Ellen Meiksins Wood

“Capitalism is also incapable of promoting sustainable development, not because it encourages technological advances that are capable of straining the earth's resources but because the purpose of capitalist production is exchange value not use value, profit not people.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

“Capitalism differs from other social forms because producers depend on the market for access to the means of production (unlike, for instance, peasants, who remain in direct, non-market possession of land); while appropriators cannot rely on 'extra-economic' powers of appropriation by means of direct coercion - such as the military, political and judicial powers that enable feudal lords to extract surplus labour from peasants - but must depend on the purely 'economic' mechanisms of the market. This distinct system of market dependence means that the requirements of competition and profit-maximization are the fundamental roles of life. Because of these rules, capitalism is a system uniquely driven to improve the productivity of labour by technical means. Above all, it is a system in which the bulk of society's work is done by propertyless labourers who are obliged to sell their labour-power in exchange for a wage in order to gain access to the means of life and of labour itself.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View