Ellen Wood

as many millions of people have often suffered from the cure as from the disease.

capitalism is a system uniquely driven to improve the productivity of labour by technical means

Above all, it is a system in which the bulk of society’s work is done by propertyless labourers who are obliged to sell their labour-power in exchange for a wage in order to gain access to the means of life and of labour itself

the production of goods and services is subordinate to the production of capital and capitalist profit

In order to explain capitalism’s distinctive drive to maximize profit, they have presupposed the existence of a universal profit-maximizing rationality.

The effect of these explanations is to stress the continuity between non-capitalist and capitalist societies, and to deny or disguise the specificity of capitalism.

Thinking about future alternatives to capitalism requires us to think about alternative conceptions of its past.

A market economy can exist only in ‘market society, that is, a society where, instead of an economy embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economy.

old models of capitalist development were a paradoxical blend of transhistorical determinism and ‘free’ market voluntarism, in which the capitalist market was both an immutable natural law and the perfection of human choice and freedom.

What transformed wealth into capital was a transformation of social property relations.