Ellen Wood’s seminal work, The Origin of Capitalism, was published in 1999, on the cusp of the 21st century, as part of a conversation among what remained of the Marxist left on how to best combat what they termed “globalization”. It was republished in 2017, with Verso books. It included an added introductory note explaining that “neoliberalism”, then the term in vogue with the same general ideological circles, could also be understood as an enemy of Wood’s work. This was, and is, an admirable goal, and it is difficult to fault Wood for her frustrations with the Marxist left’s historiography of capitalism up until that point. Nearly twenty years of failed resistance had only heightened the sense that too many people succumbed to the siren call of granting capitalism a sense of unearned inevitability. One can understand Wood’s desire to confront the “begged questions”, as she writes, in modern assumptions about capitalism’s origins as a way of pushing back against the slow surrender of any of capitalism’s ideological opponents, both at the end of the 1990s and in the beginning of the post-2016 reality of American politics.

Unfortunately, the timeliness of the project and the nobility of its aims do not distract from the failures of the book as a work of historical research and analysis. The thrust of her argument, that the origins of capitalism can be traced to changing social relations in the context of property and commodity production, feels sound, but the extent to which she insists on the primacy of English rent markets in the 16th and 17th centuries without adequate evidential grounding, while shoehorning a wide variety of prespectives from classical economics to historical materialism into a single bloc of universally inaccurate suppositions, remains unsupported throughout the work.

Wood’s focus on rent markets, and her subsequent claims that they were the drivers of changing social relations in the English capitalist economy, leaves her open to the same criticisms of confusing opportunity for imperative that she levies at her opponents. When elaborating her thesis on the agrarian origins of capitalism, she claims that the surveyors computing the new, non-customary rents did so “on the basis of some more or less abstract principle of market value.” This claim pre-supposes a competitive market for rent, before the speculation of value that created inputs for that market; that pre-supposed market for rent thus assumes that the intentional and political creation of this rent market that was, since she claims it was not borne out of a competitive market for the commodities produced on that land, born out of an already existing profit seeking motive in the landholding class. That existing motive for profit seeking cannot, she claims, have already existed in feudalism, as she rejects the traditional view of historical materialists that capitalism was borne out of the interices of feudal society, but it also could not have come about organically, as she rejects the idea of a natural human predisposition towards profit seeking behavior. From where, then, does it come? This question remains unanswered, prompting us to wonder what gains, as Marxists, could be had by abandoning the concept of historical materialism when searching for capitalism’s alternatives.

Wood’s work also seeks to reject the notion of “failed transitions”, namely those of the Italian city-states and the Dutch republics, but in doing so once again fails to create fully supported arguments or reckon with the implications of her definitions, particularly in regards to the economics of the Low Countries. When discussing the mechanisms by which the Dutch Republic sought to protect and promote international trade, Wood claims that their tools were entirely “extra-economic”, namely those that involved military force. These tools are offered as proof-positive that the Dutch still operated on pre-capitalist models. This belies a history of counter-examples that cut both ways; not only did the Dutch often operate on profit-maximizing principles internationally that worked counter to extra-economic aims (their relationship with England foundered in the late 16th century because they would not stop trading with the Spanish despite being at war), the British empire made extensive use of the aforementioned tools long after their supposed rupture with commercial economic dictates. In fact, recent scholarship by Asheesh Kapur Siddique, among others, extensively demonstrates the falsity of English reliance on ‘improvement’ as justification for imperial conquest, showing that well into the 18th century the form of governance that colonies in India, that largest of British holdings, should take, arguing that the British heavily relied upon archives of native Moghul rulers for extraction of economic surplus.

All of this also goes without confronting Wood’s unsubstantiated claim that Dutch domestic producers were not subject to market imperatives, as those claims are relatively unsourced and do not make use of extensive studies of the Dutch economy, such as Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude’s extensive De Eerste Ronde van Modeme Economische Groei, that have been part of the debates on the subject since the late 1990s. Dutch linen production, for example, operated under identical imperatives to the market for leases that Wood describes, with domestic producers being subject to internal competition on a national market. That these products were shipped overseas, rather than produced for domestic consumption, might be a convincing avenue of argument to follow and explore further, but Wood forgoes that possibility and instead writes off the Dutch domestic economy as one still operating under commercial, extra-economic modes of value extraction. When putting forward the reasons that the Dutch economy should not be viewed as one operating under capitalist imperatives, Wood often falls back onto demographic data of Dutch and English peasant classes. This inadvertently supports the idea that the Dutch, as a result of an insufficient peasant class upon which to exert the market imperatives already experienced by the ruling classes, were in fact one of those “failed transitions” that the central thesis of her work claims cannot exist.

