Best capitalism & workers Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“To believe that the intolerable crime is to burn a few cars and rob some shops, whereas to kill a young man is trivial, is typically in keeping with what Marx regarded as the principal alienation of capitalism: the primacy of things over existence, of commodities over life and machines over workers”

Men Believe Young Existence Car Crime Capitalism Machines Workers Young Man Shops Principal Commodity Alienation Primacy

Book:The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings

Source: The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings

“The fundamental law of capitalism is: when workers have more money, businesses have more customers, and need more workers. The idea that high wages equals low employment, it's absurd.”

Needs Ideas Law Lows Capitalism Fundamentals Workers Customers Absurd Employment More Money Wages

Author:Nick Hanauer

“Certainly the worker has nothing to lose by a change from government and capitalism to a condition of no government, of anarchy.”

Government Loses Conditions Capitalism Workers Anarchy Anarchism Nothing To Lose

Book:What is Communist Anarchism?

Source: What is Communist Anarchism?

“The workers of America have power enough to topple the structure of capitalism at home and to lift the whole world with them when they rise.”

World Enough Whole Home America Capitalism Structure Workers Whole World Lifts

Author:James P. Cannon

“Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.”

Capitalism Workers Factories Living Wage Factory Workers Working For A Living

Book:In Defense of Politics

Source: In Defense of Politics

“When the press writes scare stories about the global labor supply draining jobs from rich to poor places, the story is usually presented as a "race to the bottom" simply in terms of wages. Capitalism supposedly looks for labor wherever labor is cheapest. This story is half wrong. A kind of cultural selection is also at work, so that jobs leave high-wage countries like the United States and Germany, but migrate to low-wage economies with skilled, sometimes overqualified workers.”

Source: The Culture of the New Capitalism

“One man in one mood will attack Industrial Capitalism for its destruction of beauty; another for its incompetence; another for the vileness of the men who chiefly prosper under it; another for its mere confusion and noise; another for its false values; it was until recently most fiercely attacked for its impoverishment of the workers, its margin of unemployment and the rest - indeed so fiercely that it was compelled to seek palliatives for the evil. With a mass of men it was attacked from a vague but strong sense of injustice; it allowed a few rich to exploit mankind.”

“The people's community must not be a mere phrase, but a revolutionary achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of the working class. A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all economic-capitalist influences on national policy...Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must.”

“I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.”

Men Want Process Money Produce Inspirational Life Politician Capitalism Workers Pity Presidential Coats Starving Us President Economic Inequality Presidents Day Fair Trade Cheapness

Author:Benjamin Harrison

“Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table.”

Giving May Money Produce Protect Capitalism Tables Workers Golden Eggs Geese Living Wage Golden Eggs

Author:John B. S. Haldane

“The capitalist workplace is one of the most profoundly undemocratic institutions on the face of the Earth. Workers have no say over decisions affecting them. If workers sat on the board of directors of democratically operated self-managed enterprises, they wouldn't vote for the wildly unequal distribution of profits to benefit a few and for cutbacks for the many.”

“Marx's theory that only capitalists benefit from capitalism and workers are exploited was completely wrong. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Workers earned more as economies grew.”

Has Beens Economy Theory Grew Benefits Capitalism Workers Capitalist Could Have Been

Author:Kenneth Rogoff

“The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives delocalised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation.”

Giving Self Today Party Existence Rights Depends Capitalism Organization Workers Chinese Enterprise Labour Communist Capitalist Domination Communist Party

Author:Jacques Ranciere

“Most of Marx's predictions have failed to materialize, and his labor theory of value and other ideas have been proven wrong. Marx failed to recognize the incentive system built into the capitalist model - consumer choice and the profit motive of the entrepreneur. The irony is that capitalism, not socialism or Marxism, that has liberated the worker from the chains of poverty, monopoly, war, and oppression, and has better achieved Marx's vision of a millennium of hope, peace, abundance, leisure, and aesthetic expression for the 'full' human being.”

“Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and better-paying employments as the decades went by. They produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and more as they lower classes bettered their economic well-being.”

“Communism then defines a society in which there are communal forms for dealing with resources. Many communal forms exist where there are not communist governments. The Mondragon cooperatives in Spain and the thousands of worker-owned cooperatives in the United States, are viable alternatives to capitalism.”

States Government Form United United States Capitalism Resources Workers Communism Alternatives Communist Spain Cooperatives

Author:Cynthia Kauffman

“I still believe that workers must be the basic force which must organize and eventually transform society (along with peasants in poor countries). This is because they are the source of the profits which make capitalism what it is. They can shut the system down, and at the same time they possess the unique knowledge needed to make it work in everyone's interests.”

Believe Stills Country Force Interest Poor Source Needed Unique Capitalism Down And Workers Profit Organize Peasants I Still Believe Poor Countries

Author:Michael Yates

“Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador lived through times of cruel and ruthless capitalism where the workers, the masses of the population, saw themselves living in a precarious state of employment and subsistence conditions. The impact of this reality took hold and impacted the evolution of the social situation of those countries and even though that produced movements that were not exactly political movements but social movements.”

“It is only in revolutionary struggle against the capitalists of every country, and only in union with the working women and men of the whole world, that we will achieve a new and brighter future-the socialist brotherhood of the workers.”

“The payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.”

