The big guys who ran things didn’t want you thinking or feeling. It slowed down production. They wanted you scared and working so you wouldn’t bump up against the truth–life could be fun. Yup, they...

Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises–War and Shopping–simply will not work.

The global industrial food system holds an inherent contradiction. It is a major source of global warming pollution, and at the same time it is threatened by increasing climate chaos. This same food system currently...

Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women.

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They...

In capitalist nation, all is decided by money.

Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers…a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon… Proudhon in effect...

The petite bourgeoise and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies.

We seldom consider how much of our lives we must render in return for some object we barely want, seldom need, buy only because it was put before us…And this is understandable given the workings...

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms,...

To whom is an international corporation answerable? Often they do not employ workers. They outsource manufacturing to places far away. If wages rise in one place, they can, almost instantly, transfer production to somewhere else....

I argue that one of the functions of a capitalist state is to defend capitalism from itself, to defend capitalism from the capitalists.

Agent Jones switched to the big screen and a grainy video of MoMo sitting at his enormous desk, a swivel-hipped Elvis clock ticking behind his bewigged head. ‘Death to the capitalist pigs! Death to your...

Those who find it hypocritical of others to use, say, a smartphone, to speak ill of capitalism, needs to be reminded that capitalism is an ideology, not a technology.

How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow s hall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how...

Capitalism without Bankruptcy is like Catholicism without Hell.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very...

information society

America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They...

Children, awkward, isolate, their bodies crammed to bursting with caffein and sugar and pop music and cologne and perfume and hairgel and pimple cream and growth hormone-treated hamburger meat and premature sex drives and costly,...

People buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like.

. . . then life began, and since then we remember each dumpster, abandoned house, and foot-chase by retail security. At night, after running around, plotting and scheming, our checklist items all crossed out, we...

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

The Road To Serfdom is about capitalism. That’s why on the side of that road you’ll find me, in a kiosk, selling ankle chains and handcuffs.

Today humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.

And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a...

People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as ‘parasites’ fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for...

…capitalism is too important and complex a subject to be left to economists. Achieving a critical comprehension of it requires perspectives beyond those characteristic of modern economics. That is why this is a history not...

The law-abiding citizen by his labor serves both himself and his fellow man and thereby integrates himself peacefully into the social order. The robber, on the other hand, is intent, not on honest toil, but...

[W]hat counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and...

The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if...

To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard, immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in order to increase this heap of gold, one must be...

The road to the new society had lengthened and become overgrown sadly since 1904. The working class in many thousands had been shown its errors in thinking, but persisted in them. Very well: the working...

Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy...

Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people,...

How can you measure progress if you don’t know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the “market” put a price on things – food, clothes, electricity, running water – when...

The whole discussion now underway on revolutionary forms in Russia and in China boils down to the judgement to be made of the historical phenomenon of the “appearance” of industrialism and mechanisation in huge areas...

It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.

Cash is always the deciding factor in such matters of moral politics; nothing ever gets done unless motivated by commerce or greed.

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence...

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he...

Criminal: a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.

No, young man. What you see is hell with the lid taken off.” — Mother Jones

We don’t live in a free market society… markets are controlled by the major players who influence legislation to perpetuate their control…

[There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of ‘democracy’ and ‘equality’ – they’re the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them...

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.

Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public...

Unlike the Soviet Communist party, the Chinese Communist party chose to introduce capitalism.

The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, ‘Better dead than red!’ are now often heard mumbling, ‘Better red than eating hamburgers.