When capitalism emerged, it developed a wholly new social order, one that required severing the masses of people from access to land, tools, and resources. Rather than a peasantry violently coerced to turn over goods to their lords, capitalism created a new underclass of wageworkers—a class of people theoretically free to work where and how they pleased, but who would in practice be compelled—by economic necessity—to produce a surplus for someone else nonetheless.
Over the course of three centuries (from the fourteenth century until the Industrial Revolution of 1780–1850) the transformation of feudal relationships to capitalist ones created a system of production based on the exploitation of "free" wage labor: a social order of haves and have-nots.#4958•
For manufacture to advance, a rising capitalist class needed a counterpart class: laborers who could be employed whenever and wherever industrialists wanted them. These laborers had to be doubly free, in Marx's words: free from serfdom in order to be employed at will, but also free of land and the means to produce their own sustenance.
On this basis, they could be disciplined to accept the terms of working for a wage#4956•
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As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Capitalism, we are compelled to face, is driven only by what is profitable, and this dictates every facet of our lives—and deaths.
The profit motive dishes out material deprivation and ecological destruction.
Our relationships with each other face deep alienation.
A few make fantastic profits at the expense of the many, who in turn spend most of our waking hours in conditions we have little say over.
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#4961•
If there are just three points that I hope you'll take away from this book they're these:
One: These are not accidents. They are not isolated incidents of greed. They are simply products of the way the system works. Competition is the mainstay of capitalism. It can't be made friendlier or softer because it requires an accumulation of capital at any cost, in order to get ahead, or get left behind.
Two: These same processes of accumulation necessarily lead to contradictions that threaten the very profits that capitalists seek. Every contradiction for capitalism is both a great hazard to our lives—since we are made to pay the price—and also an important crack in the system. Every periodic crisis is a potential point around which to organize.
If the system seems impenetrable, all the more reason to find its weakest links.
Three: "The point, however, is to change it," argued Marx. And this too is the point of this book. Better understanding the system, as Marx wrote: "to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society" is a critical first step. These laws of motion help us to assess the balance of forces, the relative strength or weakness of the ruling class, and their strategies for increasing their profits and our immiseration.
But Marx had more to say about how the very development of capitalist industry not only concentrates capital in few hands, but also concentrates workers together into a force that can challenge the system.
Capitalism, wrote Marx and Engels, creates its own gravediggers#4955•