By most Eurocentric accounts, the nineteenth was the most capitalist of centuries. The expansion of trade and technological change in the now affluent countries of Britain, France, and the U.S. gained visible momentum.

The factory became the iconic site of production, and the corporation its iconic legal form. Karl Marx, largely responsible for the term “capitalism”, became its most iconic critic.

Capitalism was not a sufficiently specific word to characterize nineteenth­century economic systems shaped by patriarchy, slavery, and imperialism as well as the expansion of wage employment. The effort to attribute most social ills to the exploitation of wage earners by capitalists called attention to the dynamics of collective conflict, but oversimplified these dynamics in dangerously misleading ways. By distancing themselves from their socialist feminist antecedents, Marx and Engels gained support from a growing male trade union movement. But their single-minded emphasis on the internal contradictions of capitalism generated a simplistic theory of socialism that proved vulnerable to patriarchal and authoritarian appropriation.¹

In their passion to understand—and hopefully eliminate—class interests, Marx and Engels understated the importance of collective interests based on nation, race, and gender. While they acknowledged differences within the global working class, they viewed these as political and cultural, rather than economic in character. The oppression of the working class, unlike that of other groups, was based in the appropriation of surplus value, the linchpin of capitalist accumulation. Their embrace of a labor theory of value that disre­garded family labor deflected their attention from gender inequality in par­ticular. Yet many of their fellow travelers avoided this mistake. August Bebel, among others, developed an analysis of patriarchal capitalism that highlighted the parallels between collective interests based on class and gender.

Despite their departures from the earlier socialist feminist tradition, Marx and Engels always insisted that a better world was possible. Their conviction that members of the working class could successfully exert collective power countered individualist views of the war-of-all-against-all variety. At first glance, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution seemed to strengthen the case for emphasis on individual competition. Proponents of social evolution, like Herbert Spencer, seemed to argue that poverty and inequality were the outcome of necessary, natural processes. Yet Darwin himself tried to recon­cile relentless individual competition with evidence of cooperation based on both real and fictive kinship. In the twentieth century, debates over the role of collective interests would often be framed in the Darwinian language of individual versus group selection.