Introduction Page 4

First, we need to bear in mind that the world’s capitalists don’t form a united bloc.

They all compete with each other to grab a greater share of the profits that we create.

The usual way to do this is to introduce new machines/methods to create more stuff faster, and with fewer workers.

And this goes on all the time in the economy – for the capitalist who doesn’t want to be squashed by the competition (and that’s all of them), it’s a never-ending cycle of re-investment in ever more massive production systems.

Now, increased productivity ought to be a good thing, but under capitalism it inevitably results in uncoordinated expansion of production and economic instability – slump/recession/depression, call it what you will, and of course this affects us, the workers, most.

This results in a giant built-in mismatch between how we could live and how we do live.

At the same time, it throws lots of other problems our way ⮞