John Bates Clark Quotes

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

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.

You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker.

Property is theft.

In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

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.

Neither Capitalism nor Socialism can pretend to be an ideology. They are merely methods for dividing ownership and income.

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

Labor is, on the one hand, more and more furnished by a class; Property or Capital, on the other, held and controlled by another class. Here you have workers without property—the proletariat. There you have property without work—or capital…. The workers without property are excluded from their products, from the riches they create—which accumulate in the hands of the property holders, capitalists and large land-owners.

Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak.

We are unalterably opposed to any class government, whether it be the existing dictatorship of the plutocracy or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Both are essentially undemocratic and un-American. Both are destructive of private initiative liberty.

A basic contradiction between socialism and the market economy does not exist.

A true socialist never hates people. He knows, that they are products of the great economical laws, which in the present society divides man into two nations of poor and rich… We socialists never hate specific individuals. But we hate the system - capitalism, militarism, reaction – and that system we scorn with a healthy, burning, eternal hatred.

When capitalism changes, so must socialism.

I was certain that I was not a Marxist, but I did believe firmly that a connection between economics and politics existed

Clearly the tenets of capitalism are deeply and fundamentally misunderstood… At the same time that young people are rejecting capitalism and free markets, they celebrate entrepreneurs and free enterprise. This disconnect is at best confusing; at worst it’s troubling.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

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

Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society.

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 business manager was doing fine back in his office while they were out on the line, hungry. And, so they started to see a lot of that and there was, that maybe the leadership had its own cause. More so than the miners, you know, it was like a power struggle.

Because capitalist society has expanded the productive forces so enormously, the social conditions under which it arose lag behind and become fetters holding back the further growth of productive forces.