How Does Capitalism Work?

We think we know a story, but we only know how it goes or ends. To get to the heart of the story, we have to go back to the beginning usually but this time we do not need to know beging of story. Our story is about capitalism. We do not have to mention about old Italian city states, bank system or Marx, Weber or Industrial Revolution. We will try to answer how does capitalism market itself?

The concept of a ''capitalist world economy'' comes from Immanuel Wallerstein's work on world systems. World systems can take the form of world empires or world economies. Wallerstein argued that a capitalist world economy first established itself in Europe and then gradually extended to include the whole world.

Capital is richness which is used to create more richness, where richness is a description of anything created by human labour. Capitalism is about using money to make money for people who already have more than they need, also which is not islamic. Capital takes the form of money, which is then invested in the means of production and labour power to produce commodities.

Capitalism is premised on exclusive private property in the means of production. Private property is very different from personal property. If I buy a car and use it for my own ends, it is my personal property. If I hire a driver to run the vehicle as a taxi, the same object becomes my private property. Why? Because I now use it to command the labour of another individual and make a profit from the enterprise. Why should he work for me? Because he does not have property of his own! This is crucial to the workings of capitalism: there must be people without property whose labour can be counted upon. How has this been ensured in the past? Usually by force, even conquest.

We have many critiques about capitalism. For example; about cultural. We can talk about cultural critique of capitalism is that it destroys traditional culture and ways of living. Capitalism works while destroys cultures and spiritual values.

What we see is Capitalism does not care about people's life or people's values. Rather it cares only where the money is. In the West multi-national businesses under Capitalism love the money of the wealthy who buy their products, and in the East and Muslim world they love the cheap labour of those who make them their products.

Capitalism has only been able to create wealth and luxury for some, by perpetuating poverty and oppression for others.

I believe in human goodness as a Muslim person, but I have also seen greed. As history has proved, wealth and power corrupt people, and if some are given both of them without any limits on their potential abuse, I can't imagine that society will be like that for a long time. When people say something like ''let me begin with how to address the flaws in capitalism..'' this sentence we should not care that people because there is no way to deal with capitalism.

We do not need to die to understand death. We can see ourself in the mirror. That mirror can be distorted but we can change the mirror. We can check ourselfs to see how capitalism works. We can see it on our shoes, our jackets, pants or we can open fridge and check what we have in it. Islam is the only system which can end this disgusting situation and disparity between extreme rich and extreme poor, to create a society which would aim to cater for humanity.