I'm currently reading through Capital by Karl Marx, and it's proving to be pretty interesting. It's a hard read, but I'm starting to understand capital more and more. In Marx's seminal work, he shows that capital is the 'gravitational pull' of capitalism and that capital always leads to terrible things (Marx proposes communism as a good alternative to capitalism).
One thing that's helped me understand certain parts of the book is different commentaries to it. One of them (the Study Guide to Capital Volume 1 by Harry Cleaver) has several useful charts and graphs that helped me visualize the concepts clearer. In chapter one of the book, Marx talks about commodities, which are things that satisfy a want or need in humans. Marx shows they two opposite-yet-conjoined expressions of value: use value and exchange value.
A commodity has a use value if it satisfies a human need and has certain usefulness to humans. A commodity has an exchange value when it is exchanged for another thing. A commodity becomes a use value if it is used, and a commodity becomes an exchange value if it is exchanged. These are two opposite, contradictory things, and yet a commodity is the unification of the two.
In the same way that a commodity under capitalism is the unification of these two values, the class relation in capitalism is the unification of two opposite, opposing forces. The ruling capitalist class oppresses the poor and uses them as slave labor, but the poor want the ruling class dead because the ruling class oppresses them. Capitalism is the unification of these two values, the keeping of these two opposites in stasis and equilibrium. Capitalism is a balancing act: a series of weird contradictions that balance each other out enough, even though they shouldn't.
This might be part of why the system is enormously unstable, why every several years the economy tanks and needs the government to save it. This might be why capitalism is shaken yet powerful, so oppressive that you might think it wouldn't survive yet it holds an iron grip on this caught in its midst.
I don't think the word 'balancing act' does enough justice to convey how cruel and inhumane the system is, but I think it does illustrate the precariousness and inefficiency of it.
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