The argument that capitalism requires a large rural population that can be subjected to market imperatives on the basis of their relationship to their land is one that could certainly be explored, in addition to the other interesting arguments offered by a comparative study of Dutch and English economies. However, by rejecting any possibility of a “failed transition”, Wood forecloses on those studies entirely. Her suspicion seems to be that by suggesting the Dutch failed to transition into capitalism, one is proposing that capitalism is a natural state to progress into from feudalism. My attachments to historical materialism aside, this appears to me to be a form of analysis that disregards real evidence of market imperatives. To admit that the Dutch domestic economy operated on the same market imperatives does not mean that it was a result of natural human inclination; rather, it invites us to a deeper study of how, exactly, these imperatives come about, one that creates a more robust argument that resists accusations of strawmanning. That Dutch social relations depended on intra-market competition that demanded improvement might put the lie to her specific argument about capitalism’s English origins, but it does not necessarily invalidate the broader point of capitalism’s specificity.

On a broader scale, the work suffers most when it chooses to eschew consideration of still-unsettled historical debates on matters that form fundamental supporting pillars to Wood’s argument. Whenever it occurs, it only calls more attention to the additional substantiation that many of Wood’s claims require. When Wood asserts that “landed classes succeeded in shaping the [English] state to their own changing requirements”, it only highlights the fact that these “landed classes” were composed of different social groups with widely varying relationships to both land ownership and productive forces, and that the methods by which disparate members of these landed classes shaped said state are still a matter of active historical debate. This also becomes apparent when making claims that would be contested by the historians with whom she is arguing; when, as mentioned above, she asserts that the ‘abstract principle of market value’ dictated terms of the rent market, she chooses not to bolster this claims against the competing ones of classical economists that this market value would be determined by the values found in existing markets for the commodities produced on the land. Nor does she choose to explain or support claims of a lack of interest in improvement in the Dutch countryside, leaving her argument weak when contested with the realities of Dutch land reclamation projects. These are brushed away with the remark that these reclamation projects were not improvement because they were not motivated by ‘improvement’ in the capitalist sense, that of increased productivity for commodity sale, but, because she provides no evidence to refute the body of data that supports the opposite, her argument would not stand up to scrutiny by her ideological opponents.

Fundamentally, Edward Tverdek was correct when he wrote in a review that “Wood raises the questions we ought to be raising if we are to dismantle this tired orthodoxy.” It is worth considering capitalism’s origins as a specific institution, one made by the hands of humanity and thus equally capable of being challenged and dismantled. Uncovering the roots of capitalism in the changing of opportunity to imperative is a worthwhile goal, one that makes clear that humanity need not choose to subject itself to those imperatives and, broadly speaking, did not choose to do so until forced to by the fact of capitalism’s need to marketize the world under the barrel of a gun. Likewise, her desire to rescue the humanist values of the Englightenment from postmodernity is understandable and even sympathetic. Unfortunately, however, Tverdek was also accurate in saying that the historical materialist interpretation of feudalism’s contradictions resolving into capitalism is one that “Wood would like us to abandon, [but] the reader may be left wondering why we should.” His review, and mine as well, identify Wood’s tendency to unsympathetically portray the arguments of classical economists and orthodox Marxists alike in pursuit of her goal, which often works to her detriment when she provides little to no substantiation of more controversial claims. Hopefully, though, this means that, especially with the book’s re-issue in 2017, such a controversial work of scholarship can reignite historical debate around the man-made origins of the capitalist system.

The Folger Shakespeare Library’s performance of Romeo and Juliet was, at least at the matinee showing on a Sunday late in the run, marred by technical errors. Actors (in particular, Romeo and Juliet themselves) would drop lines and entrances; the imposing set seemed to get in the way of any staging choices the director made; the fight choreography felt confused, uncertain, and half-baked; AI-generated campaign speeches and promotional material, shown on multiple screens across the stage, were sometimes deafening, sometimes inaudible. How unfortunate, then, that the technical errors of the show could do nothing to mitigate the vacuous, self-important messaging of the production’s concept.

American elections are increasingly carnivals of excess, with campaigns beginning earlier and earlier each cycle. Still, though, the final months of news cycles leading up to the first Tuesday in November are always the most fevered. This is particularly true in Washington D.C., home to America’s class of politics doers and watchers, where the tenor of debate between political parties can spill out of Capitol Hill into the streets of the wider city, as operatives of both political parties are forced to rub shoulders in an increasingly hostile and divisive environment. It is likely this framing of American politics that the director, Raymond Caldwell, had in mind when he wrote in his directors note about the shock he experienced, hearing friends tittering about how they would rather die than date a Republican. Don’t you know, one could imagine him asking, that those are our neighbors? Possibly our friends? What will become of us, then, if this is our attitude? What will become of our children?

