quotes and passages on capitalism, an obstacle to living life fully

Capitalism is the astounding belief
that the most wickedest of people
will do the most wickedest of
things for the greatest
good of everyone.

John Maynard Keynes

Capitalism does not require us to hold a particular set of cognitive beliefs; it only requires that we act as if certain beliefs (about money, commodities etc) are true. The rituals are the beliefs, beliefs which, at the level of subjective self-description, may well be disavowed. Mark Fisher

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Capitalism knows only one color: the color of money; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it. Thomas Sowell

Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, to-- if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac. Michael Moore

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the
divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and
changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin
in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody.
You built a factory out there--good for you. But I want to be clear.
You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for.
You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in
your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of
us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would
come and seize everything at your factory. . . . Now look. You built a
factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea--God
bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract
is you take a hunk of that and pay forward
for the next kid who comes along.

Elizabeth Warren

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated
the growth of private power to a point where it becomes
stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its
essence is fascism: ownership of government by an
individual, by a group, or any controlling
private power.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism.
It is a crony type of system that transfers money to
the coffers of bureaucrats.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from
socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are
opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital,
but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.

Peter Thiel

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and
commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into
dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag
heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks
a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate,
demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs,
television, and armed force.

Michael Parenti
Against Empire

The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’ The capitalist–consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How though do we know that we'll really get paradise in return? We've seen it on television.

Yuval Noah Harari

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Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that
was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid
and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American
class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were
classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And
they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised
means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which
no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up,
turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited,
filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.

Kurt Vonnegut
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Prison relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging
with the problems of our society, especially those produced
by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

Angela Y. Davis
Are Prisons Obsolete?

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the
fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. . . .
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring
contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation,
it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the
West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and
South America, only to take the profits out with no concern
for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is
not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry
of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western
arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others
and nothing to learn from them is not just.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past
endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting
a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand
how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of
capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive
religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human
sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible
beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness,
and envy were assumed to move all men's acts,
even the terrible became banal.

Ursula K. LeGuin
The Dispossessed

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles
of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not
be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

Bertrand Russell

Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people
who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic
power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power
in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way.

David Korten

Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state.
The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's
only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of
government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to
all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will
make the people most healthy and happy in the bodies and their minds but
by economics. Dollars or rubles. Economy uber alles. Let nothing
interfere with economic growth, even though that growth is
castrating truth, poisoning beauty, turning a continent into
a shit-heap and riving an entire civilization insane.
Don't spill the Coca-Cola, boys, and keep
those monthly payments coming.

Tom Robbins
Another Roadside Attraction

Modern capitalism needs people who co-operate smoothly, and
in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and
whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and
anticipated. It needs people who feel free and independent, not
subject to any authority or principle or conscience—yet willing to
be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the
social machine without friction; who can be guided without force,
led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the one to make
good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead. What is the
outcome? Modern people are alienated from themselves,
from their fellow people, and from nature.

Erich Fromm
The Art of Loving

I am going to fight capitalism even if it kills me. It is wrong that
people like you should be comfortable and well fed while all
around you people are starving.

Sylvia Pankhurst

Capitalism and democracy are the opposite of each other.
Capitalism is a system that guarantees that a few are going
to do very well, and everybody else is going to serve the few.
Democracy means everybody has a seat at the table. Everybody.

Michael Moore

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

Fran Lebowitz

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not,
as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a
set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied. . . but written
off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has
produced the first culture for which a beggar
is a reminder of nothing.

John Berger
Keeping a Rendezvous

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism.
Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An
exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the
student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success
as a preparation for his future career.

Albert Einstein