Featured Essay

The crisis continues. This isn’t just a hiccup in the market, but a structural breakdown. A system driven by competition for ever-increasing profit can’t run indefinitely; sooner or later everything that can be commodified has been drawn into the market, all the capital accumulates in a few hands, and the profits dry up.

Today the factories of every industry produce commodities more and more efficiently via automation that renders workers increasingly redundant. The only way to profit on these commodities is to cut costs: to eliminate workers or pay them next to nothing. But without work or wages, people can’t play their part as consumers. The only job openings are with the police, who wage a never-ending war on the population to control the poor and unemployed. This is why our world is overflowing with cheap shit, with human life cheapest of all.

As commodities get cheaper and consumers get poorer, how can capitalists continue making a profit? Credit was invented as a way for consumers to go on shopping even when they weren’t paid living wages. When the sale of real goods can no longer produce profit, profits must be made on expected future returns—in other words, on speculation.

But like any house of cards, debt can’t be built up forever—eventually someone calls it in. The house of cards collapsed under its own weight in 2008 when it became clear that the expected future returns could never materialize. Rather than reconsidering their faith in capitalism, the authorities are now gutting the last vestiges of the support structures established to pacify the old labor movement, feeding every last stick into the fire.

Full text continued here.

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Featured Project

Work

From the industrial revolution to the internet, from colonialism to the stock market, from the financial crisis to the upheavals taking place right now, our newest book offers an overview of how capitalism functions in the 21st century and how we can get beyond it it. The text is complemented by a poster diagramming the pyramid of the capitalist system.

Featured Project

Rolling Thunder #9

This issue assesses anarchist action at the 2009 G20 summit; the accompanying Pittsburgh scene report examines a decade of local organizing. We scrutinize protest and resistance on campus and overseas in the Smash EDO campaign. Plus obscure Russian history, a reappraisal of the concept of “free speech,” and the usual stunning prose.106 pages, 16 in full color.