…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.

My Oneness will stop the machine that overtakes people’s minds. Do we really need new clothes, or new cars, or new TVs? Should we really ingest food made from chemicals not of this earth? Should...

Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist...

This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner. On the contrary, the craving to increase profits...

In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.

It’s true that private enterprise is extremely flexible, But its only good within very narrow limits. If private enterprise isn’t held in an iron grip it gives birth to people who are no better than...

I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world’s goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs...

Ah remember walkin along Princes Street wi Spud, we both hate walkin along that hideous street, deadened by tourists and shoppers, the twin curse ay modern capitalism.

No genuine revolutionary challenge to either the State or Capitalism in the United States can fail to ignore racism’s importance in maintaining the current system.

While boasting of our noble deeds we’re careful to concealthe ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we havenationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined,is not less cruel than the old system...

It is time someone put in a good word for the petite bourgeoise. Unlike the working class and capitalists, who have never lack for spokespersons, the petite bourgeoise rarely, if ever, speaks for itself.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy...

In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and...

It shouldn’t be the consumer’s responsibility to figure out what’s cruel and what’s kind, what’s environmentally destructive and what’s sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don’t need the option of buying...

The diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public’s responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about...

To me [the pope] was the incarnation of all that is capitalism.

Managers receiving hundreds of thousands a year—and setting their compensation for themselves—are not being paid wages, they are appropriating surplus value in the guise of wages.

The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.

The world put’s too much emphasis on what a person does in terms of monetary value and social status as opposed to who they are. If I was to ask you if you would be...

…Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.

Very well then! I’ll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his...

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....