Quotessence
Home / Topics / Capital Quotes

Capital Quotes

Browse 241 quotes about Capital.

Capital Quotes

“[...] what is more reductionist than to ignore the underlying dynamics of economic power and the conflict between capital and labor? What is more misleading than to treat occupational groups as autonomous classes, giving attention to every social group in capitalist society except the capitalist class itself, to every social conflict except class conflict?”

LaborCapitalClass Struggle
Book:Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
Create image

“In many ways, the left has never recovered from being wrong-footed by Capital's mobilization and metabolization of the desire for emancipation from Fordist routine. Especially in the UK, the traditional representatives of the working class - union and labor leaders - found Fordism rather too congenial; its stability of antagonism gave them a guaranteed role. But this meant that it was easy for the advocates of post-Fordist Capital to present themselves as the opponents of the status quo, bravely resisting an inertial organized labor 'pointlessly' invested in fruitless ideological antagonism which served the ends of union leaders and politicians, but did little to advance the hopes of the class they purportedly represented. Antagonism is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but internally, in the psychology of the worker, who, as a worker, is interested in old-style class conflict, but, as someone with a pension fund, is also interested in maximizing the yield from his or her investments.”

CapitalismCapitalTrade Unions
Book:Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Create image

“Those who live by the labor of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.”

SpiritualReligionCapitalismCharityImperialismCapitalProletariatCapitalistsImperialistsExploiters
Book:Socialism and religion
Create image

“The proletariat has not succeeded in negating itself as such - the century and a half since Marx has made that clear. The proletariat has failed to negate itself qua class and thereby abolish class society per se. Perhaps this is because the proletariat never was a class, as had been supposed - because only the bourgeoisie was a true Class, and therefore the only one capable of negating itself as such. For it has indeed negated itself, along with capital, and so generated a classless society, albeit one which has nothing to do with the classless society that was supposed to arise from a revolution and from a negation of the proletariat as such. As for the proletariat, it has simply disappeared - vanished along with the class struggle itself. There can be no doubt that had capitalism developed in accordance with its own contradictory logic, it would have been defeated by the proletariat. In an ideal sense, Marx's analysis is still irreproachable. But Marx simply did not foresee that it would be possible for capital, in the face of the imminent threat to its existence, to transpoliticize itself, as it were: to launch itself into an orbit beyond the relations of production and political contradictions, to make itself autonomous in a free-floating, ecstatic and haphazard form, and thus to totalize the world in its own image. Capital (if it may still be so called) has barred the way of political economy and the law of value; it is in this sense that it has successfully escaped its own end. Henceforward it can function independently of its own former aims, and absolutely without reference to any aims whatsoever. The inaugural event of this mutation was undoubtedly the Great Crash of 1929; the stockmarket crisis of 1987 was merely an aftershock.”

Capital2008 Financial CrisisTotal SimulationTranspolitics
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
Create image

“We saw this contradiction in action in Marx's analysis of struggles over the length of the working day. Individual capitalists, we there discovered, each of them acting in his or her own self-interest and locked in competitive struggle with each other, can produce an aggregative result which goes against their class interest seen as a whole. By their individual action they can endanger the basis for accumulation. And since accumulation is the means whereby the capitalist class reproduces itself, they can endanger the basis for their own reproduction. They are then forced to constitute themselves as a class — usually through the agency of the state — and to put limits upon their own competition. But in so doing they are forced to intervene in the exchange process — in this instance in the labour market -- and thereby to offend the rules of individuality and freedom in exchange.”

CapitalismCapitalContradictionsExchange
Book:The Limits to Capital
Create image

“... The Banks, as we now all too well know, must be rescued no matter what. 'The value of commodities is thus sacrificed in order to ensure the fantastic and autonomous existence of this value in money. In any event, a money value is only guaranteed as long as money itself is guaranteed.' Inflation, as we also know, must be kept under control at all costs. 'This is why many millions' worth of commodities have to be sacrificed for a few millions in money. This is unavoidable in capitalist production and forms one of its particular charms.' Use values are sacrificed and destroyed no matter what is the social need. How insane is that?”

EconomicsInflationCapitalMarxPage 208
Book:Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason
Create image

“Capital recapturing the system of the psychotherapy industry ensures that the main goal of client improvement for client improvement sake is replaced by goals that are more marketable, such as fewer bad feelings or a better-behaved child for your parental dollar investment. Progress that isn’t immediately understood by a lay person may be tossed aside as unimportant, but these complex concepts simply are not unimportant.”

CapitalismImprovementCapitalPsychoterapy
Book:Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy
Create image

“The reluctance of southern planters to grow food stemmed from more than simply greed and economic self-interest. A major concern involved what to do with their slaves, who would have more time on their hands if not out tending cotton. Planting corn exacted much time during the planting and cultivation stages, but came nowhere near matching the long cotton-picking season, which typically lasted four and often five full months. As one Georgia newspaper put it, 'No grain crop in this climate needs cultivation more than four months of the year, the remainder of the working season is unemployed. Can the farmer afford to keep his negroes, horses, and other capital idle and 'eating their heads off' for the balance of the season?”

HistoryEconomicsSlaveryGreedCottonCapitalDixieConfederate States Of AmericaPlantation
Book:Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History
Create image

“[T]hat we collectively value the 'growth' of capital as the final purpose of our economy is not reducible to the reigning ideology of neoliberal capitalism. Rather, the purpose of our economy is beyond democratic deliberation under any form of capitalism, since the defining purpose of capital accumulation is built into how we produce our social wealth in the first place.”

DemocracyCapitalismCapitalNeoliberalismWealth Accumulation
Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Create image

“What we need is a new kind of environmentalism, defined not by saying no but by saying yes. I call this new era the “era of convergence”—defined by the coming together of two of the most powerful forces in the country today: the environmental movement and the free enterprise system. Only by embracing the tools of the marketplace will we be able to mobilize the capital we need to protect the huge landscapes that are at risk.”

EnvironmentEnterpriseCapitalEssayEnvironmental Conservation
Book:A Better Planet: Forty Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future
Create image

“La tendance générale et le résultat final de ce processus sont l'hégémonie universelle de la production capitaliste. Ce terme atteint, le schéma de Marx entre en vigueur : l'accumulation, c'est-à-dire l'expansion ultérieure du capital, devient impossible.”

CapitalProductivismeCritique Des Critiques
Book:The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume IV: Political Writings 2, On Revolution
Create image

“Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.”

CultureCapitalismCapitalDeleuzeD GGuattariReterritorialization
Book:Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Create image

“To say that "the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital", means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased.”

CapitalismCapitalistCapitalKarl MarxWage SlaveryWage LaborWage LabourFriedrich Engels
Book:Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit
Create image