Quotes About Capitalism

He wondered, often, what it would look like if and when the shit in question hit the fan: The stock market at bottom was rigged. The icon of global capitalism was a fraud.

The Valley was a little experiment of capitalism with too much capital.

Capitalism's machinery favored these capitalists as it had never favored anyone else in its history.

No system in history has been more relentless [than capitalism] in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.

Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. They are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity.

Is fascism merely a dictatorial force in the service of capitalism? That may not be all it is, but that certainly is an important part of fascism's raison d'être, the function Hitler himself kept referring to when he talked about saving the industrialists and bankers from Bolshevism.

The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people's labor. Private profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment. There prevails a rational systematization of human endeavor in pursuit of a socially irrational end: "accumulate, accumulate, accumulate.

Then there were the distorting effects that unremitting capitalist encirclement had upon the building of socialism. Throughout its entire seventy-three-year history of counterrevolutionary invasion, civil war, forced industrialization, Stalinist purges and deportations, Nazi conquest, cold war, and nuclear arms race, the Soviet Union did not know one day of peaceful development.

A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this: Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A. Make communism look good.

it is not socialism that subverts democracy, but democracy that subverts capitalism.

So far, the prevailing force has not been revolution but counterrevolution, the devilish destruction wreaked by capitalist states upon popular struggles, at a cost of millions of lives.

Again — it cannot be said too often — profits are what you make when not working. This explains why, in most instances, the secret to getting rich is not to work hard but to get others to work hard for you.

Education, once free, is now accessible only to those who can afford the costly tuition rates. The curricula have been "depoliticized," meaning that a left perspective critical of imperialism and capitalism has been replaced by a conservative one that is supportive or at least uncritical of these forces.

The spiritual values that are essential to human happiness are being lost or made to seem trivial. Everything is buy, earn, sell

The communists operated on the assumption that once capitalism and its attendant economic abuses were eliminated, and once social production was communalized and people were afforded some decent measure of security and prosperity, they would contentedly do their fair share of work. That often proved not so.

Capitalism is a rational system, the well-calculated systematic maximization of power and profits, a process of accumulation anchored in material obsession that has the ultimately irrational consequence of devouring the system itself-and everything else with it.

If profits are going up, then the economy is "doing well"—even if the working public is falling behind in real wages and living conditions, as happened during much of 2001–2007.

free-market world holocaust.

For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed...

how economists seem to view the question of work and leisure: as antithetical terms that neatly line up with the equally antithetical categories of production and consumption. But perhaps that view says more about them, and consumer capitalism, than it does about us. For one of the most interesting things about cooking today—optional cooking—is how it confounds the rigid categories of work and leisure, of production and consumption.

More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what Capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint.

coffee and tea, which have amply demonstrated their value to capitalism in many ways, not least by making us more efficient workers, are in no danger of prohibition, while psychedelics—which are no more toxic than caffeine and considerably less addictive—have been regarded, at least in the West since the mid-1960s, as a threat to social norms and institutions.

For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in a field of corn, not to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.

Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.