The critical factor in the divergence of capitalism from all other forms of "commercial society" was the development of certain social property relations that generated market imperatives and capitalist "laws of motion"… competitive production and profit-maximization, the compulsion to reinvest surpluses, and the relentless need to improve labour-productivity associated with capitalism.… Those laws of motion required vast social transformations and upheavals to set them in train. They required a transformation in the human metabolism with nature, in the provision of life's basic necessities.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 205