What distinguishes capitalism from other historical forms of life is that it plugs directly into the unstable, self-contradictory nature of the human species. The infinite – the unending drive for profit, the ceaseless march of technological progress, the ever-expanding power of capital – is always at risk of crushing and overshooting the infinite. Exchange value, which Aristotle recognized is potentially limitless, holds sway over use-value. Capitalism is a system which needs to be in perpetual motion simply to stay on the spot. Constant transgression is of its essence. No other historical system reveals so starkly the way in which potentially beneficent human power are so easily perverted to baneful ends. Capitalism is not the cause of our “fallen” states, as the more naïve kind of left-winger tends to imagine. But of all human regimes, it is the one which most exacerbates the contradictions built into linguistic animal.

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