quotations about capitalism
What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it.... Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalized capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient.
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
Capitalism improves the quality of life for the working class not just because it leads to improved wages but also because it produces new, better, and cheaper goods.... Indeed, with capitalism, the emphasis shifted to producing goods as cheaply as possible for the masses--the working class--whereas artisans had previously produced their goods and wares mostly for the aristocracy. Under capitalism every business wants to cater to the masses, for that is where the money is.
THOMAS J. DILORENZO
How Capitalism Saved America
I am not a die-hard capitalist. I do not view capitalism as a credo. Much more important to me are freedom, compassion for the poor, respect for the social contract, and equal opportunity. But for the moment, to achieve those goals, capitalism is the only game in town. It is the only system we know that provides us with the tools required to create massive surplus value.
HERNANDO DE SOTO
The Mystery of Capital
Watching capitalism gun down democracy
It had this funny effect on me
ANI DIFRANCO
"Your Next Bold Move"
Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.
VLADIMIR LENIN
The State and Revolution
A religion may be discerned in capitalism--that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Capitalism as Religion
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.
MOHANDAS GANDHI
Harijan, Jul. 28, 1940
In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
AYN RAND
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
If capitalism persists for several more centuries, as seems to be highly likely, then from the vantage point of the future, capitalism may be seen as the system responsible for the transformation of the human condition from one of mass subsistence to mass prosperity.
VICTOR D. LIPPIT
Capitalism
Tra-la-la-la, tra-la-la-la, tra-la-la-la
We're making the world safe for capitalism
Here we come with our candy and our guns
And our corporate muscle marches in behind us
For freedom's just another world for nothing left to sell
BILLY BRAGG
"The Marching Song of the Covert Battalions", The Internationale
The core dynamic of the capitalist system is the accumulation process, a process in which a portion of the profits reaped through the sale of goods and services is reinvested, swelling the capital stock, incorporating new technologies in the process, and permitting larger sales and profits in the future.
VICTOR D. LIPPIT
Capitalism
Capitalism places every man in competition with his fellows for a share of the available wealth. A few people accumulate big piles, but most do not. The sense of community falls victim to this struggle.
DONALD BARTHELME
"The Rise of Capitalism"
Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it.... Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.
CAMILLE PAGLIA
Sexual Personae
I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg.
MARGARET DRABBLE
The Guardian, Jan. 2, 1993
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
KARL MARX
Capital
Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
The evolution of the capitalist style of life could be easily--and perhaps most tellingly--described in terms of the genesis of the modern Lounge Suit.
JOSEPH A. SCHUMPETER
Capitalism
Marx described the mad, self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of parthenogenesis reaches its apogee in today's meta-reflexive speculations on futures. It is far too simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction and that behind this abstraction there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this "abstraction" is not only in our financial speculators' misperception of social reality, but that it is "real" in the precise sense of determining the structure of the material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the "solipsistic" speculative dance of capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Violence: Six Sideways Reflections
The revolution eats its own. Capitalism recreates itself.
MORDECAI RICHLER
Cocksure
What Americans should by now be able to see is that neither the laissez-faire marketplace nor strong government has given them a satisfying or permanent resolution. The problem is not the marketplace and it is not government. The problem originates in the contest of clashing values between society and capitalism and, since this human society cannot surrender its deepest values, it must try to alter capitalism's. As we look deeper for the soul of capitalism, we find that, in the terms of ordinary human existence, American capitalism doesn't appear to have one.
WILLIAM GREIDER
The Soul of Capitalism