#api

Such a crises occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments, and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully developed. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed from its merely ideal shape of money of account into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money. But now the cry is everywhere that money alone is a commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. ↗

— Karl Marx

#imagination

You can do what you like, sir, but I'll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall. ↗

— Edward Rutherfurd

#capitalism

What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are so monstrous, we keep on hoping that maybe the corporate government administration and media are on the level with us this time. Americans remind me of survivors of domestic abuse. This is always the hope that this is the very, very, very last time one's ribs get re-broken again. ↗

— Inga Muscio

#lies #politics #power #wisdom #independence

This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products ↗

— Larry McCaffrey

#consumerism #identity #memory #postmodernism #capitalism

Capitalism means that a few people will do very well, and the rest will serve the few. ↗

— Michael Moore

#capitalism

It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. ↗

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

#capitalism

The bank - the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#capitalism #ownership #capitalism

When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty. ↗

— Naomi Klein

#capitalism

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content. ↗

— Alan Wilson Watts

#material #pleasure #stuff #capitalism

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#capitalism #dishonest #hierarchy #honest #labor