Eric Hobsbawm Quotes

The rules of the global economy are rigged against those who have to work to earn a living and in favour of multinational corporations and the ultra-rich.

The ruling ideology prefers to talk about individual ethics rather than the capitalist system.

Reckless capitalism kills black people.

Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one's moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.

All down history, nine-tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining one-tenth, been paid with the husks, and bidden to thank God they had the husks.

Between the working class and the capitalist class, there is an irrepressible conflict, a class struggle for life. No glib-tongued politician can vault over it, no capitalist professor or official statistician can argue it away; no capitalist parson can veil it; no labor faker can straddle it; no “reform” architect can bridge it over. It crops up in all manner of ways

There is then a universal and forced tendency to reduce to the lowest the workers’ wages, and this law is sufficient to crush all the best intentions of employers, prisoners of the social order, by which, however, they benefit.

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

I think that capitalism in general is responsible, not for the worldwide recession, but for a lot of suffering, both in the United States and around the world.

The wealthy have installed their slaves in the highest spheres of the state. The banks are privately owned. They are concerned solely with profits. They have no interest in the common good.

I am going to fight capitalism even if it kills me. It is wrong that people like you should be comfortable and well fed while all around you people are starving.

Capitalism is in crisis.

In the past, we spoke of poverty, misery only in the south. Now there is a lot of misery, a lot of bad that creates victims in the north as well. This has become manifest: the global system was not made to serve the good of all, but to serve multinational companies.

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.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

I was anxious to save the great coal operators and all of the class of big propertied men, of which they were members, from the dreadful punishment which their own folly would have brought on them if I had not acted.

We have only dented the fortress and the wage slaves are still locked in their cells.

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

everyone who was able built a castle; so that the poor people were worn out with the toil of these buildings, and the whole kingdom was covered with castles.

The saddest part is that the public officials, both State and Federal, are in league with the capitalists in making the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

One must denounce the economic, financial, and social mechanisms and structures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the poor

Our present joyless labour, and our lives scared and anxious as the life of a hunted beast, are forced upon us by the present system of producing for the profit of the privileged classes.

I am not given to Political Economy, but I can use my eyes. I have never seen the masters (mill owners) getting thin and haggard for want of food

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.