![]() Or without understanding the connection between capitalism's economic laws and the rest of the social world, including art, the family, sexuality, the environment and so on.īut capitalism is unlike gravity in at least one crucial respect. Likewise, many people go through their daily life without understanding how capitalist society powerfully shapes their world-without asking the question of why what they produced with their hands and brains during a day on the job should belong, by law, to someone else. Other than physicists, few people could state Newton's law of universal gravitation: that the gravitational force of two bodies of mass is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The power of capitalist society to structure the social world-like gravity's pull on everything around us, including ourselves-is so all-encompassing, in fact, that many people never become aware of it as a force with its own laws. Similarly, in capitalist society, someone headed home after spending the day working in a factory or at a bank doesn't believe they can simply take with them the value of what they produced-at least not without the risk of losing their job and facing incarceration. No one would stand at the top of the staircase and think they could avoid the reality of descending it. So we become accustomed as a habit of mind to treating them as unchangeable features of the world around us. The laws of both operate inexorably, and attempts to disregard them can result in serious injury or death. CAPITALISM IS like gravity: it envelops our world so completely that it's easy to forget about it entirely.
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