Quotes About Capitalism

We have a system that is deeply narcissistic - the consumer sort of capitalist culture. It's all about me and now and what do I need that just makes you feel a bit better with all the stress. But in other healthy cultures, they have a real sense of ancestor and a sense of the next seven generations.

You have to understand: the narrative that people have about business and capitalism is that they are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and exploitative. Of course, I don't agree with that narrative.

Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its ability to expand and increase profits. That the end is coming is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when. Global capitalism, in its final iteration, may replicate China's totalitarian capitalism, a brutal system sustained by severe repression where workers are modern-day serfs.

Politics would, in the late stages of capitalism, become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates of corporations.

Capitalism would, in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort, as it causes widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression to maintain social control. It would attempt, in a frantic last stand, to extract profit by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature.

It turns out that those who truly hate us for our freedoms are not the array of dehumanized enemies cooked up by the war machine—the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, or even the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS. They are the financiers, bankers, politicians, public intellectuals and pundits, lawyers, journalists, and businesspeople cultivated in the elite universities and business schools who sold us the utopian dream of corporate capitalism and globalization.

The terminal stages of what we call capitalism, as Marx grasped, is not capitalism at all. Corporations feast on taxpayer money.

Debs came to the conclusion that no strike or labor movement could ultimately be successful as long as the government was controlled by the capitalist class. Any advances made by an organized working class would later be reversed by the capitalists when they regained absolute power, often by temporarily mollifying workers with reforms. Working men and women had to achieve political power, a goal of Britain's Labour Party at the time, or they would forever be at the mercy of the bosses.

Our corporate hustlers are direct descendants of the whalers and sealers, of butchers such as George Armstrong Custer, of the gold speculators and railroad magnates who seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, and wiped out the buffalo herds, of the oil and mineral companies that went abroad to exploit—under the protection of the American military—the resources of others.

Marx illuminated these contradictions within capitalism. He understood that the idea of capitalism—free trade, free markets, individualism, innovation, self-development—works only in the utopian mind of a true believer such as Alan Greenspan, never in reality. The hoarding of wealth by a tiny capitalist elite, Marx foresaw, along with the driving down of wages of workers, leaves populations unable to buy the products capitalism produces.

Debs especially feared the rise of the monolithic corporate state. He foresaw that corporations, unchecked, would expand to "continental proportions and swallow up the national resources and the means of production and distribution."51 If that happened, he warned, the long "night of capitalism will be dark.

55 And it is the religion of capitalism, the maniacal quest for wealth at the expense of others, that turns human beings into beasts of prey.

By the 1920s, a once powerful and radical labor movement in the United States had been broken. Although it was revived with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, it would be crushed again by World War II and the anticommunist hysteria that followed.

To be a rebel is to reject what it means to succeed in a capitalist, consumer culture, especially the idea that we should always come first.

We have the facade of a functioning capitalist democracy but underneath it is a species of corporate totalitarianism.

Corporate capitalism has made war on the communal and the sacred, on those forces that allow us to connect and transcend our temporal condition to bond with others. These bonds will be reestablished or we will slip further into a world where death is more attractive than life.

Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money.

A y regarder de près, les 7 péchés capitaux sont éminemment favorables à l'économie : l'envie, la gourmandise, la luxure font acheter, la colère fait travailler, la paresse fait jouir, l'orgueil avive la compétition et l'avarice favorise l'épargne. C'est d'ailleurs le propre du système capitaliste que de transformer ainsi tout ce qu'il touche, même le pire, en or.

Capitalism is not merely a system for the efficient production and distribution of goods and services; it also incarnates and promotes a particular moral order , an institutionalized normative worldview comprising and fostering particular assumptions, narratives, commitments, beliefs, values, and goals.

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.

It seems improbable that the American fundamentalists, who desire to see the Ten Commandments emblazoned in every schoolroom and courtroom - almost like a graven image - are so hostile to the spirit of capitalism.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, the most brilliant line of which says that it is capitalism that lays upon men "the sordid necessity of living for others." Robert Tressell's novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) is the only rival to The Jungle

capitalism itself is a system and that as the environment that hosts capitalism changes—in particular, as the better part of global economic growth begins to occur outside the mature economies of the West—the capitalist system will evolve.