Raoul Vaneigem Quotes

The revolution eats its own. Capitalism re-creates itself.

The hour of capitalism’s greatest triumph is its greatest danger.

Freedom" is a grand word, but under the banner of Free Trade the most predatory wars were conducted; under the banner of "free labor" the toilers were robbed.

There is no need to subject people in capitalism to additional suffering; the point is to get them to recognize that the suffering they are already undergoing is caused by capitalism.

Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

Capitalism offers you freedom, but far from giving people freedom, it enslaves them.

You can very easily be turned into a commodity. I've grown up with it.

With the coming of peace, the workers are no longer needed as soldiers; they are no longer comrades, defenders of the fatherland, heroes. Once more they become beasts of burden, objects of exploitation.

There is no mutuality of interests ... between capital and labor. It is the iron heel of a soulless monopoly, crushing the manhood out of sovereign citizens.

We cannot remove the evils of capitalism without taking its source of power: ownership.

“I make you free,” so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, “free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.

The profit-grinding system is maintained by competition, or veiled war, not only between the conflicting classes, but also within the classes themselves: there is always war among the workers for bare subsistence, and among their masters, the employers and middle-men, for the share of the profit wrung out of the workers; lastly, there is competition always, and sometimes open war, among the nations of the civilised world for their share of the world-market.

In the society of to-day the means of production are a monopoly of the capitalistic class; the dependence of the working classes which results from this is the cause of misery and of servitude in all its forms.

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine -- the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit.

Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it

... the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

The “natural laws of economics” are in fact tools in the hands of the avaricious and the greedy for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes.

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.

We're always serving something, even if we're not aware of it. We're usually serving capitalism.

My perspective of capitalism growing up in Berkeley, Calif. in a low-income project, growing up poor, is that capitalism wanted to destroy me, they wanted me to become a worker.

This America has been the country of greed rather than the country of need.

It's not difficult in South Africa for the ordinary person to see the link between capitalism and racist exploitation, and when one sees the link one immediately thinks in terms of a socialist alternative.

The unproductive tillage of human cattle takes that which of right belongs to free labor, and which is necessary for the support and happiness of our own race.

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