Capitalism
Malcolm X on Capitalism: "It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely."
Summary
Characteristics
Alienation
"How Capitalism Causes Loneliness" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwQCnltp9lo)
"We have seen that the growing accumulation of capital implies its growing concentration. Thus grows the power of capital, the alienation of the conditions of social production personified in the capitalist from the real producers. Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social power, whose agent is the capitalist. This social power no longer stands in any possible relation to that which the labour of a single individual can create. It becomes an alienated, independent, social power, which stands opposed to society as an object, and as an object that is the capitalist's source of power."[1]
Exploitation
In reality, Marx thought, workers’ labor under capitalism is neither truly voluntary nor entirely for the benefit of the workers themselves. It is not truly voluntary because workers are forced by their lack of ownership of the means of production to sell their labor power to capitalists or else starve. And workers are not laboring entirely for their own benefit because capitalists use their privileged position to exploit workers, appropriating for themselves some of the value created by workers’ labor.
To understand Marx’s charge of exploitation, it is first necessary to understand Marx’s analysis of market prices, which he largely inherited from earlier classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Under capitalism, Marx argued, workers’ labor power is treated as a commodity. And because Marx subscribed to a labor theory of value, this means that just like any other commodity such as butter or corn, the price (or wage) of labor power is determined by its cost of production—specifically, by the quantity of socially necessary labor required to produce it. The cost of producing labor power is the value or labor-cost required for the conservation and reproduction of a worker’s labor power. In other words, Marx thought that workers under capitalism will therefore be paid just enough to cover the bare necessities of living. They will be paid subsistence wages.
But while labor power is just like any other commodity in terms of how its price is determined, it is unique in one very importance respect. Labor, and labor alone, according to Marx, has the capacity to produce value beyond that which is necessary for its own reproduction. In other words, the value that goes into the commodities that sustain a worker for a twelve-hour work day is less than the value of the commodities that worker can produce during those twelve hours. This difference between the value a worker produces in a given period of time and the value of the consumption goods necessary to sustain the worker for that period is what Marx called surplus value.
According to Marx, then, it is as though the worker’s day is split into two parts. During the first part, the laborer works for himself, producing commodities the value of which is equal to the value of the wages he receives. During the second part, the laborer works for the capitalist, producing surplus value for the capitalist for which he receives no equivalent wages. During this second part of the day, the laborer’s work is, in effect, unpaid, in precisely the same way (though not as visibly) as a feudal serf’s corvée is unpaid (Marx 1867).
Capitalist exploitation thus consists in the forced appropriation by capitalists of the surplus value produced by workers. Workers under capitalism are compelled by their lack of ownership of the means of production to sell their labor power to capitalists for less than the full value of the goods they produce. Capitalists, in turn, need not produce anything themselves but are able to live instead off the productive energies of workers. And the surplus value that capitalists are thereby able to appropriate from workers becomes the source of capitalist profit, thereby “strengthening that very power whose slave it is” (Marx 1847: 40)[2]
Centralization of Wealth
Competition
"Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society. This battle, a battle for life, for existence, for everything, in case of need a battle of life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes. Each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and to put himself in their place. The workers are in constant competition among themselves as are the members of the bourgeoisie among themselves. The power-loom weaver is in competition with the hand-loom weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver with him who has work or is better paid, each trying to supplant the other. But this competition of the workers among themselves is the worst side of the present state of things in its effect upon the worker, the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Hence the effort of the workers to nullify this competition by associations, hence the hatred of the bourgeoisie towards these associations, and its triumph in every defeat which befalls them."[3]
Usury
"Usury abridges the general formula for capital (M-C-M' or buying a commodity-C with money-M in order to sell it for more money-M). The usurer reduces this formula into its purest form: M-M': 'money which is worth more money, value which is greater than itself' (Marx, Capital 257)."[4]
Karl Marx referred to Usury as "the original starting-point of capital," "the perversion and objectification of production relations in their highest degree," and "mystification of capital in its most flagrant form."[5]
Origins of Capitalism
https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150008438748
https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/wood-ellen_agrarian-origins-of-capitalism-1998-jul-aug.pdf
Slavery and Capitalism
https://sci-hub.ru/https://muse.jhu.edu/article/580865/summary
https://www.jstor.org/stable/650442?casa_token=cpO5UM1ZcTkAAAAA%3AUxnyT-gW4_IbZoMbeDjBFh0k6qSjvYBeRd2kbvjaoHRqZAQNOR2NN8tSH3lX2kFbFtiX7NzIxg1lVP_JRFMdZc1ZS4f371TVlzkTs06rqGSUmyFu5EvN
Sugar and Coffee
https://is.muni.cz/el/fss/jaro2017/SAN106/_Sidney_W._Mintz__Sweetness_and_Power.pdf
Surplus Value
Climate Collapse
"Why Capitalism is Killing Us (And The Planet)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qxP2TzYcNw "Arundhati Roy: Capitalism Is “A Form of Religion” Stopping Solutions to Climate Change & Inequality": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyCkFoSIwWg
http://paecon.net/PAEReview/issue53/Smith53.pdf
https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.01091.x?casa_token=72Jf1ujZZg0AAAAA%
Industrial Agriculture
Mono-cultures
Biodiversity Loss
Colonization
Diffusionism
"Diffusionism is still, today, the foundation-theory for conservative beliefs about the rise of Europe and the "modernization" (read "civilization") of the Third World. Today it is accepted because colonialism, in various modern forms, remains a central and basic interest of the European elite, and it is still necessary to explain and rationalize a system by which European capital exploits non-European labor, mainly (but not only) for the purpose of persuading European populations that this exploitation is right, rational, and historically natural, and so persuade them to support the policies, pay the bills, and willingly endure the blood sacrifices. And today, still, an important component of this interest-bound theory is its tunnel-historical conception of the European past. It is still critically important to demonstrate that European social evolution has always been self-generated, owing nothing important to the non-European world, that Europe (or rather Western Europe, "the West") has always been, and remains today, ahead of the rest of the world in level and rate of development, that its economic character, and that progress for the non-European world can only come via the diffusion of European-based multinational capitalism."[6]
The Witch Trials
https://www.ppesydney.net/witch-hunts-and-the-birth-of-capitalism-reflections-on-caliban-and-the-witch/ -- Use Excerpts from Caliban and the Witch for this sub section
https://inthesetimes.com/article/capitalism-witches-women-witch-hunting-sylvia-federici-caliban
Alternatives
Human-Nature Arguments
Just Transition
Sources
- ↑ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm
- ↑ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/#MarxTheoExpl
- ↑ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch05.htm
- ↑ https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/marxism/terms/usury.html
- ↑ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch24.htm
- ↑ Blaut, J. M. (1989). Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism. Science & Society, 53(3), 260–296. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40404472