Quotes About Capitalism

Contrary to the popular view, Marx did not predict the formation of communist countries, with which he is so closely identified. Rather, he predicted that capitalism would be utterly successful on a number of fronts.

Everybody could have everything they wanted, so there would no longer be any real need for class divisions. Capitalism was destined to create the conditions necessary for the coming of the true "end of history", in which all contradictions disappear. However, for the end of history to come, capitalism must first collapse and make room for true communism. This will necessarily happen, according to Marx, because of the inner workings of capitalism.

Marx thought that capitalism's essential urge to expand and look for further markets and cheaper labour was the driving force behind the European imperialism of the 19th century.

But capitalism without some form of imperialism is actually quite a recent development. It was not even seriously considered until the end of the First World War, and not implemented on a global scale until after the Second World War. By then, European countries had lost their world domination to the USA and the Soviet Union. Imperialism was extracted from capitalism with the arrival in the late 19th century of the big corporations

The Netherlands is a small nation but its contribution to the development of capitalism is immense.

While a powerful, centralized monarchy created the first great European empires, it held back the development of a strong and independent merchant class, and that held back private enterprise. As a result, capitalism did not grow out of the empires of Spain and Portugal, but out of the disadvantaged newcomers to the race for international trade, and especially England and the Netherlands.

The idea that people have natural rights to private property and to decide how and where they work became the bedrock of liberal capitalism. In liberal thought, if a person has a natural right to something, then no one, not even the state, can interfere with it.

Islam and Capitalism Capitalism continues to spread untouched by all this theorizing, and one of its biggest growth areas is Sharia banking (banking that conforms to Islamic law). Like the Bible, the Koran takes a dim view of charging interest.

The self-correcting nature of the market led Smith to think that we could trust the market to provide what was needed – and the principal obstacle to the market trading freely and fulfilling our needs was government intervention.

The invisible hand follows profit, and works less well at providing for needs where the route to making money is less obvious. Aware of this limitation, Smith believed that the state should pay for things like public education to stop people from becoming too stupid.

We're fat, we're greedy, and we don't give a shit. Our religion is TV. Our saviour is Bill Gates. We've learned our lessons well. We know how to put number one first.

My secret weapon is my anger. That's what stimulates me as an artist. I want change. I want it yesterday. I'm pissed off at America. Society. American movies. American TV. American culture. American politicians. Capitalism. I'm a little like my old man in that way only I'm a recovered drunk. He wasn't. I should have been dead years ago like my brother but somehow I dodged the bullet and it gave me something to say. Impatience and rage are always just beneath the surface for me.

We can't just fix the workplace. We need to fix capitalism itself—and not just by making a few small tweaks at the edges. The whole system needs a major, fundamental reboot.

In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

Eventually, capitalism transformed itself, and its gains began to be shared more widely.

Technological progress fostered industrial capitalism, but would eventually undermine it. Labor productivity in manufacturing industries rose much faster than in the rest of the economy. That meant that the same or higher quantity of steel, cars, and electronics could be produced with many fewer workers. Manufacturing's share of total employment began to decline steadily in all the advanced industrial countries sometime after the Second World War.

Capitalism, it is said, is a system wherein man exploits man. And communism—is vice versa.

I think I view the system the same way that Ayn Rand views the system - that it really oppresses those that create, if you will, and tries to take away from those that produce and give to the non-producers.

It's the aspirations that capitalism is promoting as beautiful, positive attributes that are dangerous. All that is in the bedrooms of the poor and in the villages of the Third World, and it's like a cruel carrot that's being waved in front of people's noses. It's a seduction, an unattainable dream.

The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads... It includes... the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.

To be an American is to be indoctrinated with racism, violence, capitalism and manifest destiny, the principles upon which the land of the free was founded.

The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis - and, of course, in capitalism we're not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let's mention it anyway - shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence.

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

This unthinking assumption of moral virtue on the Left is frustrating. I saw someone on Facebook talking about capitalist scum, he was angry and thought it was OK because his anger was righteous.