Capitalismo popular y utopías americanas: una Historia socio-económica del cooperativismo estadounidense

Abstract

This PhD dissertation offers a study on Political Economy and History of Economics & Institutions, to review the foundations and experiences of American capitalism from the religious and ideological factor, in the way to understand the development of cooperativism according to this, as it has been working in the discipline of Religion & Economics. Attention is focused on the model of the so-called popular capitalism (or Folksnomics) and its cooperative utopias experienced in the 19c., during the colonization of the American West, and its subsequent projection with the solidarity network as sanctuary movement. There is a review of the mainstream, the whig approach (of consensus, on the imposition of the industrial-North model on the agrarian-South model, without attention to the commercial-West model) and the woke view (of conflict, delegitimizing all American capitalism as slave-owning and hetero-patriarchal system). In this way, the traditional conflict-consensus dichotomous interpretation is improved with a heterodox reading of competition and cooperation (occurring simultaneously in the West, by free, entrepreneur and prosperous people). This reading allows to explain the development of the colonizing process in the West, with innovative private self-management companies (reconfiguring the class system, the economic agents, the production factors and the firms types and culture), in the form of community farms and workshops, and their surplus and its trade of food and tools (staple approach) favored the integration of the interior of the country; also, it prepared the conditions for the Second Industrial Revolution. Likewise, the sanctuary movement has been a private initiative, with confessional origin, for the inclusion of new migrants (as an improvement of labor factor and human & social capital), in opposition to the switch in public policies, moving from a model of freedom and open doors to another of persecution and deportations. In all these issues, the religious and ideological factors have been the key, when beliefs are imposed on institutions (confirming that there is no way for coercive centralized planning), and respectively producing the paradox of colonization and sanctuary. The colonizing paradox consists in the fact that, while the first companies to be established where the religious ones, with a low initial investment, being more productive and sustainable; on the other hand, the ideological companies, despite their subsequent constitution and with greater social capital, they were the first to cease activity. The sanctuary paradox refers to the fact that the more the public powers deviate from the constitutional tradition (pro-freedom, property and migration), the greater the reaction of civil society (for their restoration), giving rise to a new cycle of awakenings and revivals, for the transformation of the socio-economic model; this is the case when it is religiously inspired, but if it is ideological, then polarization increases. This study offers a systematization of cases, by saturation of the typology of companies that competed in the colonization of the West, as well as support networks in the sanctuary movement, to compare them and evaluate their efficiency and institutional quality according to theoretical and methodological heterodox frameworks of Austrian Economics and New-Institutionalist, according to the theorems and thesis of Mises, Hayek, Coase, Buchanan-Tullock, et al. In this way, it is possible to clarify the aforesaid paradoxes.