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.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade…

In fact the “mask” theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in “The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism”, and Robert Jackall,...

Marx made theory… Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization… And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.

If the world were full of the self-seeking individuals found in economics textbooks, it would grind to a halt because we would be spending most of our time cheating, trying to catch the cheaters, and...

The walking tour guides one through the city’s various landmarks, reciting bits of information the listener might find enlightening. I learned, for example, that in the late 1500s my little neighborhood square was a popular...

Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with...

Capitalism is not merely a system for the efficient production and distribution of goods and services; it also incarnates and promotes a particular moral order, an institutionalized normative worldview comprising and fostering particular assumptions, narratives,...

Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis....

At this point in history, our society tends to elevate and reward the specialist…This concentrated focus has brought some benefits…It may also be a modern malady. Specialization, when taken too far and allowed to define...

The recent Dictionary of Occupational Titles lists over twenty thousand specialized professions in America; being a millionaire is not one of them.

The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.

The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any...

One should attend carefully to the fear and desperation of the powerful. They understand very well the potential reach of the “ultimate weapon,” and only hope that those who seek a more free and just...

I do not believe that one can become rich without being a shark; a sensitive man will never amass wealth.

The pressures and penalties of existence in the modern capitalist system are intense; and they are penalties not for what is consciously chosen, but for ways of life which are forced like strait-jackets on people....

Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist...

…vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of ’76 now look to a single and splendid government of an Aristocracy, founded on banking institutions...

At times there’s something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who...

Se quisermos evitar que a cultura seja completamente absorvida pela economia – e o desejo de evitar este destino ainda é, apesar de tudo, bastante comum -, teremos de começar por admitir a existência de...

Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.

The capitalist empires, with their affirmations of sacrifice for the free world, of defence of private enterprise, of safeguarding order from subversion and chaos, are in fact defending their political prestige and the economic interests...

The double consequence of artifice–to project sentience out onto the made world and in turn to make sentience itself into a complex living artifact–is thus fractured, neatly fractured, into two separable consequences, one of which...

Vicisti, O Aspidistra!

When I went into the business, I sat down and figured that I was indeed one of fortune’s children. Just think. There were 20 million buffalo, each worth at least $3 — $60 million. At...

For guns and ammunition,” says I.

…all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the...

She looked at her note cards and took a breath. “Why I Love America, by Hayley McDonald’s. America is the greatest group of countries in the world because we have freedom. In countries like France,...

The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade; the climates and oceans destabilize; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes increase to endanger life-systems at all levels in cascade effects;...

A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there’s such a range of different kinds of market economies. Essentially, what we’ve been debating over—certainly since the Great Depression—is what percentage of a society should be...

The United States has never done away with slavery; we just stopped calling it such. These days, we call it free-market capitalism.

Political corruption, social greed, and Americanized quasi-socialism can ruin even the most wonderful places. California proved that.

Big companies are reliant on institutional investors on a punishing schedule which leads to ruthless behaviour. This form of capitalism with this structure and incentives will never deliver sustainability.

In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man’s work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to...

Paradise, the capitalists promise, is right around the corner. True, mistakes have been made such as the Atlantic slave trade and the exploitation of the European working class, but we have learned our lesson and...

Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.

In capitalism, man exploits man. In socialism, it’s exactly the opposite.

Money is sacred as everyone knows… So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form...

…capitalism satisfied the Christian demand for an institution that channels selfish human desire toward the betterment of society. Some critics accuse capitalism of being a selfish system, but the selfishness is not in capitalism –...

Nearly every “serious” anarchist writer in recent years has tried to distance anarchism from chaos. Yet for most ordinary people, chaos and anarchy are forever linked. The connection between chaos and anarchism should be rethought...

Since the 1970S, financial innova­tions such as the securitisation of mortgage debt and the spreading of investment risks through the creation of derivative markets, all tacitly (and now, as we see, actually) backed by state...

But if sedentary behavior makes us fat and physical activity prevents it, shouldn’t the “exercise explosion” and the “new fitness revolution” have launched and epidemic of leanness rather than coinciding with an epidemic of obesity?

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost...

Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.

Every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labor. While every previous form of society was an organization of labor in the interests of a minority, which organized its...

It made Daniel think. The people who had the least were the most willing to share. He outlined a dictum that he would believe the rest of his life: the more people have, the less...

so why don’t you folks start and we’ll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere.

You know you are capitalism’s ideal puppet (and that education betrayed you) when winning the lottery is your only chance to realizing financial freedom.

In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical...