Capitalist Quotes - Page 26

• The fundamental differences between Marxian and traditional orthodox economics are, first, that the orthodox economists accept the capitalist system as part of the eternal order of Nature, while Marx regards it as a passing phase in the transition from the feudal economy of the past to the socialist economy of the future.

  Joan Robinson

  Nature, Money, Work

  Joan Robinson (1967). “Essay on Marxian Economics”, p.1, Springer

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• The situation of the factory worker today is reminiscent in certain respects of that of the nineteenth-century capitalist whose wife dragged him reluctantly toward "culture" and away from his "materialistic" preoccupations.

  David Riesman

  Wife, Culture, Today

  David Riesman (1964). “Abundance for What?”, p.156, Transaction Publishers

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• The monopoly capitalists - even while employing purely empirical methods - weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in which the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed.

  Che Guevara

  Art, Rebel, Tools

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• The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'

  George Orwell

  Jobs, Land, House

  George Orwell (2004). “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, p.83, Penguin UK

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• What sets imperialism of the capitalist sort apart from other conceptions of empire is that it is the capitalist logic that typically dominates, though ... there are times in which the territorial logic comes to the fore. But this then poses a crucial question: how can the territorial logics of power, which tend to be awkwardly fixed in space, respond to the open spatial dynamics of endless capital accumulation? And what does endless capital accumulation imply for the territorial logics of power?

  David Harvey

  Space, Doe, Dynamics

  David Harvey (2003). “The New Imperialism”, p.33, OUP Oxford

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• Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.

  David Harvey

  Expansion, Social, Exploitation

  "The Limits To Capital". Book by David Harvey, 1982.

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• The bandage will remain on the eyes of Justice as long as the Capitalist has the cut, shuffle, and deal.

  Bill Haywood

  Eye, Cutting, Long

  "Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood". Book by Peter Carlson, p. 146, 1983.

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• There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual's responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism.

  John Carroll

  Responsibility, Evil, Woe

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.64, Taylor & Francis

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• Except for its worst inner-city slums, America is not the primitive capitalist jungle of European imagination, where human beings slink away like wounded animals to die in bloodstained holes.

  Timothy Garton Ash

  Animal, Cities, America

  Timothy Garton Ash (2005). “Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West”, p.72, Vintage

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• Apart from their work and production, households perform other important economic functions. Most CONSUMPTION occurs within the household. ... In developed capitalist economies, private consumption spending accounts for half or more of GDP.

  Jim Stanford

  Capitalist Economy, Gdp, Important

  Jim Stanford (2008). “Economics for everyone: a short guide to the economics of capitalism”, Pluto Pr

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• The capitalists of a country which manages to capture foreign markets from other countries are able to increase their profits at the expense of the capitalists of the other countries. Similarly, a colonial metropolis may achieve an export surplus through investment in its dependencies.

  Michal Kalecki

  Country, May, Able

  Michal Kalecki (1971). “Selected Essays on the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy 1933-1970”, p.85, CUP Archive

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• The capitalist process shapes things and souls for socialism.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  Soul, Shapes, Socialism

  Joseph A. Schumpeter (2013). “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, p.220, Routledge

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• We believe that the developing crisis in the capitalist system, by which we mean both economic stagnation, and the social and political conflicts to which it gives rise, makes it possible to think in terms of developing a sizeable and serious revolutionary socialist party in a way that was not possible 20 or even 10 years ago.

  Anthony Crosland

  Party, Believe, Mean

  The Times, September 8, 1977.

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• 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

  Men, Long, World

  Immanuel Wallerstein (1979). “The Capitalist World-Economy”, p.15, Cambridge University Press

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• Even the most conservative must realize that the recent transformation of surplus from an individual to a national disaster implies a scathing indictment of our capitalist system as it has now developed.

  Benjamin Graham

  Conservative, Transformation, Realizing

  "Storage and Stability". Book by Benjamin Graham, Part I, Chapter I, The Changing Role of Surplus Stocks, p. 17, 1937.

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• To permit every lawless capitalist, every law-defying corporation, to take any action, no matter how iniquitous, in the effort to secure an improper profit and to build up privilege, would be ruinous to the Republic and would mark the abandonment of the effort to secure in the industrial world the spirit of democratic fair dealing.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Law, Effort, Would Be

  Theodore Roosevelt (1910). “Presidential addresses and state papers”

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• The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.

  Friedrich Engels

  Mean, Organization, Paris

  Letter to Philipp Van Patten, www.marxists.org. April 18, 1883.

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• Our problem today is not how to expropriate the expropriators but, rather, how to arrange matters so that the masses, dispossessed by industrial society in capitalist and socialist systems, can regain property. For this reason alone, the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false-not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing different hats.

  Hannah Arendt

  Wisdom, Different, Alternatives

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• Although until recently the Church was closely linked to the established order, it is beginning to take a different attitude regarding the exploitation, oppression, and alienation which prevails in Latin America. This has caused concern among the beneficiaries and defenders of capitalist society, who no longer can depend on what used to be - whether consciously or unconsciously - one of their mainstays.

  Gustavo Gutiérrez

  Attitude, Latin, Order

  Gustavo Gutiérrez (1988). “Teología de la liberación”

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• We got email today from an LGF reader who was browsing the Lexis research system and discovered that anti-American, anti-capitalist icon Noam Chomsky has embarrassingly capitalist tastes; among other expensive property he owns a 36,155 square foot home near Cambridge, a 13,503 square foot vacation home, and four boats. And we won't even mention the cars. Teaching kids to hate their own country seems to pay quite well.

  Charles Foster Johnson

  Country, Hate, Teaching

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• Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq is clearly a 'client' state of the West, of Turkey and to some extent, Israel. It is shamelessly capitalist, taking land from its own people, cheating them, just in order to pump and refine huge quantities of oil. It treats Syrian refugees like animals, forcing them to make anti-Assad statements. It is turning ancient Erbil into some bizarre shopping mall with nothing public in sight. Its military top brass is mainly US/UK-trained and indoctrinated. And it provokes Baghdad, day and night.

  Andre Vltchek

  Cheating, Military, Night

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• It is more than a little ironic that "capital accumulation" once a rather tendentious Marxian view of a supposed capitalist obsession, should have become - of all things - Wall Street's own slogan.

  Robert Kuttner

  Wall, Views, Should Have

  Robert Kuttner (1987). “The Economic Illusion: False Choices Between Prosperity and Social Justice”, p.51, University of Pennsylvania Press

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• The democracy which shows up in the United States and in England is not an ideal democracy, because the will of the people is under the pressure of property, which is in the hands of the wealthy capitalists.

  Hans Fritzsche

  Hands, People, Democracy

  "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately, 2004.

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• The communist model does not work economically, we all realised that, but the capitalist model in the modern world also looks to be unsustainable.

  Arsene Wenger

  Doe, Looks, World

  "ARSENE WENGER INTERVIEW: The full transcript of Martin Samuel's fascinating meeting with the Arsenal manager - part I". Interview with Martin Samuel, www.dailymail.co.uk. August 24, 2009.

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• Fascism is not [only] squads of the SA or the Blackshirts marching on the streets. Fascism is officials, in uniforms ordering what is capitalist supposed to do with "his" factory, and how he should father "his" children and occasionally - how many Jews (or anti-Semites) should be sent to Auschwitz.

  Janusz Korwin-Mikke

  Children, Father, Squad

  Blog post, May 09, 2008.

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