Capitalism
What you hear
Markets. Buying, selling, owning a business, working for a wage. The way normal economic life works.
The common meaning. This is the cover the redefinition travels under.
What they mean by it
In this tradition capitalism is the thing every other complaint is finally about. The claims start narrow and widen until they cover nearly everything.
All of history is class war.
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848; English edition of 1888, edited by Engels, Section I, "Bourgeois and Proletarians"
It reduces every human tie to money.
has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment."
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848; English edition of 1888, edited by Engels, Section I, "Bourgeois and Proletarians"
It ruins work itself.
labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, written 1844; read in Renton, ed., Marx on Globalisation (2001), "Estranged Labour", p. 115
It runs on unpaid housework.
the development of a specifically capitalist use of the wage and of the markets as means for the accumulation of unpaid labor
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia, 2004, Chapter 2, on the separation of production from reproduction
It is bigger than an economy: it orders the whole society.
capitalism is not an economic system but something bigger. More than a way of organizing economic production and exchange, it is also a way of organizing the relation of production and exchange to their non-economic conditions of possibility
Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet, Verso, 2022, Chapter 4
Racism is built into it.
racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, University of North Carolina Press, first published 1983; revised and updated 3rd edition, 2020, Introduction, p. 2, on racialism permeating capitalism
The gender binary exists to serve it.
the imposition of binary genders pre-defined by genitalia, heteronormative sexuality, and cisgender conformity are not ‘natural’. These norms are at the service of a specific economic system
Jules Joanne Gleeson, Transgender Marxism, Pluto Press, 2021, Chapter by Virginia Guitzel, pp. 142-143
The climate crisis has no other root cause.
We cannot solve a problem triggered by capitalism while still preserving capitalism, as there is no other root cause. We must make a thorough break with capitalism to find a solution to climate change.
Kohei Saito, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, Astra House, Japanese 2020; English translation 2024, Chapter 8, on degrowth communism
Its full name joins race, sex and the economy into one enemy.
In white supremacist capitalist patriarchy—words we never used then—we knew we would have to pay a price for this friendship
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge, 1994, Chapter 1
The whole program in one sentence: abolish private property.
the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848; English edition of 1888, edited by Engels, Section II, "Proletarians and Communists"
The family rests on capital, so it goes too.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain.
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848; English edition of 1888, edited by Engels, Section II, on the bourgeois family
That conclusion is current, not a relic.
the family is to be abolished even when it is aspired to, mythologized, valued, and embodied by people who are neither white nor heterosexual, neither bourgeois nor colonizers
Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Verso, 2022, Chapter 2, "Abolish Which Family?"
The plain lines are the archive’s. The words under each are theirs, read in the edition named.
Documented
In plain English
The universal defendant. Whatever the grievance, they run the chain back until it ends here: racism is capitalism, the gender binary is capitalism, the climate is capitalism, the family is capitalism. The traffic runs one way, and no finding ever leads away from the verdict. Saito states the rule outright when he writes that there is no other root cause. That is what makes the word the keystone rather than one topic among many. Which chains hold is a live argument inside the tradition, and the class-first Marxists in the same corpus say several do not.
The archive’s reading. The definition above is the citable one.
Assessed
Why it works
Every other word in this codebook feeds this one, and that is the design. Nobody asks you to accept a case against capitalism. They ask you to oppose racism, to be decent about your gay nephew, to care about the weather, to want the poor housed. Each of those routes back to the same defendant. So agreement you gave on ordinary moral ground arrives as consent to a program nobody put to you. The tell is the one-way traffic: no problem ever traces to some other root, and no evidence ever leads away. A theory that returns one verdict tests nothing; it only applies itself. And a word that can absorb any grievance can also absorb your assent.
Assessed
The claims ledger
The citable statements behind this term, each tied to the movement source filed in the Vault.
In Black Marxism, Robinson holds that capitalist society developed and expanded in essentially racial directions, and coins "racial capitalism" for the resulting structure.
- Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical TraditionUniversity of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill
{"offset":160349}
The Communist Manifesto opens by holding that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.
{"offset":0}
The Communist Manifesto holds that the bourgeoisie has left no bond between people other than naked self-interest and callous cash payment.
{"offset":5157}
In the 1844 manuscripts Marx holds that under this system labour is external to the worker, who denies rather than affirms himself in his work.
{"offset":223898}
In Caliban and the Witch, Federici holds that capitalism uses the wage and the market as means for the accumulation of unpaid labour, resting on reproductive work it does not pay for.
- Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive AccumulationAutonomedia, New York
{"offset":165400}
In Cannibal Capitalism, Nancy Fraser holds that capitalism is not an economic system but something bigger: a way of organizing the relation of production and exchange to their non-economic conditions of possibility.
{"offset":177574}
Robinson holds that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emerging from capitalism.
- Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical TraditionUniversity of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill
{"offset":160349}
In Transgender Marxism, Virginia Guitzel holds that binary gender, heteronormative sexuality and cisgender conformity are not natural but norms in the service of a specific economic system.
- Transgender MarxismPluto Press, London
Chapter by Virginia Guitzel, pp. 142-143
In Slow Down, Kohei Saito holds that climate change cannot be solved while preserving capitalism because there is no other root cause, and requires a thorough break with capitalism.
- Slow Down: The Degrowth ManifestoAstra House, New York
{"offset":460090}
bell hooks names the object of critique with the single compound phrase "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy", treating race, economy and sex as one system rather than three.
- Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of FreedomRoutledge, New York
{"offset":46421}
The Communist Manifesto sums up the theory of the Communists in the single sentence: abolition of private property.
{"offset":30305}
The Communist Manifesto holds that the bourgeois family rests on capital and private gain, and will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
{"offset":813276}
In Abolish the Family, Sophie Lewis holds that the family is to be abolished even where it is aspired to and valued, because its fundamental feature is that it privatizes care.
{"offset":50766}
Plain English for “Capitalism”: The universal defendant. Whatever the grievance, they run the chain of explanation back un...
- Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical TraditionUniversity of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill
{"offset":160349}
The Combahee River Collective statement of 1977 holds that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy, and declares its authors socialists.
{"offset":179309}
The evidence file
Corroboration beyond the ledger. Each passage was read in the edition named, not in a search result.
The founding statement
We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists
Source: Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement, dated April 1977; first collected in Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy (1978), as quoted in Bohrer, Marxism and Intersectionality (2019), p. 73
The same exhibit sits under racism, on purpose: the vocabulary is circular, and the codebook should read that way.