Immanuel Wallerstein Quotes

Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.

American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.

This capitalist society has not lasted forever; it's only a few hundred years old.

The capitalist system was termed "capitalism" not by a friend of the system, but by an individual who considered it to be the worst of all historical systems, the greatest evil that had ever befallen mankind. That man was Karl Marx.

The very concept of universal formal education is a product (and a relatively late product) of the capitalist world-economy.

The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism - the system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise.

Capitalism is first and foremost a historical social system.

Marxists have more than once pointed out that the capitalist world economic system contains in itself the seeds of a general crisis and of warlike clashes.

If we just stop producing stuff, if we stop being so capitalist, we stop taking resources from other third world countries, we'll be happy.

We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.

Today and over the foreseeable future,traditional capitalism throughout most of the world has been thrown on a defensive from which it is doubtful that it can never recover.

The world’s biggest problem is the unequal distribution of capitalism. If there were capitalism everywhere, you wouldn’t have food shortages.

Free enterprise is the best economic system in the history of the world, because it is the only system where you can make poor people richer and you don't have to make rich people poor.

Capitalism gave the world what it needed, a higher standard of living for a steadily increasing number of people.

Capitalism has created a situation called scarcity. And that scarcity is not natural, it's socially induced. Along with that sense of scarcity, or feeling of scarcity, is a feeling of economic insecurity. Along with that is a feeling of deprivation... And unless we can demonstrate that that feeling is not justified technologically, we will not be able to speak intelligently to the great majority of people and reorganize our economy so that we really know what needs are rational and human and what have been created, almost fetishisticaly, by the capitalist economy.

Capitalism, in contrast, has existed for fewer than 300 years. If the entire history of Homo sapiens was a 24-hour day, then capitalism has existed for two minutes.

What distinguishes the historical social system we are calling historical capitalism is that in this historical system capital came to be used (invested) in a very special way. It came to be used with the primary objective or intent of self-expansion. In this system, past accumulations were 'capital' only to the extend they were used to accumulate more of the same.

This is the free enterprise system. The only place in the world that I can recall where companies never failed was the old Soviet Union. This is what investors do in free enterprise and capitalism system. [...[ And, yes, free enterprise system can be cruel. But the problem with this administration is that small businesses are the one who had suffered the most, the kind that need investors, the kinds that don't need the hundreds of pages, thousands of pages of regulations that continue to plague them and have them hold back on the hiring investment.

That is why we may say that the historical development of capitalism has involved the thrust towards the commodification of everything.

If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die.

Any allegation of runaway capitalism has to be tempered by the observation that today we have the largest public sectors and the highest taxes the world has ever known.

The foundation of any and every civilization, including our own, is private ownership of the means of production. Whoever wishes to criticize modern civilization, therefore, begins with private property.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.

The uneven distribution of wealth in the world is due to the uneven distribution of capitalism.