Quotes About Economics

The less you eat, drink and buy books the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.

The separation between the Man of Labour and the Instruments of Labout once established, such a state of things will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore the original union in a new historical form.

By buying the power of the workman, the capitalist has, therefore, acquired the right to use of make that labouring power during the whole day or week.

The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society.

Its patriarchal society became one in which people were reduced to factors of production, with the whole system fueled by desire for export profits.

The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws.

In the economic system, under the rule of private property, the interest which an individual has in society is in precisely inverse proportion to the interest society has in him — just as the interest of the usurer in the spendthrift is by no means identical with the interest of the spendthrift.

The medieval proverb nulle terre sans seigneur [There is no land without its lord. — Ed.] is thereby replaced by that other proverb, l'argent n'a pas de maître [Money knows no master. — Ed.], wherein is expressed the complete domination of dead matter over man.

If money, according to Augier, comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

As the reader will have recognized in dismay, the analysis of the real, inner connections of the capitalist production process is a very intricate thing

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. … what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

Indudablemente, la voluntad del capitalista consiste en embolsarse lo más que pueda. Y lo que hay que hacer no es discurrir acerca de lo que quiere, sino investigar su poder, los límites de este poder y el carácter de estos límites.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor.

The average price of wage-labor, is the minimum wage ...

Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.

Whether we force the man's property from him by pinching his stomach, or pinching his fingers, makes some difference anatomically; morally, none whatsoever.

Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him.

Under capitalism, man oppresses man. But under socialism, it's the other way around.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

People want just taxes more than they want lower taxes. They want to know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to his wealth.

The calculus of utility aims at supplying the ordinary wants of man at the least cost of labour.