Series II — The Hidden Engine

The math is broken. Capitalism needs an outside to extract from. It always has.

This series names what that outside is made of: unpaid care work, reproductive labor, the bodies and communities capital consumes without replacing.

The cooking, cleaning, childcare, elder care that women performed every day — capitalism ran on it. Got it for free. And the profit margins on everything else depended on that theft.

  1. 08
    The Outside Capital Needs

    Rosa Luxemburg in 1913: capitalism can't complete its circuit internally. Once you see the math, you can't unsee it.
  2. 09
    Who Pays for the Next Shift

    Alexandra Kollontai in 1909: the labor that keeps workers alive is stolen labor. The whole profit structure depends on the theft.
  3. 10
    The Other and the Outside

    The system produces categories of people who can be treated as less than workers. Where that logic came from.
  4. 11
    Which Women

    Kimberlé Crenshaw: the framework that fixed what both feminist and anti-racist analysis missed.
  5. 12
    Falling Through the Gap

    Some people fall through every category the system uses. They're not in the wrong database — they're in the gap between databases.
  6. 13
    What They Burned

    Between 1400 and 1700, 40,000–60,000 people were executed as witches. Most were healers. This wasn't hysteria. It was policy.
  7. 14
    What We Do on Monday

    Mariame Kaba isn't asking for better prisons. She's asking: what if we built everything else instead?