Capitalism is best understood as a competitive class-based mode of production and exchange geared to the accumulation of capital through the exploita… - John Bellamy Foster

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Capitalism is best understood as a competitive class-based mode of production and exchange geared to the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of workers’ labor power and the private appropriation of (value generated beyond the costs of the workers’ own reproduction). The mode of economic accounting intrinsic to capitalism designates as a value-generating good or service anything that passes through the market and therefore produces income. It follows that the greater part of the social and environmental costs of production outside the market are excluded in this form of valuation and are treated as mere negative “externalities,” unrelated to the capitalist economy itself—whether in terms of the shortening and degradation of human life or the destruction of the natural environment.

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About John Bellamy Foster

(born August 15, 1953) is a professor of sociology at the and also editor of . He writes about political economy of capitalism and , ecology and , and .

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At the instigation of giant corporations, philanthrocapitalist foundations, and neoliberal governments, has been restructured around corporate-designed testing based on the implementation of robotic common-core standards. This is generating massive databases on the student population, much of which are now being surreptitiously marketed and sold. The and privatization of education is feeding the progressive subordination of children’s needs to the cash nexus of the . [...] Having been reduced to intellectual dungeons, many of the poorest, most racially segregated schools in the United States are mere pipelines for prisons or the military.

We have now reached a point in the twenty-first century in which the externalities of this irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion of natural resources, the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary environment, now far exceed any future economic benefits that capitalism offers to society as a whole. The accumulation of capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the social and environmental conditions governing human life on earth.

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Less than two decades into the twenty-first century, it is evident that capitalism has failed as a social system. The world is mired in , , and the most extreme inequality in , accompanied by mass unemployment and , , poverty, hunger, wasted output and lives, and what at this point can only be called a planetary ecological “death spiral.” The , the greatest technological advance of our time, has rapidly mutated from a promise of free communication and liberated production into new means of surveillance, control, and displacement of the working population. The institutions of liberal democracy are at the point of collapse, while fascism, the rear guard of the capitalist system, is again on the march, along with patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and war.

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