#capitalism

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

Knowledge about the economy, ideas about capitalism and government, the future of the world and geopolitics were things I was never really interested in. ↗

— Shia LaBeouf

#capitalism #economy #future #government #i

Capitalism works. ↗

— Michael Bloomberg

#works

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell. ↗

— Frank Borman

#capitalism #christianity #hell #like #without

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners. ↗

— Eric J. Hobsbawm

#capitalism #economics #education #london #morality

The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system. ↗

— Milton Friedman

#capitalism #greed #harm #how #kind

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