Identifying what makes our moment unique - or not unique - is not an easy task in part because we're living in it, so we don't have perspective on it, but also because the language we have to understand and describe the inequality of our era is one of the instruments of perpetuating the inequality of our era. How can we think and act critically in the present when the medium with which we do that - language - is always betraying us and laying traps for us?

Writer John Patrick Leary translates the new language of capitalism in the 21st century, and explains how the words and ideas of market logic inject themselves into our vocabulary and values - narrowing the horizon of political possibility and and reducing the social into a series competitive transactions between precarious, atomized individuals.

John is the author of the forthcoming book Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism from Haymarket Books.