Capitalism Quotes - Page 7

Revolutionary law number one," someone said. "Capitalism has cheated us. Books are not to be bought, they are to be repossessed.""This is robbery," I said. "Let's not kid ourselves. And don't do that to me again. You scared me to death.""It's not robbery. Books are ideas. They should be able to circulate freely within society. At no price at all, or for pennies. Knowledge is universal. It belongs to all of us.
Gioconda Belli
Capitalism needs war.
Paul Murray
I was happiest when I was working for myself. Setting my own goals. Improving my own skills… Take control of your world.
Warren Ellis
Above all, everything was expensive. Kids are idiots and slaves to desire. We didn't know what we really wanted, so we wanted everything.
Rika Yokomori
, I believe in some type of free market system. I just don’t think you’ll find an example of one completely free from government intervention.
Kenneth Eade
Capitalism does not merely mean that the housewife may influence production by her choice between peas and beans; or that plant managers have some voice in deciding what and how to produce: it means a scheme of values, an attitude toward life, a civilization—the civilization of inequality and of the family fortune.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
There is a lot of talk about "rigged games" as of late. Big government is the most insipid of all "rigged games". There is no choice available to the public allowing it to avoid a big over-arching government. You can always chose not do business with a big corporation. Corporations that are distasteful can be avoided. A big, powerful, government bent on intrusion cannot be avoided.
A.E. Samaan
Capitalists too, as the novelist Charles Dickens noted, liked to think of their workers as 'hands' only, preferring to forget they had stomachs and brains. But, said the more perceptive nineteenth-century critics, if this is how people live their lives at work, then how on earth can they think differently when they come home at night? How might it be possible to build a sense of moral community or of social solidarity, of collective and meaningful ways of belonging and living that are untainted by the brutality, ignorance and stupidity that envelops labourers at work? How, above all, are workers supposed to develop any sense of their mastery over their own fates and fortunes when they depend so deeply upon a multitude of distant, unknown and in many respects unknowable people who put breakfast on their table every day?
David Harvey
If the authorities under various false pretenses, continue curtailing the rights of citizens, so that they merely become serfs to a handful of multinational companies, a global rebellion of ordinary people against super capitalism is certainly not inconceivable.
A.J. Beirens
the basic principle of capitalism: that the penalties (losses) no less than the rewards (profits) of risk taking shall go to those who embark on a productive venture.
George W. Stocking
But the more time has been released from production, the more imperative it has become to absorb that time in consumption and consumerism, given that, as was earlier argued, capitalist 'economic rationality has no room for authentically free time which neither produces nor consumes commercial wealth'. The ever-present danger is that freely associating and self-creating individuals, liberated from the chores of production and blessed with a whole range of labour-saving and time-saving technologies to aid their consumption, might start to build an alternative non-capitalistic world. They might become inclined to reject the dominant capitalist economic rationality, for example, and start evading its overwhelming but often cruel rules of time discipline. To avoid such eventualities, capital must not only find ways to absorb more and more goods and services through realisation but also somehow occupy the free time that the new technologies release.
David Harvey
I heard Mansour say to Richard, ‘You transmitted to us the disease of your capitalist economy. What did you give us except for a handful of capitalist companies that drew off our blood — and still do?’ Richard said to him, ‘All this shows that you cannot manage to live without us. You used to complain about colonialism and when we left you created the legend of neo-colonialism. It seems that our presence, in an open or undercover form, is as indispensable to you as air and water.’ They were not angry: they said such things to each other as they laughed, a stone’s throw from the Equator, with a bottomless historical chasm separating the two of them.
Tayeb Salih
Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights.
A.E. Samaan
Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is but one thing only: Buy Low - Sell High. Capitalism is what happens when a government allows free association and respects property rights. It is a symptom of liberty.
