There may be "pie in the sky when you die" but how the pie is dished out on the ground has considerable existential relevance. - Eric Wolf

In order to understand what the world would become, we must first know what it was.

The major vehicle of for the transition to the capitalist mode of production was the textile industry of eighteenth - century England. In cloth production mercantile wealth was visibly transformed into capital, as it acquired the dual function of purchasing machines and raw materials, on the one hand, and buying human energy to power their operation on the other.

I acknowledge my debt to Marxian thought without apology.