Capitalism Quotes - Page 21

• Every time I say the word capitalism, everyone just assumes I have plenty of Marxism in me, I do. But Russia and China had their bloody revolutions and even while they were Communist, they had the same idea about generating wealth - tear it out of the bowels of the earth. And now they have come out with the same idea in the end... you know, capitalism. But capitalism will fail, too.

  Arundhati Roy

  Ideas, Russia, Tears

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• We often confuse or loosely use the ideas of crony capitalism or neoliberalism to actually avoid using the word "capitalism", but once you've actually seen, let's say, what's happening in India and the United States - that this model of US economics packaged in a carton that says "democracy" is being forced on countries all over the world, militarily if necessary, has in the United States itself resulted in 400 of the richest people owning wealth equivalent [to that] of half of the population.

  Arundhati Roy

  Country, Ideas, People

  "Arundhati Roy: 'The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution'". Interview with Arun Gupta, www.theguardian.com. November 30, 2011.

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• We must pay close attention to those with another imagination: an imagination outside of capitalism, as well as communism. We will soon have to admit that those people, like the millions of indigenous people fighting to prevent the takeover of their lands and the destruction of their environment - the people who still know the secrets of sustainable living - are not relics of the past, but the guides to our future.

  Arundhati Roy

  Fighting, Past, Land

  "Arundhati Roy: 'The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution'". Interview with Arun Gupta, www.theguardian.com. November 30, 2011.

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• Neither capitalism nor socialism is capable of meeting our unprecedented global challenges. Both came out of early industrial times, and we are now well into the post-industrial age. Both came out of times when the West still oriented much more to the domination side of the social scale, so both these theories did not pay attention to caring for people and nature.

  Riane Eisler

  Caring, People, Challenges

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• Bear in mind that capitalism is a tiny period of human society. You never really had capitalism, you always had one or another variant of state capitalism.

  Noam Chomsky

  Mind, Tiny, Bears

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

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• Capitalism would self-destruct in no time. So the business classes have always demanded strong, straight intervention to protect the society from the destructive effects of market forces because they don't want everything destroyed.

  Noam Chomsky

  Strong, Self, Class

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

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• We had one or another form of state capitalism during an extremely brief period of human history, which tells us essentially nothing about human nature. If you look at human societies and human interactions, you can find anything. You find selfishness, you find altruism, you find sympathy.

  Noam Chomsky

  Selfishness, Looks, Human Nature

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

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• Let's take Adam Smith, the patron-saint of capitalism, what did he think? He thought the main human instinct was sympathy. In fact, take a look at the word "invisible hand." Which, of course, you learned about, or you think you've learned about. Take a look at the actual way in which he used the phrase. There is almost no relation to what is claimed.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Invisible Hand, Hands

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

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• I still believe that workers must be the basic force which must organize and eventually transform society (along with peasants in poor countries). This is because they are the source of the profits which make capitalism what it is. They can shut the system down, and at the same time they possess the unique knowledge needed to make it work in everyone's interests.

  Michael Yates

  Country, Believe, Unique

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Capitalism is a powerful producer of output, crisis-mongering on the left notwithstanding, and this too makes the system seem to have a lot of promise. This is why it is so important to agitate against the system in good times and bad. We can't depend on some super crisis to get folks thinking but instead have to focus on all of the contradictions of the system which cannot be ultimately resolved by it.

  Michael Yates

  Powerful, Thinking, Focus

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Capitalism is, in Mao's language, the main contradiction in the world today and so our efforts have to be focused on ending this system and making a new one.

  Michael Yates

  Effort, World, Today

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I worked very hard to try and figure out what I thought and I believed that we were going to succeed and that revolutions would happen globally and we would be a part of that and we would have then not capitalism. We would have values based on human lives, not profit. We would actually transform the kinds of ways people built love and built community. It was a very shocking thing to me, out of the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, to realize that that dream - while I still believed in it - was not going to happen in the way that I had hoped.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Dream, People, Community

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative - alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations - becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy.

  Tariq Ali

  Mean, Reality, Media

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• The European Union is effectively a union dominated by the German political and economic elite. Its main function is to serve as a nucleus for financial capitalism and to ease the road for that capitalism. The other functions just irritate everyone: it's undemocratic; decisions are not made by parliament; the European Parliament is not sovereign.

  Tariq Ali

  Decision, Political, Ease

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• The real problem is the total capitulation of German social democracy to capitalism, reflected and symbolized by actual extreme center coalition governments in Germany, which have been in power for a long time and still are even as we speak. That is the real problem: that there is no serious opposition in Germany at all. And the Left party is divided.

  Tariq Ali

  Real, Party, Government

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador lived through times of cruel and ruthless capitalism where the workers, the masses of the population, saw themselves living in a precarious state of employment and subsistence conditions. The impact of this reality took hold and impacted the evolution of the social situation of those countries and even though that produced movements that were not exactly political movements but social movements.

  Alejandro Castro Espin

  Country, Reality, Impact

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• In Cuba we had the most ferocious form of capitalism for 60 years. It dominated every sphere of life.

  Alejandro Castro Espin

  Years, Spheres, Cuba

  "The Future of Cuba". Interview with Lasonas Pipinis Velasco, www.counterpunch.org. February 27, 2015.

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• Cubans are a people who suffered from capitalism in the cruelest way, in the social order, the economic order and the political order.

  Alejandro Castro Espin

  Order, People, Political

  "The Future of Cuba". Interview with Lasonas Pipinis Velasco, www.counterpunch.org. February 27, 2015.

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• Cuba cannot go back to capitalism; we know all the tragic experience that it has generated for Latin America and the world. We also know the positive experiences of socialism not only in our geographic environment but also like what we are witnessing in China.

  Alejandro Castro Espin

  Latin, America, Positive Experiences

  "The Future of Cuba". Interview with Lasonas Pipinis Velasco, www.counterpunch.org. February 27, 2015.

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• Under communism, no one would be living in marginal conditions as they do under capitalism today and where the greatest part of humanity lives.

  Alejandro Castro Espin

  Humanity, Today, Would Be

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Post-1989 capitalism was far more unfriendly to economic and social rights than was the prior capitalism seeking to win public approval as a more compassionate economic arrangement than that which prevailed in state socialist economies.

  Richard A. Falk

  Winning, Socialist Economy, Rights

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• The systemic incompatibility between free-market capitalism and the quality of democratic life and respect for human rights has to be modified to take account of such contextual variables as wartime, security threats, and the societal balance between entrepreneurial and working classes.

  Richard A. Falk

  Class, Rights, Quality

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Capitalism is in crisis both morally, due to widening disparities of income and wealth and disclosures of abusive practices, and ecologically, due to its refusal to make business adjustments in accounting procedures that pass the consequences of emissions to the public and the future.

  Richard A. Falk

  Practice, Income, Wealth

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Anyone who studies the energy predicament understands its connection with the operations of capital - and by this I do not mean capitalism as an ideology, I mean the behavior of acquired wealth and its deployment for productive purpose. (A lot of educated idiots don't understand this, and we waste a lot of time blathering about capitalism.)

  James Howard Kunstler

  Mean, Deployment, Energy

  Interview With Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org.

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• I have always favored Capitalism as the best economic system and Democracy as the best political system. They both have the most potential for improving the lives of people. However, both systems need to be reexamined and refreshed so that, in fact, they do serve the majority of people.

  Philip Kotler

  People, Political, Democracy

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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