Quotes About Capitalism

the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like 'inequality' sounds like it's practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It's possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it's not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean.

True, earlier figures like Adam Smith and David Ricardo were suspicious of credit systems, but already by the mid–nineteenth century, economists who concerned themselves with such matters were largely in the business of trying to demonstrate that, despite appearances, the banking system really was profoundly democratic.

Defenders of capitalism generally make three broad historical claims: first, that it has fostered rapid scientific and technological development; second, that however much it may throw enormous wealth to a small minority, it does so in such a way that increases overall prosperity for everyone; third, that in doing so, it creates a more secure and democratic world. It is quite clear that in the twenty-first century, capitalism is not doing any of these things. (p. 143)

John Holloway, perhaps the most poetic of contemporary Marxists, once proposed to write a book entitled Stop Making Capitalism.50 After all, he noted, even though we all act as if capitalism is some kind of behemoth towering over us, it's really just something we produce. Every morning we wake up and re-create capitalism. If one morning we woke up and all decided to create something else, then there wouldn't be capitalism anymore. There would be something else.

The promulgation of consumerism also coincided with the beginnings of the managerial revolution, which was, especially at first, largely an attack on pupular knowledge...the new bureaucratically organized corporations and their 'scientific management' sought as far as possible to literally turn workers into extensions of the machinery, their very move predetermined by someone else.

Thanks to technology, we are probably as productive in two days as we previously were in five. But thanks to greed and some busy-bee syndrome of productivity, we are still asked to slave away for the profit of others ahead of our own nonremunerated ambitions. Whether

In California in general, and its northwest corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that – according to Goldschmidt – bore an uncanny resemblance to the Puritan attitudes described by Max Weber in his famous 1905 essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Insofar as there is a politics, here, it seems a variation on a theme seen since the dawn of capitalism. Ultimately, it's sociality itself that's treated as abusive, criminal, demonic. To this, most ordinary Americans—including Black and Latino Americans, recent immigrants, and others who were formerly excluded from credit—have responded with a stubborn insistence on continuing to love one another.

Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de facto, and avoid the ordinary risks of trade.

This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.

Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.

It reflected the belief that a largely uncontrolled capitalism such as existed in America might be ruinous for Japan, that without sufficient controls too few men would become too rich in too poor a nation. That would create intolerable tensions and divisions, so the state and the capitalists themselves had to regulate it.

Fierce, and what capitalists sometimes call 'ruinous' competition tends, therefore, to produce leap-frogging innovations that more often that not lead capitalists to fetishise technological and organisational innovations as the answer to all their prayers

This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.

Barriers to accumulation are perpetually dissolving and re-forming around the issue of so-called natural scarcities and on occasion, as Marx might put it, these barriers can be transformed into absolute contradictions and crises.

Capital takes away the autonomy of our time and makes it impossible for large segments of the population to leave the realm of necessity behind. In fact, the largest segment of the population is struggling hard to get access to basic necessities, which means that they have a very restricted capacity and time for freedom of expression.

The sale of indulgences is sometimes regarded as one of the first major waves of capitalist commodification. It certainly laid the basis for all that hoarded wealth in the Vatican. Talk about the commodification of conscience and honor!

The difficulty," he says, "lies not in comprehending that money is a commodity, but in discovering how, why and by what means a commodity becomes money" (186): What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities universally express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. (187, emphasis added)

This translates into a hypothesis about actually existing capitalism: that the more it is structured and organized according to this utopian liberal or neoliberal vision, the greater the class inequalities. And there is, it goes without saying, plenty of evidence to support the view that the rhetoric of free markets and free trade and their supposed universal benefits to which we have been subjected these past thirty years have produced exactly the result that Marx would expect:

Marx's critique of free markets and free trade can shed as much devastating light on our own actually existing capitalism as it did for the capitalism of Marx's own time and place.

The rise of monetary exchange leads to socially necessary labor-time becoming the guiding force within a capitalistic mode of production. Therefore, value as socially necessary labor-time is historically specific to the capitalist mode of production. It arises only in a situation where market exchange is doing the requisite job.

This brings us back to Marx's method. One of the most important things to glean from a careful study of Volume I is how Marx's method works. I personally think this is just as important as the propositions he derives about how capitalism works, because once you have learned the method and become both practiced in its execution and confident in its power, then you can use it to understand almost anything.

Not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the level of devaluation now required. The idea is dreadful in its implications. What better reason could there be to declare that it is time for capitalism to be gone, to give way to some saner mode of production?