socio-economic structure Quotes

Capitalism rules worldwide, and a society whose economic fabric depends on constant growth requires that its citizens have ever-expanding needs and wants... In the West, it will take one with soul force equal to Gandhi's to change the prevailing dogma of ever increasing GNP. We may be forced to change our profligate ways some day, when the soil is depleted, the aquifers drained, the icecaps melted, and all the oil wells pumped dry. But the crisis will wait another fifty years or so; we'll leave those problems to a generation yet unborn.

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

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

The society was so different [in China] - it was a feudalistic society. It didn't come to a point of industrial revolution until twenty years ago.

Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing. Attempts to 'green' capitalism, to make it 'ecological', are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.

Capitalism is like math. It is amoral. It is good at producing wealth; it's bad at distributing wealth. Unless it operates within a moral framework it will produce an unjust society.

Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.

We cannot say that everything developed in capitalist countries is of a capitalist nature. For instance, technology, science - even advanced production management is also a sort of science - will be useful in any society or country.

It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social committments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical.

I'm by no means convinced that capitalism and the development of technology has made anarchism easier.