Quotes About Capitalism

En nuestra sociedad los que trabajan no adquieren y los que adquieren no trabajan.

They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

La riqueza de las sociedades en las que domina el modo de producción capitalista se presenta como un enorme cúmulo de mercancías, y la mercancía individual como la forma elemental de esa riqueza

No eunuch flatters his tyrant more shamefully or seeks by more infamous means to stimulate his jaded appetite, in order to gain some favor, than does the eunuch of industry, the entrepreneur, in order to acquire a few silver coins or to charm the gold from the purse of his dearly beloved neighbor.

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

Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.

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.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social, status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.

All commodities, as values, are realized human labours.

E]verything which appears in the worker as an activity of alienation , of estrangement , appears in the non-worker as a state of alienation , of estrangement .

PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS

Die Entfremdung erscheint sowohl darin, daß mein Lebensmittel eines andern ist, daß das, was mein Wunsch, der unzugängliche Besitz eines andern ist, als daß jede Sache selbst ein andres als sie selbst, als daß meine Tätigkeit ein andres, als endlich – und das gilt auch für den Kapitalisten – daß überhaupt die unmenschliche Macht her[rscht].

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

Economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class.

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

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.

y, en términos generales, advertiréis, frente a un enorme aumento de valor no sólo de las mercancías, sino también en general de las operaciones en dinero, una tendencia a la disminución progresiva de los medios de pago.

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.

La burguesía … ha creado fuerzas productivas mucho más colosales y masivas que todas las pasadas generaciones juntas, …¿Cuál de los pasados siglos pudo sospechar siquiera que en el seno del trabajo social dormitasen tantas y tales fuerzas productivas?

La época de la burguesía se caracteriza y distingue de todas las demás por el constante y agitado desplazamiento de la producción, por la conmoción ininterrumpida de todas las relaciones sociales, por una inquietud y una dinámica incesantes.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured an looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.