A People's Guide to Capitalism

Western Europe developed economically by actively underdeveloping Africa and other parts of the colonized world.

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Lest we think the early capitalists piled up their wealth penny by penny, as in Adam Smith’s version of the story, the truth has more to do with conquest, robbery, and pillage—from piracy, to colonialism, to the European Crusades, to the enslavement of Africans.

has a history and an origin, and therefore, it can have an end.

Turning a profit is only possible on the basis of private ownership of the means of production, a “free” workforce, and a state of the bourgeoisie to enforce and project the power of the new ruling elite.

simply an economic or a political structure, but a system of social relationships, whose foundation is the expropriation of masses of people from the land.

The forcible expropriation of peasants alienated humanity from the natural world, and led to a “metabolic rift,” as Marx described it, beginning a process that has driven us today to the brink of planetary destruction.

Whichever the reasons, its eventual domination would not have decisively cohered without the brutal enslavement of as many as twenty million Africans

The cash reaped from trading enslaved people, and from the products of their labor on sugar and cotton plantations, was the basis for Britain’s banking system, and for investments in many of the laborsaving technologies that propelled British capitalism ahead of the rest.

The early capitalists were made up of merchants, lords that had become agricultural capitalists, as well as yeoman farmers (richer peasants who owned their land).

Marx described the new setup as wage slavery