To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and encourage what they call individual merit and asserted not only the desirability but also the inevitability of differential reward, of earned privilege, so to speak.

We must distinguish between the kind of structural transformation that would leave in place (even increase) the realities of the exploitation of labor, and one that would undo this kind of exploitation or at least radically reduce it

One by one, these governments came undone, and were forced into IMF tutelage (and national illegitimacy) by the careening oil prices, the debt imbroglio, and falling terms of trade. The last of these governments to fall were the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, which have now gone the way of other Third World countries. The second in the cascade of bifurcations is thus symbolized by 1989.

Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies.

Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.

The primary ideology that operated to create, socialize, and reproduce them was not the ideology of racism. It was that of universalism.

Capitalism is first and foremost a historical social system.