Thus, the Folger’s Romeo and Juliet was born. Lady Montague, a woman of few words in the script, becomes Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, and Lord Capulet, the most substantial parent in the play, becomes Donald Trump. Not in the abstract, not in an allusive gesture of hand or suggestive choice of costuming, but in literal, practical, physical ways. Both presidential hopefuls appear on screen before the play begins and throughout the run, delivering speeches [As mentioned previously, these were AI-generated] built off of actual words delivered by those two candidates. The advertisements are near-copies of real world TV spots that many audience members have likely been inundated with, referencing real issues at play in the current election season: immigration, Trump’s felony charges, the politics of sex and gender. No other characters are one-to-one analogues of their real world counterparts [Though it is easy to imagine Melania Trump suffering from the pill-and-liquor problems that Lady Capulet suffers from, considering what she is forced to live with], but the party affiliations and family ties of the world are made explicit from the beginning of the performance. That these characters and their rhetoric explicitly represent the real-life players on the American political stage is a central aspect of the play: as Caldwell says in the note, “the divisiveness of our body politic blinds love now more than ever”. The messaging of 2024 has simply been too mean, too tribal, and it is driving the young people of America away from a vision of a better future and deeper into parasocial internet usage, manic violence, and self-destructive substance abuse.

If these descriptions of the production and its message seem uncharitable, that’s because they are. There is little room for charity in this review. In grafting American presidential politics onto the structure of the Capulet and Montague families, the production evaporates Romeo and Juliet of any ‘structures’ or ‘systems’ that could be critiqued. In conflating the media cycle of a presidential election and American politics writ large, it abdicates its responsibility to come to terms with the damage American systems of governance can do to the world. By turning the victims of the play into phone-addicted, drug-addled children, it ignores the expressions of hope and courage young people all across America have exhibited over the last year. If read even more uncharitably, the production is actively seeking to paper over the actual movements of youth activism that had so frightened and offended the aforementioned DC-dwelling political operatives, for whom this play was produced. This production is a deep, fundamental failure to properly understand and express not only the text of Romeo and Juliet but also the world of American politics more broadly.

There will be no defense of American electoral politics in this review, as I bear no particular fondness for the Democratic party or its candidates. My thoughts on the Republican party, if not already obvious, can be easily assumed by the rest of this review. It is not on partisan grounds that I find the Montague-Democrat, Capulet-Republican analogy so repulsive. Indeed, the logic is sound at first glance -- Lord Capulet’s aggressive enforcement of patriarchal authority on the rest of his family seems much more in line with a Republican reading of the character, and the absence of any real textual contribution from the Montague parents makes it not impossible to see Kamala Harris as an absentee mother for Romeo, too busy with the campaign to make time for her child. Once that analogy is explored any further than just vague allusion, however, it collapses completely. One is not a Democrat or Republican by birth; more importantly, being a Montague or a Capulet does not imply any particular belief system or policy position. Setting aside the problem of the Prince, Montague and Capulet are fighting over something that the play deems unimportant or inconsequential -- thus, the death of the heirs of both houses is a tragedy by way of the fact that their conflict is unnecessary. Not fully setting the Prince aside -- in a world where Capulet and Montague are running for President of Verona, by what authority does the Prince govern them both? Dressed all in white, lugging a bullhorn about the stage, distraught at the violence done by these two political parties -- who is this person? What American person, group, institution sits above the structures of politics? Caldwell agrees with this, and wants to bring this tragedy to the fore: as he says in the note, Romeo and Juliet is supposed to be about the “tragedy of society played out on the bodies of young people”.

This, then, is the central failing of the Folger’s interpretation: the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is that an inherited, meaningless conflict destroys the lives of everyone unlucky enough to be born into it. To be Lord Capulet is the be the patriarchal driver of a decades-long feud against a rival Veronese family; to be the Republican candidate for president is to seek power in order to further your vision of America’s future. It is unclear what Lady Montague, in the text of the play, would materially gain from the success of her war against the Capulets. If the Democrats were to succeed in eliminating Republicans from public life, the laws that govern the country and all its people would change, possibly in radical ways. This unresolved tension, between the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet and the real-world implications of conflict in the sphere of politics, is what makes the production a complete failure on its own terms.

