While markets have been around for many thousands of years, in different times and places, capitalism is relatively recent – only about 500 years old.2 What makes capitalism distinctive isn’t that it has markets, but that it is organised around perpetual growth; indeed, it is the first intrinsically expansionist economic system in history. It pulls ever-rising quantities of nature and human labour into circuits of commodity production. And because the goal of capital is to extract and accumulate surplus, it has to get these things for as cheap as possible. In other words, capital works
...more
