Capitalism, a socio-economic system, ideology, and way of life pervades our existence in this nation. Capitalism rose out of European medieval feudalism where land owners and the wealthy would loan plots of arable land to peasants and working peoples so they could earn a living as well as pay off their debts to their lords. These men and women were called serfs and they had overseers, similar to Malcolm X’s notion of the ‘house negro,’ which was flawed in some respects. Nat Turner, one of our great revolutionary black men, was technically a house negro. This is not to mention the countless and nameless house negros that acted as informants, poisoned their masters, plotted escapes, and burned down white slavemaster’s houses. But I digress, capitalism, to be brief, was the system that allowed for the centralization of the means of production in the hands of the wealthy; it is the natural evolution of feudalism.

There are two main ways to think about capitalism today; the historical and the abstract ways. In the abstract, this is simply the relationship between people, and in the historical it is simply how capitalism came about and how it developed into what we see today. We cannot deny that capitalism has changed forms and shapes, as mercantile capitalism of the 16th and 17th centuries are not the same as the post-industrial global financial capitalism of the 21st century.

In the abstract, capitalism is best summed up as such: 1. private ownership over the means of production (land, factories, businesses) 2. paid unemployment, cheapest possible wage labor 3. creation of goods and commodities or the offering of services for profit via the system exchange or the “free” market.

Something to point out is that the market is not an invention of capitalism as some capitalists love to expound, and the market doesn’t exactly align itself with capitalism. The market has existed with different governments and regimes all over the world and various forms of ownership. Just because we exchange things that are of equivalent ‘value’ doesn’t mean that wage labor is inevitable, and this is the crux of understanding what is so peculiar about the production system of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, labor was purchased or people were enslaved, bonded, and put into subservient positions that exploited their labor, giving them the least amount from their labor. It is labor that produces wealth, workers, not capitalists who put the necessary work into making commodities and producing the surplus so coveted by capitalists. Serfs and slaves, who had no control over their lives, did not choose what would be the means of their labor or the goals, they were tethered to some estate, similar to the way we work today in corporations and businesses, most of which we do not own. However, with the ending of feudalism and slavery, people became liberated and could chose their own destiny, or so it seemed. Not owning the means of production, nor any of the tools; most were owned by the capitalist who procured them by violent means of course (slavery and feudalism are undergirded by war, imperialism, and the maintenance of monarchies). So instead of owning one person, that person or many persons could be thrown back into a similar (not the same) relationship where they are selling their labor for the cheapest amount of wages so that they capitalist can make profit off of the surplus created.

Now some may inquire about alternative forms or what did we do before capitalism. Well for most of human history we have been hunter gathering societies and the norms were focused around collective ownership, the survival of the group was contingent on collaboration, not ruthless competition for limited resources. Families, kin networks, and groups were established because they were the most efficient way of procuring resources needed for survival. This can also been seen in small co-opts of towns or even city states like the Green Bay Packers or co-opt city in the Bronx.

Without people having to worry about profiting or making money off each other at each other’s expense, we can see that more peaceful interactions can be had unlike that of competitive jobs or cities where people literally fight over scraps, the crumbs that the rich plutocrats thrown down to us as if we were pigeons. Some say that it is capitalism that has forwarded our society and given us things like ipads and new technology in general. What they fail to understand or put forth is that the amount of violence and the history of violence that undergirds the creation of the profit needed to invest in those areas are what is the pep to the step in capitalism. Without accessible, replenishable, and cheap labor, there would be no profit to reinvest in businesses, new technology, equipment, or such that enables to competition so vital to capitalism. This competition sits upon the backs of slaves, poor workers of the world, and women. Most of these people are also our brothers and sisters of the so called third world or developing nations. We don’t have spices and gold and cobalt to create our technologies without the violent exploitation of these countries natural resources and their labor. Us in the first world have the luxury (some of us) to say we built something ourselves, like a business or new technology, when in fact almost all the products we have are from exploited countries of color. These people are exploited because their labor is cheap and the government there are cronies of the American empire and don’t protect the human rights of their people, similar to slavery huh?

To not overbear you, reader, I conclude here saying that we must begin to analyze capitalism and: 1. The interdependence of the transnationalisation of capitalism 2. corporate consolidation 3. The Legal and Political framework of economic globalization and financialization. I leave you with some quotes from our black revolutionary leaders…

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. … A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”- Martin Luther King Jr.

“In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people’s needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.”- Cornel West

“One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents”- Angela Davis