Capitalism is a class-divided socioeconomic system of contingent human making.

Evidence

We live in a specific type of economy, with a particular historical form, different from those that preceded it and those that could succeed it. It is thus essential to provide a definition of our economy that is free from technicalities that hide its concrete meaning. Capitalism is a socioeconomic system in which employers use their private means of production to hire wage labor in order to produce commodities whose sale generates profits. The system’s two pillars are wage labor and the private means of production. The roof of the system is profit. These two pillars are the attributes of the two main classes that confront each other in society: workers, who live primarily off their labor income, and capitalists, who live primarily off capital income in the form of dividend and interest payments. We’re talking about human institutions, generated by precise collective decisions and historical processes that, being human, can be subverted. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 58

Categorization

• DEFINE: Mattei’s working definition of capitalism: wage labor plus private means of production, roofed by profit — the conceptual anchor for the whole book.
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing move that capitalism, being human-made, can be subverted is the enabling premise of the entire argument — dense, load-bearing, resists summary.
• XREF: connects to: Human subjectivity itself is constituted by the social process of production. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 254; Entering human life means being subordinated to money. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2017