Capitalism, as Marx and Engels noted in the Communist Manifesto when the system was still quite young, is a dynamic system that “has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” It is a system based on incessant accumulation based upon the exploitation of wage labor. But that very dynamism also contains within it the seeds of its own demise. This talk will introduce people to the workings of capitalism, and explain how those workings lead both to phenomenal growth and to disastrous crashes that threaten the very foundations of this growth.