Status Updates From Capitalism: A Global History

“These merchants lived by the logic of capital... Yet as they invested capital to gain more capital, something strange happened: Capital developed its own powers, including over its owners, a truly extraordinary development of sell-mystification in which a human-created social relationship seemed to move beyond human control, making ever more people act on its logic—a kind of rogue artificial intelligence.”

“Capitalism, as this definition suggests, is a process... Ultimately, capitalism is best defined as a global process in which economic life is fundamentally driven by the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital, is structured by the state, and propels the ever expanding commodification of inputs and outputs, including labor, creating constantly shifting boundaries between its outside and inside.”