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Capitalism Quotes

This is a page where the critics talk the most. David Harvey, Fidel Castro, Jim Stanford, Michael Parenti and Terry Eagleton lead, so much of what is here is argument from the left. The sourced material is more varied. G. K. Chesterton, in The Utopia of Usurers (1917), warns that the community the capitalists are constructing will be complete and absolute. Bertrand Russell, in 1963, says he dislikes communism because it is undemocratic and capitalism because it favours exploitation. Malcolm X, in 1965, argues that you cannot have capitalism without racism.

The one flagged entry is “Fascism is capitalism in decay,” credited to Lenin and marked misattributed.

Random quote on Capitalism

Most quoted on capitalism:

Capitalism designates an economic system significantly characterized by the predominance of "capital." Capitalism and double entry bookkeeping are absolutely indissociable; their relationship to each other is that of form to content.

Werner Sombart

Western society is relapsing at critical points into precivilized modes of thought, feeling, and action because it has acquiesced too easily in the dehumanization of society through capitalist exploitation.

Lewis Mumford Technics and Civilization (1934)

Capitalist enterprises buy components from others who have lower costs in producing those particular components, and sell their own output to whatever middlemen can most efficiently carry out its distribution.

Thomas Sowell

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.

Alan Greenspan

Racism, violence, and brutality were the concomitants of the capitalist system when it extended itself abroad in the early centuries of international trade.

Walter Rodney

Every day in our neighborhood there were whole apartments, beds, bureaus, kitchen tables out on the street. We understood that this was because of capitalism, which didn't care that working people had no work and no money for rent.

Grace Paley Injustice (1995)

In the aftermath of 10,000 years of incessant growth and endless wars that humanity waged upon itself, other species, and the earth, we now live amidst unsustainable global capitalism and a system of growth that is driving natural systems to an irreversible tipping point.

Steven Best

In bourgeois society... the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

Karl Marx The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

The landlord, qua landlord, performs no function in the economy of industry or of food production. He is a rent receiver; that, and nothing more. Were the landlord to be abolished, the soil and the people who till it would still remain, and the disappearance of the landowner would pass almost unnoticed. So too with the capitalist.

Keir Hardie

Everyday I become more convinced, there is no doubt in my mind, as many intellectuals have said, that it is necessary to transcend capitalism. But capitalism can not be transcended through capitalism itself; it must be done through socialism, true socialism, with equality and justice. I’m also convinced that it is possible to do it under democracy, but not in the type of democracy being imposed by Washington.

Hugo Chávez

Those of us now in isolation, in spite of our fear and frustrations, in spite of our grief ⁠— for those who have died or may die, for the life we once lived, for the future we once hoped for ⁠— there is also a sense we are cocooned, transforming, waiting, dreaming.

Max Haiven No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation (2020)

Production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit is the essential feature of a capitalist world-economy. In such a system production is constantly expanded as long as further production is profitable, and men constantly innovate new ways of producing things that will expand the profit margin.

Immanuel Wallerstein

It is really impressive what a filthy system capitalism is, that can't guarantee its own people employment, nor health, nor adequate education; that cannot prevent youth from being corrupted by drugs, gamble, and all kind of vices.

Fidel Castro

When you are poor you don’t have any social respect or social worth because everything is defined in terms of money and how much of it you have. This is what capitalism does. It turns all values into commercial values, even the value of life itself.

Kevin Rashid Johnson Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin Rashid Johnson (2010)

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force. But even Capitalist cynicism will admit that however unconscionable we may be when our own interests are affected, we can be most indignantly virtuous at the expense of others.

George Bernard Shaw The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928)

It is above all the impersonal and economically rationalized (but for this very reason ethically irrational) character of purely commercial relationships that evokes the suspicion, never clearly expressed but all the more strongly felt, of ethical religions. For every purely personal relationship of man to man, of whatever sort and even including complete enslavement, may be subjected to ethical requirements and ethically regulated. This is true because the structures of these relationships depend upon the individual wills of the participants, leaving room in such relations for manifestations of the virtue of charity. But this is not the situation in the realm of economically rationalised relationships, where personal control is exercised in inverse ratio to the degree of rational differentiation of the economic structure.

Max Weber Sociology of Religion (1922)

I hear Republicans and Libertarians and so forth talking about property rights, but they stop talking about property rights as soon as the subject of American Indians comes up, because they know fully well, perhaps not in a fully articulated, conscious form, but they know fully well that the basis for the very system of endeavor and enterprise and profitability to which they are committed and devoted accrues on the basis of theft of the resources of someone else. They are in possession of stolen property. They know it. They all know it. It's a dishonest endeavor from day one.

Ward Churchill

There are no good aspects of monopoly capital, so no reservations need be recognized in its destruction. Monopoly capital is the enemy. It crushes the life force of all of the people. It must be completely destroyed, as quickly as possible, utterly, totally, ruthlessly, relentlessly destroyed.

George Jackson Blood in My Eye (1971)

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.

Michael Parenti Against Empire (1995)

"Capitalism," says Irving Kristol, "is the least romantic conception of a public order that the human mind has ever conceived." The reason it's so unromantic is that it doesn't tell people what to do and that can be very frustrating for intellectuals who want to tell people what to do.

Jonah Goldberg

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