A.E. Samaan
The commercialization of molecular biology is the most stunning ethical event in the history of science, and it has happened with astonishing speed. For four hundred years since Galileo, science has always proceeded as a free and open inquiry into the workings of nature. Scientists have always ignored national boundaries, holding themselves above the transitory concerns of politics and even wars. Scientists have always rebelled against secrecy in research, and have even frowned on the idea of patenting their discoveries, seeing themselves as working to the benefit of all mankind. And for many generations, the discoveries of scientists did indeed have a peculiarly selfless quality... Suddenly it seemed as if everyone wanted to become rich. New companies were announced almost weekly, and scientists flocked to exploit genetic research... It is necessary to emphasize how significant this shift in attitude actually was. In the past, purescientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectuallyuninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn't get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. Their long-standing antagonism kept university scientists free of contaminating industry ties, and whenever debate arose about technological matters, disinterested scientists were available to discuss the issues at the highest levels. But that is no longer true. There are very few molecular biologists and very few research institutions without commercial affiliations. The old days are gone. Genetic research continues, at a more furious pace than ever. But it is done in secret, and in haste, and for profit.
Michael Crichton
The Deleuzian philosopher Brian Massumi clearly formulated how today's capitalism has already overcome the logic of totalizing normality and adopts instead a logic of erratic excess: the more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen, This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism's dynamic. It's not a simple liberation. It's capitalism's own form of power. It's no longer disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it's capitalism's power to produce variety - because markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are okay - as long as they pay. (...) What happens next, when the system no longer excludes the excess, but directly posits it as its driving force - as is the case when capitalism can only reproduce itself through a continual self-revolutionizing, a constant overcoming of its own limits? Then one can no longer play the game of subverting the Order from the position of its part-of-no-part, since the Order has already internalized its own permanent subversion.
Slavoj Žižek
Even the 'right to live'...extends no further than the right to protection against murder. Charity certainly will, morality possibly may, and public utility perhaps ought to add to this protection supererogatory provision for continuance of life; but it is questionable whether strict justice demands it.
George Saintsbury
Capitalists grow wealth. Socialists redistribute wealth.... but population grows, so the Socialist population control kicks in in the form of eugenics.
A.E. Samaan
This dog is mine," said those poor children; "that is my place in the sun." Here is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of all the earth.
Blaise Pascal
The test of an economic system lies in the choices it offers, the alternatives that are open to the people living under it. When choices are limited by coercion of one sort or another, the system must fall short of meeting the test in greater or less degree. The virtue of a free system – i.e., competitive capitalism – is that it allows energy to flow uncoerced into a thousand-and-one different forms, expanding goods, services, and jobs in a myriad, unpredictable ways. Every day, under such a system, a consumer’s plebiscite (the phrase is Ludwig von Mises‘) is held, the vote being counted in whatever money unit is the handiest. With his votes the consumer directs production, forcing or luring energy, brains and capital to obey his will.
John Chamberlain
The collective impact of these failures has been a complete erosion of ethical standards, ultimately leading to a novel system we still call Capitalism, but which is tantamount to economic slavery. In this system—our system—the slaves are unaware both of their status and of their masters, who exist in a world apart where the intangible shackles are carefully hidden amongst reams of unreachable legalese.
John Doe
On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves.
Iain M. Banks
...the government in Beijing continues to define itself as Marxist-Leninist, though 'Market-Leninist' would be rather more apt.
Francis Wheen
In this way the world market is, with regard to its immanent dynamic, 'a space in which everyone has once been a productive labourer, and in which labour has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system'.
Slavoj Žižek
How did we get here? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world - in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s - with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win.
David Graeber
Modernism has been consumed and remains partially digested in the belly of capital, awaiting occasional bouts of flatulence.
Nick Dunn
You can't stop the gears of capitalism. But you can always be a pain in the ass.
Jarett Kobek
There's so much one doesn't know; it wasn't my business to know. I mean, when a child asks you how a helicopter works or who made the world–well, what are you to answer if you're a Beta and have always worked in the Fertilizing Room? What are you to answer?
Aldous Huxley
Deregulated marketplace: a brilliant method by which profits are privatized and losses are socialized.
