Henry Charles Carey Quotes

It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.

Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

Under capitalism we have a state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another.

The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power, the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority.

The contest will be between the capitalists and operatives; for into these two classes it must ultimately divide society.

There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital.

The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.

So long as millions of human beings in every country has to sell their labour-power to a small minority of owners, and to sink into the most wretched misery if they could find no buyers, the so called “equality before the law” remains a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can also be no talk of a “right over one's own person,” for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if he does not want to starve.

Exploitation is not exclusively capitalist, but wealth creation is.

Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.

The industrial society... recognises nothing except the power to acquire... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.

Right now people seem to be very tentative about the positive benefits of capitalism.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

Every capitalist who suffers from the competition of still greater capitalists denounces those above him and cries out for help on behalf of the middle class

Nor can one class appropriate the produce of the labour of another class, as the capitalists now appropriate and enjoy the wealth which the powers of the working man daily call into existence. It is inequality of exchanges which enables one class to live in luxury and idleness, and dooms another to incessant toil

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth—not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced—to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.

If work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.

There are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery.

What did the workers and peasants gain when power passed from the kings and nobles to the bankers and manufacturers?

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.

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.

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of ever industrial country.

For the first time in the life of the great republic, there was a political organization which grappled directly and fundamentally with the growing injustice which marked the dealings between Exploiters and the Exploited

Those who control the wealth of this society have an influence over political life far in excess of their number.