#capital

The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative. ↗

— Guy Debord

#commodity-production #culture #modernity #the-last-man #nature

...capitalism satisfied the Christian demand for an institution that channels selfish human desire toward the betterment of society. Some critics accuse capitalism of being a selfish system, but the selfishness is not in capitalism - it is in human nature. ↗

— Dinesh D'Souza

#christianity #greed #nature

Barriers to accumulation are perpetually dissolving and re-forming around the issue of so-called natural scarcities and on occasion, as Marx might put it, these barriers can be transformed into absolute contradictions and crises. ↗

— David Harvey

#capitalism #enigma #harvey #marx #marxist

...Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce. ↗

— Tad Williams

#dystopia #future #religion

Modern society, the political body, the legal and judiciary system, the state of governance, capitalism and the very fabric of the society itself, including our religions and so-called morals and values, are institutions steeped in traditions of absolute and total violence. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#government #institution #morality #politics #religion

Occult Theft,--Theft which hides itself even from itself, and is legal, respectable, and cowardly,--corrupts the body and soul of man, to the last fibre of them. And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists ↗

— John Ruskin

#communism #economics #respect

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas. ↗

— Karl Marx

#class-struggle #marx #philosophy #political-science #science

The Master said, “A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.” (Analects 4.9) ↗

— Confucius

#china #consumerism #greed #materialism #simplicity

Wake up America! The insurance companies took over health care! Wake up America! The pharmaceutical companies took over drug pricing! Wake up America! The speculators took over Wall Street! Wake up America! They want your Social Security! Wake up America! Multinational corporations took over our trade policies! Wake up America! We went into Iraq for oil! WAKE UP AMERICA! ↗

— Dennis Kucinich

#critisism #incompetence #wake-up-call #iraq

The capitalist empires, with their affirmations of sacrifice for the free world, of defence of private enterprise, of safeguarding order from subversion and chaos, are in fact defending their political prestige and the economic interests arising from it; they are indeed at the service of economic power and the international trusts. The socialist empires for their part are hard and intransigent, they do not allow pluralism, they impose dialectical materialism, demand blind obedience to the party, set up a regime of total and permanent insecurity and fear, just like the fascist dictatorships of the extreme right. ↗

— Hélder Câmara

#communism #politics #communism