Greg Palast
In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings; the rest they would sell to the local nobility, or to pykari merchants from Patna. Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a household's needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies - fifteen ploughings of the land and every remaining clod to be built; purchases of manure and constant watering; and after all that, the frenzy of the harvest, each bulb having to be individually nicked, drained and scrapped. Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies - but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factory's appetite for opium seemed never to be seated. Come the cold weather, the English sahibs would allow little else to be planted; their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances on the farmers, making them sign /asámi/ contracts. It was impossible to say no to them: if you refused they would leave their silver hidden in your house, or throw it through a window. It was no use telling the white magistrate that you hadn't accepted the money and your thumbprint was forged: he earned commissions on the oppium adn would never let you off. And, at the end of it, your earnings would come to no more than three-and-a-half sicca rupees, just about enough to pay off your advance.
Amitav Ghosh
And yet, something has changed for the better. We have rediscovered that capitalism is not the answer, but the question.
Eric Hobsbawm
We can't, it seems, live without [capitalism] even as we complain about it.
David Harvey
But the basic structure of capitalism, in which a small number own most of the productive assets, guarantees that the vast majority of people will (at best) spend their lives earning wages, but never profits.
Michael A. McCarthy
Arguing that the only problem with a free market is lack of competition, is like arguing that that the only problem with prostitution is that there aren't enough pimps.
Quentin R. Bufogle
Capitalism does not merely oppressworkers on the factory floor. It creates anentire culture in which the logic of oppressionand competition become commonsense. It turns people against each otherand their mvn humanity. Like Franz Kafka'scharacter in The Metamorphosis, GregorSamsa, people are alienated from theirhuman selves, isolated from their fellmvbeings, and tortured by the loss of all thatcould be possible.
Nivedita Majumdar
So far as I am aware no leader of a party of the European left in the past twenty-five years has declared capitalism as such to be unacceptable as a system. The only public figure to do so unhesitatingly was Pope John Paul II.
Eric Hobsbawm
Once again it is evident that even between major crises, ‘the market’ has no answer to the major problem confronting the twenty-first century: that unlimited and increasingly high-tech economic growth in the pursuit of unsustainable profit produces global wealth, but at the cost of an increasingly dispensable factor of production, human labour, and, one might add, of the globe’s natural resources. Economic and political liberalism, singly or in combination, cannot provide the solution to the problems of the twenty-first century. Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously.
Eric Hobsbawm
Class analysis can thus function not simply as part of scientific theory of interests and conflicts, but of an emancipatory theory of alternatives and social justice as well. Even if socialism is off the historical agenda, the idea of countering the exploitative logic of capitalism is not.
Erik Olin Wright
It's the last great free-for-all robbery of everybody's earth.
Marge Piercy
There is one problem, however, at least for alternative experiments of the American variety (and possibly some European as well), namely that we have no clear litmus test to determine which models are truly steady-state (non-expansionist) and which are business as usual hiding under “green wigs.” This latter trend is known as “greenwashing,” in which the language is hip and the bottom line remains profit. Thomas Friedman and Al Gore are major (and wealthy) players in this category, perpetuating the notion of “green corporations.” Other examples include a 2012 conference on “Sustainable Investing,” sponsored by Deepak Chopra, among others, which had as its slogans “Make Money and Make a Difference” and “Capitalism for a Democratic Society.” All of this is the attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too (or simply eat someone else’s cake); there is no real interest in disconnecting from growth, and it is growth that is the core of the problem. As Professor Magnuson tells us, while traveling around the U.S. to interview varous alternative businesses and experiments, he discovered that many of them were shams—capitalist wolves in green clothing.
Morris Berman
Capitalist production...was necessary to develop the productive forces of society to a level which will make possible an equal development worthy of human beings for all members of society. All earlier forms of society were too poor for this.
Friedrich Engels
Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.
Fredric Jameson
Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference.
Jürgen Habermas
Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power" <-- This is a fake quote, it appears in none of the writings or recorded speeches of Mussolini.― Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't a man. The bank isn't like a man.Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
John Steinbeck
The construction of masculinity and femininity was driven by the need to sell products.
