We Tell Ourselves Stories About Money to Live
Stories about American capitalism tend to have a recognizable villain: the robber baron, the business tycoon, the financial investor, your boss. But, as Karl Marx once put it, the evil capitalist “is only capital personified.” Far more chilling, he wrote, are the workings of capital itself, which, “vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Writing about that, as he knew firsthand, was much more difficult.
Look around today and it’s not hard to see capital’s life-sucking forces still at play: We sense them in tech companies’ , in the exploitation of migrant labor, in Amazon’s economic and physical . The world of industry and finance—and its long reach into our lives—has only grown more complex since Marx’s day. The challenge of writing about the shadowy system behind the “evil capitalist,” though, remains. How does one even begin to capture its contortions?
