Haymarket Books

Yet since capitalism’s instability and unevenness are continually reproduced across every variation of external natural, political, and cultural conditions, some of those who defend the system have felt compelled to find better arguments that don’t rely on external causes. These thinkers have sought to justify capitalism by insisting that its negative dimensions, such as cyclical downturns and inherent inequality, are simply the necessary price to be paid for economic and social progress. They claim that the gains of capitalism’s winners are greater than the losses inevitably suffered by economic losers in the system, and therefore that instability and unevenness are ultimately—in terms of their net social effects—progressive.

Elaborate calculations of costs and benefits suitably dressed in charts and graphs have been key props in the efficiency theater that has provided ideological cover for the endless struggles attending capitalism’s uneven development.

post-1970 change in the conditions and lives of American women changed their families and households in ways that also altered US capitalism. Briefly, the mass movement of adult women, mostly married and with children, into paid, mostly full-time labor transformed households and families. Wives and mothers had long held disproportionate responsibility for maintaining the emotional integrity of the traditional nuclear family and the physical integrity of the traditional household