Economic problems are political problems about how social power is distributed

Evidence

My fundamental intuition is that there are no economic problems that are not inevitably also political problems. Contrary to what technocrats typically suggest, our economy is neither a force of nature nor an external object that we can manipulate as if it were a machine. On the contrary, the economy is us. Flesh-and-blood people. This means that “capital” as a “commodity,” as money to invest, as wealth expressed in gross domestic product, exists thanks to specific social relations, and in particular thanks to the fact that most people have no alternative but to sell their ability to work for a wage and inevitably be paid less than the value they produce. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 38

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘capital order’ as the backdrop of wage labor plus underpayment; this is the core conceptual framing Mattei wants to escape via class analysis.
• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose’s key idea of ‘the invisible order’ — capitalism requiring social relations to appear natural. Also evokes Marx’s labor theory of value. — connects to: Real political participation requires eliminating economic inequality as a cause of unequal political access. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2342; Development problems are reframed as mere market-access problems. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 419; Political economy reframes subjects of right as a population to be governed — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 278 (+1 more)