By introducing the concept of fetishism, Marx shows how the naturalized value of classical political economy dictates a norm; we foreclose on revolutionary possibilities if we blindly follow that norm and replicate commodity fetishism. Our task is to question it. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital
I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back. Leo Tolstoy
Capitalism offers people the freedom to choose where they work, what they do. George W Bush, lecture Manhattan Institute
Democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised. George W Bush, cited The New York Times online 24 September 2008
The real determinant of society is hidden behind the state and the economy: it is the way in which our everyday activity is organised, the subordination of our doing to the dictates of abstract labour, that is, of value, money, profit. It is this abstraction which is, after all, the very existence of the state. If we want to change society, we must stop the subordination of our activity to abstract labour, do something else. John Holloway, Crack Capitalism
I am not interested merely in a better organised society; I am not interested merely in working capitalism more efficiently than the capitalists themselves. I am interested in a society which is based upon co-operation and not upon competition. Trevor Park, address Labour Party Conference 1958
It’s long been understood very well that a society that is based on this principle [individual material gain] will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as it’s possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited – that the world is an infinite resource and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control over its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others, or alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control. Professor Noam Chomsky
Societies differ but in ours the major decisions over what happens in the society – decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on – are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms and so on – they are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government and they are the ones who own the media and they are the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens. Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
What really matters is the fact that the major institutions in society are under totalitarian control. After all, what’s a corporation? A corporation is just a tyrannical system, one of the most tyrannical systems that humans have ever devised. They’ve been given extraordinary rights by the courts, not by legislation early in this century. Like the multilateral agreement. They’ve been given the rights of states. They’re basically unaccountable to the public ... They’ve been given the rights of free speech which is insane ... They control the information system. The media ... The major decisions that affect what happens in the economy and social life are made behind closed doors. Very little public accountability ... Alliance capitalism. Noam Chomsky
If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving twenty hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different. Noam Chomsky
Modern industrial civilisation has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilisation has been individual material gain. Noam Chomsky
It is only the Third World that is to be subjected to the destructive forces of free-market capitalism, so that it can be more efficiently robbed and exploited by the powerful. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
Financial capital can impose the social policies that is chooses on governments and it can punish those that deviate … restricts democracy … and it also undermines efforts to use public resources. Noam Chomsky, lecture 1999, ‘Case Studies in Hypocrisy: US Human Rights Policy, Rhetoric and Practice’
The system inevitably crashes – it’s happened over and over again since the Reagan years each time more serious than the last but that’s not a problem, they can run to the nanny state that they nurtured, ask for a taxpayer bailout, and meanwhile they clutch their copies of Hayek and Milton Friedman … The main architects of the crisis are bigger and richer. Noam Chomsky, lecture 7 June 2011, ‘The Evolving Global Order: Prospects and Opportunities’
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it. Ellen Goodman
The mistake you make, don’t you see, is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You’re trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system. But one can’t. One’s got to change the system, or one changes nothing. One can’t put things right in a hole-and-corner way, if you take my meaning. George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras – they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They ‘kept themselves respectable’ – kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do. ibid.
England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern England own anything at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house. The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small businessman is diminishing in numbers. But at the same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, etc. etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do. George Orwell, England Your England IV
Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were. Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
He [Rothko] was ambivalent, not just about the commission but about American capitalism, about his own American success story. Simon Schama’s Power of Art: Rothko, BBC 2006
You know what capitalism is? Getting’ fucked. Scarface 1983 ***** starring Al Pacino & Michelle Pfeiffer & Steven Bauer & Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio & Robert Loggia & Miria Colon & F Murray Abraham et al, director Brian de Palma, Tony in bath
People are no longer obsessed with the accumulating of things. Star Trek: The Next Generation s1e26: The Neutral Zone, Picard
The wealth that early nineteenth century people were making was being made out of the sweat of other fellow human beings. If you made a lot of money out of a mill in the north or out of a small factory in the middle of Birmingham, the reason is you’d made your money is a lot of people had worked on your behalf – they’d worked like slaves. A N Wilson, author The Victorians
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, 8th December 1908
So we won. But what did we do with our victory? We unleashed the power of turbo-capitalism. Dominic Sandbrook, Strange Days – Cold War Britain III, BBC 2013
In the Soviet Union capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy. Fran Lebowitz
In the eighteenth century chains had many different uses ... As capitalism expanded it co-opted the world for its workforce and it didn’t care how it got them. Michael Wood, The Great British Story: A People’s History 7/8: Industry & Empire, BBC 2012
Sir Jimmy Goldsmith – the tycoon with a complex business and love life who believed the media were plotting to destroy capitalism. The Lost World of the Seventies: A Report by Michael Cockerell, BBC 2012
Goldsmith was fiercely protective of his business reputation. ... Private Eye targeted Goldsmith; it depicted him as an asset-stripper. ibid.
The worker is the slave of the capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave. James Connolly, 1868-1916, The Re-conquest of Ireland, 1915