Capitalism Quotes

Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver.

By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit become the most effective means of driving captialist production beyond its own limits and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment.

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.

As the variable capital always stays in the hands of the capitalist in some form or other, it cannot be claimed in any way that it converts itself into revenue for anyone.

It appears then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.

The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

A circuit performed by a capital and meant to be a periodical process, not an individual act, is called its turnover. The duration of this turnover is determined by the sum of its time of production and its time of circulation.

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.

When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendancy, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder.

The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object.

The capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self - earned private property: in other words, the expropriation of the labourer.

In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.