This essay is based on an address to the Rebuilding the Left Conference at Simon Fraser University on September 23, 2003.
I want to address a very simple question: What keeps capitalism going? or, in the somewhat more technical language of Marxists, How does capitalism as a system reproduce itself?
Of course, the first point that we need to establish is what I mean by capitalism. People mean a lot of different things when they use the term. They may have in mind a market economy or an economy with wage-laborers—or maybe only an economy in which corporations dominate. Naturally, then, what they mean by anticapitalism will also differ—it may mean, anti-markets, anti-wage-labor, and it may simply mean anti–large corporations.
to reed more
