ABSTRACT
Capitalism began by creating surplus people. Capitalist logic requires making a profit by keeping costs to a minimum. It applauds efficiency. Usually the greatest single cost is labor. People are a cost of production: employees are a tool to use and then abandon when no longer needed. Capitalist ideology, at least in the neoclassical or laissez-faire form, proudly proclaims this. All people are inherently self-interested, but rational. Everyone is in competition with everyone else to maximize their own benefit within the market. Everybody uses whatever resources they have for whatever advantage they can gain. Some people have property, but others just have their bodies and must sell their labor to survive. To compete and increase profit, capitalists are expected to continually innovate, a process that renders some people obsolete. If nobody needs their labor, they are cast aside-but the ideology claims there is unlimited opportunity and that if no one wants you, you must be lazy or incompetent. If you fail, you ain’t got nobody to blame but yourself and nobody owes you nothin’.
