Quotes About Capitalism

Except for its worst inner-city slums, America is not the primitive capitalist jungle of European imagination, where human beings slink away like wounded animals to die in bloodstained holes.

The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate.

On the political Right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political Left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves as virtuous. In the twenty-first century, anarchical protest movements join in a friendly tussle with global oligarchy, in which neither side can be hurt since both see the real enemy as the state.

labor power itself is the sole commodity—the "unique commodity," as Marx calls it—that is produced outside of the circuit of commodity production

oppression is theorized as structurally relational to, and hence shaped by, capitalist production rather than on the margins of analysis or as add-ons to a deeper and more vital economic process.

What exactly are capitalist productive relations? And how are children implicated in them?

every form of capitalist society harbors a deep-seated social-reproductive "crisis tendency" or "contradiction." On the one hand, social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; on the other hand, capitalism's orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies.

This book is an attempt to begin that process by highlighting the critical contribution of SRT to an understanding of capitalist social relations.

severing the integrated relationship between class and gender. Contributors to Mojab's volume show how decoupling feminism from capitalism carries the twin perils of emptying out the revolutionary content of feminism which "reduces gender to questions of culture" and of "reduc[ing] gender to class relations."8

in capitalist societies the majority of people subsist by combining paid employment and unpaid domestic labor to maintain themselves . . . [hence] this version of social reproduction analyzes the ways in which both labors are part of the same socio-economic process.

If workers' labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker? Put another way: What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society?

Capitalism, however, acknowledges productive labor for the market as the sole form of legitimate "work," while the tremendous amount of familial as well as communitarian work that goes on to sustain and reproduce the worker, or more specifically her labor power, is naturalized into nonexistence.

our understanding of capitalism is incomplete if we treat it as simply an economic system involving workers and owners, and fail to examine the ways in which wider social reproduction of the system—that is the daily and generational reproductive labor that occurs in households, schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on—sustains the drive for accumulation.

unlike all other commodities under capitalism, the "unique" commodity labor power is singular in the sense that it is not produced capitalistically.

South Carolina's history, punctuated by the sale of little children, might be read as a cautionary tale about how a self-centered ruling class could rely on racial prejudice in the service of unchecked capitalism and to the detriment of moral character.

As one historian of slavery and capitalism concluded: "The number of enslaved migrants who made it from the depths of the cotton and sugar frontiers all the way to the free states probably numbered under a thousand during all the years of slavery. That amounts to one-tenth of 1 percent of all forced migrants

Dalla Cina di Mao all'India di Gandhi e alla Cambogia di Pol Pot, tutti gli esperimenti di autarchia, di sviluppo non capitalista, con caratteristiche nazionali, sono falliti. I più per giunta, facendo milioni di vittime.

Capitalism engenders identity politics. It does so by stripping away the content of all particular identity by imposing the commodity form on every particularity. This commodity form is not a universal but an empty form that necessitates total conformity.

Love seems like a capitalist plot.

The capitalist epoch is the first in human history that permits individuals to view themselves as isolated entities with no inherent connection to their fellow beings.

Despite the salience of Marx's critique of capitalism, this was the worst event to occur within the internal history of the project of emancipation. The theoretical turn from Hegel to Marx paved the way for a practical catastrophe.

subjects to continue to go on. Capitalist society's packaging of love as romance aims at eliminating the disruptiveness of love while sustaining its passion. This is an impossible task, and the love of the capitalist subject is always a diminished love insofar as it's safer.

Romance under capitalism is a form of investment, and even a risky investment, as romance sometimes is, remains within the calculus of risk and loss. Love transcends any calculus and forces the subject to abandon its identity entirely, not simply stake its reputation or its fortune.

The appeal to identity is capitalism's secret sauce.