There is, at the core of the Folger’s interpretation, a refusal to engage with what politics is about. Multiple times, an advertisement for Kamala Montague plays that proclaims her intention to increase border patrol funding and escalate the war on drugs. In one scene, it plays on a TV in front of Donald Capulet, and when the voiceover begins to chastise the former president for withholding funding for such crucial projects, he turns the screens off in disgust. Juliet, watching with him, sees his anger and is on edge for the rest of the scene, anxious for him to leave the room so she can do a quick line of coke out of her locket. It is a distillation of this production’s driving message, how ‘political tribalism’ leads to ‘a society riddled with substance abuse’. Poor girl, we’re supposed to think -- back-and-forth rhetoric, a toxic media environment, and the tensions of her own home have driven her into the arms of drug addiction. This is farcical. Donald Trump Jr. and Ella Emhoff [Because, in fact, both major presidential nominees do have children in one form or another] are not the victims of their parents’ frenzied media cycle. Jared Kushner does not suffer as a result of ‘the divisiveness of our body politic’. 1.1 million people have been deported between 2020 and 2024, and 1.5 million were deported between 2016 and 2020. It is those people, tens or hundreds of thousands of families torn apart, that are the invisible victims of Lord Trump and Lady Harris and their competing attempts to depict themselves as protectors of America’s borders. To assert that our political system is broken is reasonable: to assert that it is broken because the sides are simply too mean to each other is monstrous. To conclude, as this play does, with Donald Trump and Doug Emhoff aiming firearms at each other over the bodies of their own dead children is to live in a world completely removed from the material consequences of American politics. This is not unusual for Washington, D.C.

Romeo and Juliet is a play about young people. This production’s interpretation is doubly about young people, attempting to bring modern technology and all its attendant woes into conversation with the existing tragedy of the text. The production is also set explicitly in the politics of 2024 America. Noticeably absent, then, from both the performance and the underlying interpretive work is the actual political contributions of young people in the last year. This absence leads to an old [Old as in previously mentioned in this review] question from a new perspective. Who, in fact, are the victims here, and what is it that they are victims of? The Folger’s assertion, that it is young people writ large, unengaged with the world of politics, that are victims of political tribalism, falls apart completely when met with young people’s real world engagement with politics. It is easy to set aside the actual assertion the production makes. That is, that an increasingly acrid political environment is driving more and more young people to check out completely. This is easily set aside because, ever since the 18-24 demographic received the vote in 1971, young people have always been checked out of presidential politics, regardless of the tenor of the discourse. It is on-its-face ridiculous to claim that increased screen use and drug addiction is downstream of young people’s exposure to ‘political tribalism’. It is more difficult but all the more instructive to interrogate the assertion-by-absence. There is a common thread between the failure of the Capulet-Republican Montague-Democrat analogy and the absence of the political activism of the young: the production’s implicit insistence that there is nothing really of value being contested in the sphere of politics, nothing that is more important than turning down the temperature of the rhetoric. It is, in particular, the campus movement against the genocide in Gaza that flies in the face of the Folger’s conception of the youth of America.

Many young people, when polled, oppose the policies of both American political parties in regard to the Israel/Palestine conflict and criticize the role America has played in the situation so far. In fact, they disagree with these policies and level these criticism at a unviersally higher rate than any of their older American counterparts. Over the course of 2024, at least 60 college student bodies erupted in protests against the American material support of Israel’s war effort. Their methods were well-trod aspects of American protest: occupation of common spaces on campuses had been a method of political action since at least the 1960s, when young Americans took to the streets in their thousands to protest the bombings of Vietnam and Cambodia. American youth political action has been a mainstay of protest politics, from the Civil Rights era to South African apartheid protests to actions against the war in Iraq. The students of 2024 had aims that were often well-articulated and widely circulated, focusing on the investments by their institutions of higher learning in companies that furthered the war effort or supported the IDF. Almost without exception, these protest movements were met with repressive violence: in a particularly visible case, the Columbia University president enlisted the help of the NYPD to destroy college property in an attempt to dislodge the students from buildings they were occupying. The images of these protests, capturing baton-wielding police officers assaulting young people across the country, are far and away the most memorable examples of what might be termed ‘political violence’ in America in the last year.

That is the root of the cognitive dissonance I felt when watching the Folger’s production of Romeo and Juliet, the elephant in the room blocking my view of the show. The ongoing season at the newly-remodeled Folger Shakespeare Library is entitled “WHOSE DEMOCRACY?”, with the tagline: “Featuring performances that challenge perceptions and ignite conversations about power and participations”. Romeo and Juliet, as it fits into this broader theme, is about the effects of politics, and its ensuing violence, on young people. The production asserts that it is the divisiveness of the modern political moment that is doing so much damage to Juliet and her Romeo. In doing so, it robs the young people of America of their agency. It attempts to criticize the world of American politics, but by completely misrepresenting both the participants and the stakes, it vacates the criticism of any real-world value. It tries to demonstrate “the tragedy of society played out on the bodies of young people”, but then ignores the criticisms of that society that young people all across America have been articulating. The Romeos and Juliets of America have been saying, loud and clear, why they are so dissatisfied with their democracy. It is a shame that the Folger hasn’t been listening.