Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.

It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism.

The second reason why we haven't observed the growing gap is that our historical and social science analyses have concentrated on what has been happening within the 'middle classes' - that is, to that ten to fifteen percent of the population of the world-economy who consumed more surplus than they themselves produced. Within this sector there really has been a relatively dramatic flattening of the curve between the very top (less than one percent of the total population) and the truly 'middle' segments, or cadres (the rest of the ten to fifteen percent).

The concept that one ought to restrict one's political involvement to one's own state was deeply antithetical to those who were pursuing the accumulation of capital for its own sake.

The employment rates are in very bad shape. We vastly underestimate the unemployment

I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.

We can tentatively credit capitalist civilization with a positive, if very geographically uneven, record in the struggle against disease.