Quotes About Capitalism

Marx was the first to identify the historical object known as capitalism - to show how it arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end. Rather as Newton discovered the invisible forces known as the laws of gravity, and Freud laid bare the workings of an invisible phenomenon known as the unconscious, so Marx unmasked our everyday life to reveal an imperceptible entity known as the capitalist mode of production.

As the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, revolution is not a runaway train; it is the application of the emergency brake. It is capitalism which is out of control, driven as it is by the anarchy of market forces, and socialism which attempts to reassert some collective mastery over this rampaging beast.

In Marx's view, what was awry with the prevailing notion of equality was that it was too abstract. It did not pay sufficient attention to the individuality of things and people... It was capitalism that standardised people, not socialism.

Nature does not guarantee that socialism will follow on the heels of capitalism. There are many different futures implicit in the present, some of them a lot less attractive than others...[T]hough the future may turn out to be a great deal worse than the present, the one thing about it is that it will be very different. One reason why the financial markets blew up a few years ago was because they relied on models that assumed the future would be very like the present.

Ideology is essentially a matter of meaning; but the condition of advanced capitalism, some would suggest, is one of pervasive non-meaning. The sway of utility and technology bleach social life of significance, subordinating use-value to the empty formalism of exchange-value.

Capitalism has given birth to extraordinary powers and possibilities which it simultaneously stymies; and this is why Marx can be hopeful without being a bright-eyed champion of Progress, and brutally realistic without being cynical or defeatist. Il belongs to the tragic vision to stare the worst steadily in the face, but to rise above it through the very act of doing so.

Under capitalism, we are deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce more hospitals or more breakfast cereals. Under socialism, this freedom would be regularly exercised.

o socialismo exige uma expansão das forças produtivas, mas a tarefa de expandi-las cabe não ao socialismo em si, mas ao capitalismo

At every stage, public debate over alternative economic plans and policies would be essential. In this way, what and how we produce could be determined by social need rather than private profit. Under capitalism, we are deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce more hospitals or more breakfast cereals. Under socialism, this freedom would be regularly exercised.

Os que perguntam o que haverá de derrubar o capitalismo costumam se esquecer de que, em certo sentido, isso é desnecessário. O capitalismo é perfeitamente capaz de desmoronar sob o peso das próprias contradições sem sequer um microempurrão de seus oponentes

apenas o capitalismo é capaz de desenvolver as forças produtivas até o ponto em que, sob uma administração política diferente, o excedente por elas gerado possa ser usado para prover o bastante para todos. Para ter o socialismo, primeiro é preciso ter capitalismo...

se não houvesse exploração, não haveria a expansão significativa das forças produtivas, e, se tal expansão não existisse, não haveria base material para o socialismo

Capitalism is not the cause of our "fallen" state, as the more naive kind of left-winger tends to imagine. But of all human regimes, it is the one which most exacerbates the contradictions built into a linguistic animal.

Capitalism's] newly pugnacious posture, like most forms of aggression, sprang from deep anxiety. If the system became manic, it was because it was latently depressed. What drove this reorganisation above all was the sudden fade-out of the postwar boom.

It is the nature of capitalism to confound distinctions, collapse hierarchies and mix the most diverse forms of life promiscuously together.

If we do not act now, it seems that capitalism will be the death of us.

Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces.

There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.

The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.

In a hyper-capitalist environment dominated by media giants, the means available to independent journalism have narrowed considerably.

The bunker business is just one instantiation, the grandest instantiation, of what you might think of as conspiracy capitalism.

What we're seeing now is that greed is still alive and kicking, and banks are bigger than ever.

In antiquity, agriculture and industry depended completely on human labor; but now, with the development of natural forces that human labor cannot match, agriculture and industry have fallen completely into the hands of the capitalists. The greater the amount of capital, the more abundant the resources that can be utilized.

It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.