Critique Of Capitalism Quotes

There are persons who constantly clamor. They complain of oppression, speculation, and pernicious influence of wealth. They cry out loudly against all banks and corporations, and a means by which small capitalists become united in order to produce important and beneficial results. They carry on mad hostility against all established institutions. They would choke the fountain of industry and dry all streams.

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.

The notion that free enterprise exists has got to be acknowledged as being a myth. If I had a choice between believing in free enterprise and Santa Claus, I'd tell you I believe in Santa Claus.

Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think that money was so valuable?

… as a rule capitalists and entrepreneurs are not saints excelling in the virtue of self-denial. But neither are their critics saintly.

Capitalism will destroy itself by breeding a new class: bureaucrats, intellectuals, professors, lawyers, journalists, all of them beneficiaries and, in fact, parasitical on them and yet, all of them opposed to the ethos of wealth production, of saving and of allocating resources to economic productivity.

Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.

I have said it already, I am convinced that the way to build a new and better world is not capitalism. Capitalism leads us straight to hell.

The point is always made that capitalism is efficient, people say 'You might not like it, but it works.' But Britain is not efficient.

I don't put much faith in the political system because it's a question of how are you going to run capitalism, not how are we going to develop a different system to capitalism.

In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people's needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

These guys who talk about free markets, they're not ideologues; they're crooks.

Voltaire remarked that it is possible to kill a flock of sheep by witchcraft if you give them plenty of arsenic at the same time. The sheep, in this figure, may well stand for the complacent apologists of capitalism; Marx's penetrating insight and bitter hatred of oppression supply the arsenic, while the labour theory of value provides the incantations.

Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.

One man in one mood will attack Industrial Capitalism for its destruction of beauty; another for its incompetence; another for the vileness of the men who chiefly prosper under it; another for its mere confusion and noise; another for its false values; it was until recently most fiercely attacked for its impoverishment of the workers, its margin of unemployment and the rest - indeed so fiercely that it was compelled to seek palliatives for the evil. With a mass of men it was attacked from a vague but strong sense of injustice; it allowed a few rich to exploit mankind.

I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems it falls victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.

Capitalism may have all sorts of things that are good, but ultimately, it's bad for everyone.

“Capital” is a sort of cabalistic word, like “Church” or “State,” or any other of those general terms which are invented by those who fleece the rest of mankind to conceal the hand that shears them.

Those who condemn the immorality of liberal capitalism do so in comparison with a society of saints that has never existed—and never will