"At its core, capitalism was defined by Marx as a social relation of production. He meant that profits are not the result of good accounting or the inventive ideas of the superrich, but are instead the outcome of an exploitative relationship between two classes of people: bosses and workers."
"The division of society into haves and have-nots did not gently come to pass, and certainly not through the frugalness and intelligence of a small elite. It was the outcome of a violent upheaval, which forced large swaths of the population from their lands and traditional means of self-sufficiency. As we'll see, laws and coercive menas had to be employed to discipline a new class of laborers. Further, political revolutions discussed below placed a new capitalist elite at the helm of states, which could systematically repress the struggles of the dispossessed, advance markets and plunder abroad, and tend to other needs of the burgeoning elite. The violence, coercion, legislation, and upheavals necessary for the birth of this new system evince just how unnatural and vicious the road to capitalism was."
"As long as peasants and their families had some economic independence, obligation to serve their feudal lords was quite transparent - landowners and the state had to physically wrest a portion of the peasants' harvest through rent and taxes. Under the guise of freedom and democracy, the new landless wage laborers were 'free' to sell their labor-power to whomever they chose... or face starvation."
"To presume that markets and market signals can best determine all allocative decisions is to presume that everything can in principle be treated as a commodity. Commodification presumes the existence of property rights over process, things, and social relations that a price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract. The market is presumed to work as an appropriate guide - an ethic - for all human action."
"The bosses also get a big discount when they purchase labor-power. A good deal of unpaid work also contributes heavily toward its reproduction: for instance, childbirth, childcare, food preparation, laundry, and household cleaning, to name a few."
"Yet even if we limit ourselves more narrowly to paid labor that goes into producing your subsistence, if all things were fair and just, you would give over to your boss only the amount of time that it takes to reproduce the value of your labor-power."
"Using this definition, we see that wealth and poverty do not determine class, rather they are manifestations of it. The bosses are thus not defined by the degree of their extravagance. At the same time, society's poor do not represent an 'underclass' who, due to lack of employment or wealth, stand outside of society. Poverty is an integral part of the experience of the working class, and unemployment is just a stone's throw away for most workers."
"As a 2018 Oxfam report revealed, the richest forty-two people own the same combined wealth as the world's poorest 3.7 billion. In the US, the wealth of the three richest people equals that of the bottom half of the population. This gap grows by the day."
"For Marxists, understanding the system's propensity to break down is central to our analysis of capitalism, as well as the potential for its revolutionary overthrow. We've seen that at its best, a 'healthy' capitalist economy depends on exploitation, poverty, oppression, and environmental destruction in order to function."
"Understanding capitalist crisis is central to the theory and politics of revolutionary Marxism. The volatility and destruction brought upon by endemic, periodic crises make capitalism a fundamentally precarious system, and at the same time open the way toward class struggle and the potential for revolution."
"So, for instance, a 'surplus' of housing is part of what led to the recession that began in 2008. But this is not because there isn't a need for homes! It's just that people don't have the money to buy homes."
"Speculation can take off and snowball quickly because much of bourgeois economics rests on a delusional premise that markets will always expand."
"In the 1970s, what became known as the 'neoliberal revolution' overthrew much of the regulatory structures that were imposed on finance in the wake of the Great Depression. We'll discuss neoliberalism further later. This decade saw the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement and floating exchange rates, increased capital mobility, deregulation, and privatization of social benefits, such as pensions. Deregulation opened the door to an explosion of currency markets and a drive to 'securitize' everything... Neoliberalism has meant, in short, the financialization of everything."
"The ideology of neoliberalism thus served as a blueprint to attack the working class. Speedups, increased productivity, and declining wages transferred wealth from the bottom rungs of society to the top. Social costs were meanwhile passed on to working families through cuts to public services and welfare. The desired outcome of this restructuring was growing profitability for the ruling class alongside staggering inequality."
"But the twin features of neoliberalism - economic polarization and deregulation - gave rise to contradictions that would implode down the line: overaccumulation, mountains of debt, and soaring speculative bubbles. Rapid accumulation gave way to overproduction."
"In keeping with neoliberal principles, the US government rescued the financial system without violating the concept of private ownership of the system. In the wake of the crisis, when financial reform entered political discussion, banks and their lobbyists succeeded in dictating the terms of the debate, resulting in largely preserving the status quo."
"But thus far the ruling class has never found a crisis it wasn't able to get out of - by making the working class pay for it."
"Mozambique, one of the poorest nations in the world, holds public debt equal to 70 percent of its GDP. Over 60 percent of it is owed to foreign institutions. The so-called 'emerging markets' became a popular investment destination for speculators searching for high-yield returns. They readily lapped up a record of $1.4 trillion wroth of debt from emerging markets' governments and companies. But when prices of commodities produced in the Global South fell, booming growth slowed, and speculators responded by pulling back investments and calling in debts."
"Profits cannot be created without the exploitation of labor at the point of production, even if large sums are traded and lost."
"We live in a society where every decision made by those with power is driven by how much money can be made. In a nutshell, 'exchange-value' rules over 'use-value'. Profits over human beings."
"Workers (sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically) have our hands on the gears of production. If we collectively withdraw our labor-power, along with it, we withdraw the means to turn a profit. Without profits, the system cannot survive."
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