E. M. Woods, The Origin of Capitalism (1999)

Even among Marxist historians there is a tendency to naturalize capitalism as a social form, E. M. Wood observes. The standard narrative, including the commercialization model and demographic model, presupposes the very thing in need of explanation. Capitalism, it is argued, is the end social form in full realization of basic human tendencies at exchange. Its realization took the gradual removal of external constraints that impeded its development; however, undergirding history always was the same law of market logic, trans-historical in its status, manifest in the earliest instance of exchange to the mature industrial form of capitalism. Wood refutes the presupposition of such a continuity but underpinning the specific origin of capitalism (not an immutable law which in fact seems to argue that there is no origin of capitalism at all), that is the specific social property relations born in the English countryside. England was unique in its relative centralization of political power in the state and an integrated national economy separate from it. The feudal lords, unlike countries like France, appropriated the peasants not by their extra-economic forces (i.e. taxes) but rather by purely economic means (i.e. extraction of surplus labor). No longer did peasants own the means of their self-reproduction, that is land. Dispossessed, they were then forced to sell their labor-power; hence, unfixed rents responsive to market imperatives stimulated vast improvement in productivity. But the point made by Wood is that it was not market opportunities but market imperatives that led to the improvements. Furthermore, the rural society of England was divided into landowners and dispossessed peasants, giving birth to the famous triad of landlord, capitalist tenant, and wage laborer. The last group, wage laborers, come to not only consist a massive workforce but also one reliant upon the domestic market for cheap consumer goods.