Capitalist Quotes

469 Sourced quotes

Only the dialectical conception of... reality as a social process... dissolves the fetishistic forms necessarily produced by the capitalist mode of production and enables us to see them as mere illusions which are not less illusory for being seen to be necessary.

György Lukács

We want a system in which the worker shall get what he produces and the capitalist shall produce what he gets.

Ignorance alone stands in the way of socialist success. The capitalist parties understand this and use their resources to prevent the workers from seeing the light.
Intellectual darkness is essential to industrial slavery.

Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

One might even say that it's one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically.

A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.

The capitalist is very fond of declaring that labour is a commodity, and the wage contract a bargain of purchase and sale like any other. But he instinctively expects his wage-earners to render him, not only obedience, but also personal deference. If the wage contract is a bargain of purchase and sale like any other, why is the workman expected to toff his hat to his employer, and to say 'sir' to him without reciprocity?

Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield

The worker in a capitalist state—and that is his deepest misfortune—is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker. He has become a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is alienated from what he produces.

Joseph Goebbels

The schools, government, and news media are all more powerful in shaping people's basic concepts of how the world operates and what kinds of lives are worth living. Still, advertising is a powerful cultural institution in this country (less so in other capitalist countries, though its presence is growing).

Michael Schudson

That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society post-capitalist.

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.

It was an ideological war for some—the defenders of democracy versus the rebel strong-arm charismatic leaders. Or the capitalist land-grabbers versus the protectors of the people, take your pick.

This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.

I would like for my books to have been recognized posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where they turn you into a kind of merchandise.

Gabriel García Márquez

The American farmer, whose holdings were not so extensive as those of the grandee nor so tiny as those of the peasant, whose psychology was Protestant and bourgeois, and whose politics were petty-capitalist rather than traditionalist, had no reason to share the social outlook of the rural classes of Europe. In Europe land was limited and dear, while labor was abundant and relatively cheap; in America the ratio between land and labor was inverted.

Richard Hofstadter

I predict that, if anarcho-capitalist institutions appeared in this country tomorrow, heroin would be legal in New York and illegal in most other places.

A key factor in [the revival of Shiite Islam in Iran] was the Iranians' refusal to accept the western reduction of religion to individual faith, which would have enabled an easier imposition of a global capitalist political economy.

Richard A. Horsley

I think therapy is a rather misguided notion of capitalist societies whereby the self-indulgent examination of one's life supersedes the actual living of said life.

Peter Cameron (writer)

Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Moreover, there is an unearned increment on capital and on labor, due to the presence, around the capitalist and the laborer, of a great, industrious, and prosperous society.

William Graham Sumner

I am a capitalist and I am a bit of a right winger, and I think in many ways the system we have got at the moment is really not a bad system. I think capitalism is a good thing. The only problem with capitalism is that it destroys the planet, and that it's based on growth. I mean apart from those two little details it's got a lot to be said in its favour.

Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.

He also helped start the Tides Foundation, which among its many super, super classics are the anti-capitalist Story of Stuff, indoctrination video. Yes, George Soros money. Isn't that great? Shown in schools all across America to warp your children's brains and make sure they know how evil capitalism is.

We are Socialists, enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system! And with my inclination to practical action it seems obvious to me that we have to put a better, more just, more moral system in its place, one which, as it were, has arms and legs and better arms and legs than the present one!

Gregor Strasser

If a 19th century capitalist Machiavelli had wished to cripple the socialist intelligentsia of the 20th century, he could have invented no more cogent weapon than the labour theory of value. Yet this theory was the invention, not of a defender of capitalism, but of its greatest critic: Karl Marx.