Founded on private property, the
ownership of the means of production by a
small minority of people, and a market on
which labour power is purchased and
exploited, capitalism appears to behave like
a self-regulating system. Whatever the intentions
of individual capitalists, if they do not
extract surplus labour power from their
workers and thus compete successfully in the
market, they will be driven to bankruptcy.

Much Marxist scholarship has shown that
there is much more to capitalism than blind
economic mechanism. Vital to the establishment
and maintenance of capitalist relationships
are struggles between owners and
employees, gender and ethnic divisions
within the working class, economic intervention
from the state to stabilize and protect
markets, social intervention from the state to
provide services (education, health and
welfare) for reproducing the labour power
needed by capital, and police and military
intervention from the state to control labour
revolts.

The resulting complex of economic and
political relationships is still usually called
capitalism, and again treated as a system with
its own dynamic. Thus we can read about the
current restructuring of capitalism, the penetration
of capitalism into second and third
world societies and into more and more
facets of everyday life, and the ubiquitous
'crisis' of capitalism.

Structural approaches hold great power in
analysing social systems, if the structures
which are conceptualized happen to capture
key ways of organizing human interactions
which tend to reproduce themselves. This is
an elementary but important point. In principle,
there is nothing to stop the employees
at a factory from simply leaving their jobs
and setting up production on their own in a
different location. In practice, if the 'different
location' were someone else's private
property, police would be called in to evict
the workers and there would be little support
from anyone else in the community. Furthermore,
the original company typically would
find little difficulty in recruiting new workers.
Thus, the system of private property and the
market in labour would continue as before.
As a shorthand, it could be said that capitalist
social relations continued to assert
themselves.

It took many decades before the strike, a
carefully circumscribed withdrawal of labour
power, was accepted as legitimate, and it
continues to be attacked by employers.
Direct challenges to private property, such as
squatting and workers' control, are even
more difficult to achieve.

The existence of numerous struggles at the
borders of what is conceived of as capitalism
makes it hard to argue that capitalism is an
automatically self-sustaining type of mechanism.
Fundamentally involved is the commitment
of individuals to the current order. This
is where the concept of hegemony enters
(Gramsci, 1971). Hegemony refers to the
processes by which a given way of organizing
social life, in which one class dominates
another, becomes accepted as inevitable and
desirable by most people. These processes
include the mass media, formal education,
the family, popular culture, and routines of
daily life at work and leisure.

Brian Martin, Gene Sharp's Theory of Power