#capital

In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold. ↗

— Kim Stanley Robinson

#employment #slavery #education

We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged. ↗

— Joe Abercrombie

#forgiveness

[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. ↗

— David Graeber

#economics #libertarianism #markets #politics #freedom

No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been. still they must have understood that living like that was just murder, a capital crime - except it was slow, day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) could not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man - that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives - that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years - that was not a crime! No, really, isn't it funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn't solve it. All their Kant's together couldn't solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kant's to construct a system of scientific ethics - that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication). ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#death #philosophy #death

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence. ↗

— Eugene Victor Debs

#capitalism #feudalism #inequality #justice #labor

The hand that gives is among the hand that takes. Money has no fatherland, financiers are without patriotism and without decency, their sole object is gain. ↗

— Napoleon Bonaparte

#gain #internationalism #money #patriotism #money

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes. ↗

— Adam Johnson

#capitalism #communism #economics #north-korea #obedience

When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use. ↗

— Joseph Stalin

#hang #rope #sell #us #use

We can't fool ourselves that they will ever be enough to overthrow Capitalism. If we're serious about that we need to organise ourselves in our workplaces and communities, making the links with other workers internationally. ↗

— John Blair

#capitalism #communities #enough #ever #fool

You look at the steamboat, the railroad, the car, the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world, but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture, the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans. ↗

— Walter Russell Mead

#architecture #capital #car #developed #extended