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...

The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or...

A time of ongoing cultural revolution when the adversaries of Christianity have made plain their intent to use the state machinery to promote radical social ideologies hardly seems an opportune moment to discuss how the...

I don’t want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.

For anyone who thinks “profit” is evil, I have a challenge for you: try NOT to get any profit in the next week. Profit simply means increasing how much valuable stuff you have, and if...

Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor’s historic threat of violence against capital.

You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter’s place was, and I looked across it and...

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which...

The essence of modern capitalism is not slavery of the antique pattern but the possession of the expensive tools of production by a small plutocratic group which controls frequently the tools of persuasion.

What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are...

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not...

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

If you can’t afford the good food or if you can’t afford health care or if you don’t have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can’t get it fixed and you...

Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He...

Capitalist ideology in general, Zizek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief – in the sense of inner subjective attitude – at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior....

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I...

America runs on credit darling. Why do you worry, our credit will take care of this payment. It is not saving or cash in hand that matters. We do not need cash, we just need...

Within two or three years of World War II’s end, starvation had been basically eliminated in Japan, and yet the Japanese had continued slaving away as if their lives depend on it. Why? To create...

As for wealth, we live in a civilization which piously denies that it is an end in itself, and treats it exactly this way in practice. One of the most powerful indictments of capitalism is...

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in...

Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just “human rights,” and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that...

There cannot exist in the future an economy which is still mercantile but which isn’t capitalist anymore. Before capitalism there were economies which were partially mercantile, but capitalism is the last of this genre.

Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others – the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial...

In the developed countries of the capitalist world, the mass media are beginning to become businesses, and huge businesses at that. The freedom of journalists is now becoming, in most cases, a very relative thing:...

Traditional hedonism…was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent...

Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease.

The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists; they’re too damned greedy.

Our founding fathers did a decent job of framing our democracy. They wrote the Constitution and added a Bill of Rights that intended for people of all classes to enjoy the freedoms the Constitution offers....

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

Here is a principle to use in all aspects of economics and policy. When you find a good or service that is in huge demand but the supply is so limited to the point that...

Anyone who objects to any government whatsoever as a form of socialism ought not to pull that socialist lever in their home, the one that makes their waste disappear in a whirlpool into the socialized...

In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social...

…there’s nothing more depressing than bad capitalism.

She was willing a little bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce...

To Jurgis the packers had been the equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws...

Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to...

They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy-just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.

This was 1990 the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that...

I believe in humanitarian capitalism, and there are good people on Wall Street.

It is everyone’s bounden duty to try to get more than they have got already. If you have got two shillin’ you try to make it into four shillin’ . . . there is no...

The idea that we are anti-capitalist is a stupid idea. Free software is not anti-capitalist. Capitalism now makes a great deal of money out of free software and it voluntarily pays us money to make,...

do more in less time” is not a neutral force in our culture; it is the handmaiden of miserable experts, specialists, and leaders. Not everyone has rushed to become efficient. Something else exists on the...

Barriers to accumulation are perpetually dissolving and re-forming around the issue of so-called natural scarcities and on occasion, as Marx might put it, these barriers can be transformed into absolute contradictions and crises.

The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness.

Capitalism was a marvel, as long as you were a capitalist.

The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

Do you understand economics? I mean big-time, prewar, global capitalism. Do you get how it worked? I don’t, and anyone who says they do is full of shit.

In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from...