Quotes About Capitalism

Those who live by the labor of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.

Under capitalism democratism is restricted, cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage slavery and of the poverty and misery of the masses

Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.

As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will never be utilised for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists; it will be used for the purpose of increasing those profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of "advanced" countries. And this "booty" is shared between two or three powerful world plunderers armed to the teeth (America, Great Britain, Japan), who are drawing the whole world into their war over the division of their booty. III

Social-Democracy leads the struggle of the working class not only for better terms for the sale of labour power, but also for the abolition of the social system which compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.

All officials, without exception, elected and subject to recall at any time, their salaries reduced to the level of ordinary "workmen's wages" — these simple and "self-evident" democratic measures, while completely uniting the interests of the workers and the majority of the peasants, at the same time serve as a bridge leading from capitalism to socialism.

Os escravos assalariados de hoje, em conseqüência da exploração capitalista, vivem por tal forma acabrunhados pelas necessidades e pela miséria, que nem tempo têm pa-ra se ocupar de "democracia" ou de "política"; no curso normal e pacífico das coisas a maioria da população se encontra afastada da vida política e social.

Crises of every kind — economic crises more frequently, but not only these — in their turn increase very considerably the tendency towards concentration and monopoly.

Under capitalism democratism is restricted, cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage slavery and of the poverty and misery of the masses. This and this alone is the reason why the office-holders in our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted (or, more precisely, have a tendency to be corrupted) by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to being turned into bureaucrats, i.e. privileged persons cut off from the masses and standing above the masses

The right-wing critique of capitalism--that is, the critique which is unsupported by the objective movement of history--however true, acute, profound, even brilliant it might be--can only end up by capitulating before the very evil it condemns.

One of the forgotten lessons of U.S. history is the fact that the American Founding Fathers tried Communism before they tried capitalistic free enterprise.

International Communism stood for: 1. the overthrow of capitalism, 2. the abolition of private property, 3. the elimination of the family as a social unit, 4. the abolition of all classes, 5. the overthrow of all governments, and 6. the establishment of a communist order with communal ownership of property in a classless, stateless society.

It is interesting that after the Pilgrim Fathers tried communism, they abandoned it in favor of a free enterprise type of Capitalism which, over the centuries, has become more highly developed in the United States than in any other nation.

When Karl Marx was asked what his objective in life was, he said, "To dethrone God and destroy capitalism!

The monsters of our wired world can also quickly become commodified, as can be seen in the extraordinary story of the cult PC game Five Nights at Freddy's.

Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?

If we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world ecologically.

If freedom were not so economically efficient it certainly wouldn't stand a chance.

The only reason free markets have a ghost of a chance is that they are so much more efficient than any other form of organization.

I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it.

But democracy is by no means a limit one may not overstep; it is only one of the stages in the course of development from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to Communism.