A People's Guide to Capitalism

My 20 highlights

• The Marxist explanation instead emphasizes that one’s position in society is not measured quantitatively, but is determined by a person’s relationship to labor, the fruits of labor, and the means of production. Anyone who controls the means of production, has political power, dictates the terms of other’s working conditions, or owns capital that can be invested in production, is part of the CAPITALIST CLASS. And anyone who must sell their labor-power for a wage and has no access to the means of production themselves is part of the WORKING CLASS

• Shkreli defended the move on the same grounds that many pharma executives and apologists do, saying the superprofits are necessary to fund further research and development. This is a patent lie. Pharmaceutical companies spend, at most, 15–20 percent of their revenues on research and development. And those companies that have most aggressively pursued the acquisition and price-hike game spend much less.

• 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

• This is the irony of the ideology of the “free market.” Corporations gain in size, or corner a market, precisely so that they don’t have to compete to make the best or most affordable product. In the US, monopolistic activities are further entrenched by patent laws, which allow drug manufacturers to remain the sole makers of patented drugs for twenty years (and can easily game the patent system to extend past this point)

• Simply put: a commodity is defined as something that was made through human labor, satisfies a demand, and is produced for the purpose of exchange. If I bake a loaf of bread to eat, then it’s just bread. But if I bake it in order to sell it, then the loaf becomes a commodity. Production has existed

• Inequality has long been built into the core fabric of the American business model. Pitting Black workers against white workers against immigrant workers has been a particularly potent, tried-and-true tactic of employers to drive down all wages

• Marx explained that the ability to work has become a commodity under capitalism, which the capitalist buys in exchange for a wage (its exchange-value

• Most economists think of capital as things: money, machinery, and labor. But these “things” do not become capital except through a social process in which they are activated to create more value. “Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.”25

• Capitalism today still depends on the state and the threat of violence, but in its everyday running breaks down resistance through the “silent compulsion” of economic necessity.28 Lacking our own land, tools, and technology to independently provide for ourselves and our families, we have no choice but to labor for others. A STATE OF THEIR OWN

• Michael Zweig and labor journalist Kim Moody have both estimated that the working class makes up about 63 percent of the US labor force. The corporate elite makes up 2 percent, and in between, the middle class makes up 35 percent.51 Further, if you include broader society beyond the accounted-for labor force (family members not working, elderly people, people permanently unemployed because of disabilities, etc.), the numbers reflecting the working class would be even higher

• Class and wealth surely have everything to do with each other, but they are not the same thing. A stable, well-paid job (to the extent that these still exist) such as a train conductor in New York City may pay upward of $70,000 a year, and a small bodega owner in the Bronx may earn much less. But the former is a worker—who does not control her own hours and conditions of work, and the latter is a small business owner, charged with his own exploitation, as well as that of others (even if few in number). The numbers on someone’s paycheck can’t tell you everything. It can’t tell you, for instance, that a manager at Starbucks, who makes less than a subway conductor, has the power to fire every worker in the store. We can see then that wealth is just one part of the picture, and one that is more symptomatic of class inequality than explanatory of its origin. In fact, power, control over working conditions, and financial decision-making are the bedrocks of exploitation

• As capitalism has increasingly come to rely on women’s ability to work outside the home, and to make up a low-wage sector of the workforce, the necessities provided by domestic labor have become strained. All the more so since those elements of social reproduction that do take place outside the home—public education, pensions and retirement for the elderly, public transportation—have come under systematic attack over the last several decades. In part this tension has been mitigated by the increasing use of things like laundromats, microwaves, and frozen foods, which reduce the amount of time necessary for domestic labor. But in the main, the contradictory needs of capital to depend on women’s labor both inside and outside the home has been “solved” through the ruthless intensification of the double-burden faced by women. More paid and unpaid labor is expected of women, outside and inside the home. So the same woman who is being forced to spend extra hours at work as a teacher also faces increasing pressures as a mom when childcare costs rise out of reach.

• money is itself a commodity, which by custom and circumstance, has become a universal measure against which all other items on the market are exchanged

• Marx explained: “The value of labor-power is determined by the value of the means of subsistence habitually required by the average worker.”11 That is to say, its value, like that of any other commodity, is based on the amount of labor that has gone into producing it. In the case of labor-power, this amounts to the labor-time required to keep the worker alive, to daily reproduce her capacity and readiness to go to work every day, and to keep her children alive, so that they may one day replace her in the workforce. The value of food, rent, clothing, training, and education, along with other necessities deemed essential by society therefore make up the value of labor-power. If, for example, social norms attach an average of $120 to the cost of minimal daily needs, that would loosely translate into the value of labor-power.12

• The MIDDLE CLASS is a layer of society that stands between the working class and the ruling class. It includes small business owners, as well as middle managers, supervisors, and professional occupations that have a fair amount of autonomy within the system (such as doctors and lawyers). They are often the daily face of exploitation. You see your manager every day at work. He may reward your work with a raise, or reprimand you for being late, but you will rarely encounter the CEO who profits from this arrangement.

• capitalism forces us into a spiral of accumulation for the sake of accumulation. Planned development to improve the quality of life for the vast majority of humanity on the basis of sustainable production and planning is its polar opposite

• Even Medicare, which covers over forty million people, is legislatively barred from negotiating drug prices

• Across these experiences, workers collectively make up a class of people exploited to create surplus value for the bosses.41 A very basic definition of classes as they exist in capitalist society begins with this premise. Workers have to sell our ability to work, and capitalists buy and command our labor-power

• Across these experiences, workers collectively make up a class of people exploited to create surplus value for the bosses.41 A very basic definition of classes as they exist in capitalist society begins with this premise. Workers have to sell our ability to work, and capitalists buy and command our labor-power. You can’t understand either the worker’s or the boss’s class position without understanding that the whole of the system is one in which labor is set to work on means of production, in order to produce a profit for someone else. Class,

• Standard Oil would soon team up with General Motors and Firestone Tires to literally derail public transit systems in the United States. In the 1920s, electric trolleys were common in cities across the country, and only one in ten people owned cars. GM received funding from Standard Oil and others to buy National City Lines, a bus company, which—with this funding—came to control bus systems in forty-five cities. These busses were meant to eliminate the need for trolley tracks that had been embedded in the roads. Alfred Sloan, GM’s president at the time, said, “We’ve got 90 percent of the market out there that we can… turn into automobile users. If we can eliminate the rail alternatives, we will create a new market for our cars.”77 Once the national bus company replaced rail, they would let the business run itself into the ground, and make way for individual cars.