There’s a telling scene in the documentary Food, Inc where industrially raised cows are getting E.coli due to the cramped and unsanitary conditions they live in, and because they're being fed a diet unnatural to their systems. In order to combat this, food writer Michael Pollan suggests that if the cows were only put out to pasture for five days (to be fed on grass, their real diet), the problem of E.coli would be self-correcting. It would go away. What does the industry do instead? It builds an enormous space-age looking factory where men in fully enclosed suits put all the meat into stainless steel kettles where it's treated with ammonia to remove the contamination. Forget about the condition of the cows or the final quality of the meat- the solution chosen is the one that will continue production unchecked so that outputs can continue to be maximized.

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic, relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound men to his ‘natural superiors’ and has left remaining no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest and callous ‘cash payment’.  It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation”. – Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto

It’s perhaps hard to decipher in the passage above, but Marx is actually quite giddy about the process he’s describing (*). He’s excited about this group he called the bourgeoisie, or the new capitalist class of the rapidly expanding modern world-system (1). The term bourgeoisie had been in use since the eleventh century, where for a long time it referred to city-dwellers of an intermediate social rank, such as bankers and merchants. By the time of the nineteenth century, Marx’s time, when this group had risen to prominence on an irrepressible wave of economic evolution, the term had come to designate a class of the first rank in modern society (2).