Values Products Capitalism Workers Determined Payment

Book:The Albert Einstein Collection: Essays in Humanism, The Theory of Relativity, and The World As I See It

Source: The Albert Einstein Collection: Essays in Humanism, The Theory of Relativity, and The World As I See It

“The early industrialists were for the most part men who had their origin in the same social strata from which their workers came. They lived very modestly, spent only a fraction of their earnings for their households and put the rest back into the business.”

Men Social Capitalism Workers Household Earning Fractions

Author:Ludwig von Mises

“In the capitalist society there is a place and bread for all. Its ability to expand provides sustenance for every worker. Permanent unemployment is not a feature of free capitalism.”

Ability Capitalism Workers Bread Permanent Features Capitalist Unemployment Sustenance

Book:Socialism - An Economic and Sociological Analysis: The Economist

Source: Socialism - An Economic and Sociological Analysis: The Economist

“I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers”

Want Nations Capitalism Historical Workers Thinker

Book:John D. Rockefeller on Making Money: Advice and Words of Wisdom on Building and Sharing Wealth

Source: John D. Rockefeller on Making Money: Advice and Words of Wisdom on Building and Sharing Wealth

“When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose. There's no evidence that more people with more skills would produce more jobs. There's a great deal of evidence that they produce more competition for the jobs that exist, and in turn, drive down the cost of labour. Nothing pleases a corporation more than having five people compete for the same job. Competitiveness means good times for machines, not workers, because our tax systems privilege machines over workers.A lost job can put a smile on any shareholder's face.”

“Market forces have no intrinsically moral direction, which is why, before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ethics should precede economics. But it doesn't have to. . . . We know this because we've seen the results of capitalism without conscience: the pollution of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat; the endangerment of workers; and the sale of dangerous products - from cars to toys to drugs. All in pursuit of ever-greater profits.”

“Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited--or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society.”

Source: Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta

“It (the Chinese move to embrace capitalism in 1989) is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.”

“Hitler did not have Mussolini's revolutionary socialist background... Nevertheless, he shared the socialist hatred and contempt for the 'bourgeoisie' and 'capitalism' and exploited for his purposes the powerful socialist traditions of Germany. The adjectives 'socialist' and 'worker' in the official name of Hitler's party ('The Nationalist-Socialist German Workers' Party') had not merely propagandistic value... On one occasion, in the midst of World War II, Hitler even declared that 'basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.'”

“For reforms ameliorate the situation of the working class, they lighten the weight of the chains labour is burdened with by capitalism, but they are not sufficient to crush capitalism and to emancipate the workers from their tyranny.”

Situation Class Capitalism Weight Workers Tyranny Chains Reform Sufficient Crush Labour Working Class

Author:Clara Zetkin

“If you mean by capitalism the God-given right of a few big corporations to make all the decisions that will affect millions of workers and consumers and to exclude everyone else from discussing and examining those decisions, then the unions are threatening capitalism.”

Ifs Mean Bigs Given Decision Millions Capitalism Unions Workers Consumers Corporations Threatening Discussing Examining Big Corporations

Author:Max Lerner

“The cement in our whole democracy today is the worker who makes $ 15 an hour. He's the guy who will buy a house and a car and a refrigerator. He's the oil in the engine.”

Whole Today Guy House Hours Democracy Car Capitalism Workers Oil Engines Refrigerators Cement

Book:Iacocca: An Autobiography

Source: Iacocca: An Autobiography

“There is but one means available to improve the material conditions of mankind: to accelerate the growth of capital accumulated as against the growth in population. The greater the amount of capital invested per head of the worker, the more and better goods can be produced and consumed. This is what capitalism, the much abused profit system, has brought about and brings about daily anew. Yet, most present-day governments and political parties are eager to destroy this system.”

“He was thinking that the cities, perhaps, needed to look into the future even more than the country did. They should look ahead for forty, eighty, one hundred and sixty years, to a strong and healthy plain of population - or to an overworked, weakened, underfed, and infertile desert.”

Philosophy Capitalism Economics Workers Working Class America

Book:Heed the Thunder

Source: Heed the Thunder

“There's also an advisory board that's very into"--I made air quotes--"'optimal productivity.' Some theory about how productivity increases when workers don't know what their work is going to be each day. Switching from one task to another helps employees adapt and become more nimble? Something like that." "Well, that's completely psychotic," Sailor said, but in an unsurprised way. "Wonder how many members of this illustrious advisory board own sweatshop empires, am I right?”

Work Capitalism Tasks Workers Productivity Boards Working Sweatshops Task Switching

Book:The Island of Last Things

Source: The Island of Last Things

“Capitalism, as Marx observed—with surprising admiration for its dynamism—never promised stability, and it’s been a generation since blue-chip companies like IBM offered their white-collar workers a job for life. As the best-seller Who Moved My Cheese advises, dislocated professionals must learn to adapt to new flavors of cheese as the old ones are taken away. But when skilled and experienced people routinely find their skills unwanted and their experience discounted, then something has happened that cuts deep into the very social contract that holds us together.”

Jobs Work Capitalism Workers Betrayal Stability Working Companies Karl Marx Professionals

Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

Source: Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“So these two classes, rising professionals and sinking workers, which a couple of generations ago were close in income and not so far apart in mores, no longer believe they belong to the same country. But they can’t escape each other, and their coexistence breeds condescension, resentment, and shame.”

America Work Capitalism Workers Income Classes Professionals

Author:George Packer

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Capitalism Quotes