Benita Roth
As these contrasts show, capitalism has undergone enormous changes in the last two and a half centuries. While some of Smith’s basic principles remain valid, they do so only at very general levels.For example, competition among profit-seeking firms may still be the key driving force of capitalism, as in Smith’s scheme. But it is not between small, anonymous firms which, accepting consumer tastes, fight it out by increasing the efficiency in the use of given technology. Today, competition is among huge multinational companies, with the ability not only to influence prices but to redefine technologies in a short span of time (think about the battle between Apple and Samsung) and to manipulate consumer tastes through brand-image building and advertising.
Ha-Joon Chang
It was evidently quite obvious to a powerful intellect like his that the one essential condition for a healthy society was equal distribution of goods - which I suspect is impossible under capitalism. For, when everyone's entitled to get as much for himself as he can, all available property, however much there is of it, is bound to fall into the hands of a small minority, which means that everyone else is poor.
Thomas More
Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk. But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities.
George Gilder
Reform or no reform, he never ceased to promote the interests of St. Denis and the Royal House of France with the same naive, and in his case not entirely unjustified, conviction of their identity with those of the nation and with the Will of God as a modern oil or steel magnate may promote legislation favorable to his company and to his bank as something beneficial to the welfare of this country and to the progress of mankind.
Erwin Panofsky
They would tell you that governments could not manage things as economically as private individuals; they would repeat and repeat that, and think they were saying something! They could not see that “economical” management by masters meant simply that they, the people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid less!They were wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible; and they were taking an interest in the process, were anxious lest it should not be done thoroughly enough! Was it not honestly a trial to listen to an argument such as that?And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to some poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six o’clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to take his clothes off; who had never had a week’s vacation in his life, had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything, never hoped anything—and when you started to tell him about Socialism he would sniff and say, “I’m not interested in that—I’m an individualist!” And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was “paternalism,” and that if it ever had its way the world would stop progressing.It was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like that; and yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out—for how many millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what freedom was!And they really thought that it was “individualism” for tens of thousands of them to herd together and obey the orders of a steel magnate, and produce hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for him, and then let him give them libraries; while for them to take the industry, and run it to suit themselves, and build their own libraries—that would have been “Paternalism”!
Upton Sinclair
For now, we live in the mall, but I think it's closing soon.
Grafton Tanner
It's true,' Vanya now, 'look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction--ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer--all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they're approaches more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.' A pause to allow Rudi a quick and sour grin. 'The self-induced orgasm.
Thomas Pynchonchon
Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away.
Thomas Pynchon
What I mean when I talk about sovereignty is that "we have a different way of being". Those of us who are organising around the idea of sovereignty are not asking for inclusion within the capitalist system. We're not asking for the so-called benefits of a capitalist system, which is always based on exclusions because it is based on privatising what was once communal and shared. We're saying no to being incorporated. We're saying yes to a completely different way of being, to a society based on commonality and plurality, not the fundamentalism of markets, religion, and the gender binary. We're not pushing to get in. Why should we want to enmesh ourselves in an economy and a political system that is driving the planet and our species toward destruction?
Sendolo Diamina
One of the curious aspects of the Twenty-First Century was the great delusion amongst many people, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were best exercised on technological platforms owned by corporations dedicated to making as much money as possible.
Jarett Kobek
So let us replace the word with a true description. People in our societies own things, their labour included, and can trade those things freely with others. They can buy, sell, accumulate, save, share and give. They can enjoy all that their freely exercised labour can secure for them and even, if they choose, do nothing and still survive. You can take away the freedom to buy and sell; you can compel people to work on terms that they would not freely accept; you can confiscate property or forbid this or that form of it. But if those are the alternatives to ‘capitalism’ there is, now, no real alternative save slavery.
Roger Scruton
What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth. For the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs to him only?
Massasoit
...many of us know deep down, whether we choose to admit it or not, a number of simple truths: the global capitalist economy is incompatible with life. As numerous environmentalist authors... have noted, the global economy effectively creates infinite demand and no natural community can support infinite demand, especially when nothing beneficial is given back. A global economy is extractive, it gives nothing back, but follows the ecocidal pattern of a genocidal machine converting raw materials into power at the expense of living things and living systems.
Damien Short

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