Source: Common Dreams
by Klaus Moegling
“Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels taught us that capitalism is a system primarily characterized by private control over the means of production. In other words: Factories and banks are privately owned. Business decisions are guided by whether they generate surplus value that can be appropriated as profit by the owners. Workers become a commodity, one that must, however, market itself and generate exchange value. In this context, the state’s primary role is to safeguard these relations of production and balance the interests of the various factions of capital. In doing so, the construction of neoliberal ideologies sought to minimize state benefits for the poorer strata of society, destroy the protective mechanisms of poorer societies, and simultaneously transfer state resources to capitalist oligarchies. Those who demanded the elimination of subsidies were, in fact, the very ones who benefited from them.” (04/29/26)