of Labour
Capitalism didn’t burst onto the world stage; it crept in through the cracks left by old empires and broken systems.
It rose from the ruins of feudalism, fuelled by the Black Death, which decimated Europe's peasantry and unraveled centuries-old social contracts. As scarcity of labor gave workers newfound bargaining power, landowners and monarchs turned to new systems of wealth generation: trade, conquest, exploitation and ultimately, global markets. By the 16th century, mercantilist states like England harnessed colonialism to extract silver, spices, and human lives. Capitalism, at its root, was never about free trade or free choice; it was about control—of resources, people, and information.
The Industrial Revolution magnified these contradictions. Factories replaced fields. Children laboured twelve hours a day. Workers in London and Manchester fought back—not through grand revolutions, but with sabotage, strikes, and demands for suffrage. In the United States, tycoons like Carnegie and Rockefeller amassed staggering fortunes, while workers, crowded into unsafe buildings like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, paid the price with their lives.
Each explosion of wealth was mirrored by an implosion of human dignity. Yet capitalism endured, not because it was fair or inevitable, but because it proved astonishingly adaptable.
Its genius lay not in erasing resistance but in absorbing it—granting partial rights, raising partial wages, adopting partial reforms—always just enough to prevent total collapse.
Arrival in Asia and the Indian Transformation
When capitalism crossed oceans into Asia, it encountered ancient civilisations unaccustomed to wage labor or profit as a virtue. In the aftermath of World War II, many newly independent Asian countries experimented with various models. Vietnam's Doi Moi (which means 'rejuvenation') reforms and Indonesia’s mixed economy represented attempts to graft capitalist growth onto socialist roots, often under heavy state supervision. Yet the true transformation was less about grand policy shifts and more about the remaking of everyday life: peasants migrating to industrial zones, ancestral crafts replaced by assembly lines, kinship ties eroded by the demands of hourly wages.
Our own journey illustrates this metamorphosis with particular poignancy. At independence in 1947, India embraced socialism, not out of ideological purity but pragmatic necessity. Jawaharlal Nehru envisioned an economy led by public sector giants—steel mills, dams, and banks—that would deliver prosperity without succumbing to colonial-style exploitation. For three decades, the "License Raj" regime tightly regulated production, trade, and investment. Jobs in state enterprises were coveted for their stability; labor was organised but largely insulated from global competition - which hurt us badly in the coming decades.
This era produced a distinctive labor class—salaried, secure, and accustomed to lifetime employment. But by the late 1980s, the dream began to wither. Economic stagnation, rising fiscal deficits, and a balance of payments crisis in 1991 forced India to liberalise. Under Manmohan Singh’s reforms, barriers fell. Markets opened. Foreign companies flooded in. Overnight, labor was no longer protected by the state; it became a commodity once more, bought and sold according to the brutal arithmetic of global capital.
Today’s workforce embodies this tumultuous legacy. A minority enjoys salaries, social security, and corporate perks. The majority toils informally, without contracts or protections, caught between tradition and the new tyranny of flexible labor markets.
Capitalism’s Kryptonite
Capitalism's survival depends on a framework more intricate than its most countries have been able to establish. Amongst many others, it...
requires secure property rights: without confidence that their wealth will not be arbitrarily seized, entrepreneurs and investors will not risk building enterprises.
depends on transparent governance—an often elusive ideal even in advanced economies—because corruption corrodes trust faster than any market downturn, and
needs flexible legal frameworks, capable of adapting to innovations like cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence without strangling them.
When these pillars weaken, capitalism falters. Postcolonial Africa offers sobering lessons: without property security, effective courts, or robust labor protections, capitalist ventures often became mere extensions of colonial plunder.
Yet the twenty-first century confronts capitalism with a deeper, existential dilemma. Attempts to reform capitalism—to green it, humanize it, democratize it—are proliferating. Terms like “stakeholder capitalism” and “Africapitalism” have entered the lexicon, proposing a gentler form of accumulation. Efforts like the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive suggest that at least some in the global elite recognise the urgency of change.
But can a system built on perpetual expansion coexist with ecological limits? Can markets, designed to reward short-term profits, prioritize long-term survival?
The next chapter of capitalism will not be written solely in boardrooms or trading floors, but in the daily struggles of workers navigating AI, of voters redefining democracy, of activists resisting environmental devastation.