Anti Capitalism Quotes

“It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“We don’t think you fight fire with fire best ; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.”
― Fred Hampton

“It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Comradeship, dignity, amorosity, love, solidarity, fraternity, friendship, ethics: all these names stand in contrast to the commodified, monetised relations of capitalism, all describe relations developed in struggles against capitalism and which can be seen as anticipating or creating a society beyond capitalism.”
― John Holloway, Crack Capitalism

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows”
― Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs

“The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness.”
― Immanuel Wallerstein

“The struggle is lost from the beginning, long before the victorious party or army conquers state power and ‘betrays’ its promises. It is lost once power itself seeps into the struggle, once the logic of power becomes the logic of the revolutionary process, once the negative of refusal is converted into the positive of power-building.”
― John Holloway

“إن هذا التركيز الهائل للسلطة والثروة يرتبط ارتباطاً مباشراً برأسمالية الانتاج الضخم في أمريكا. إن الصفقات التي تقدر بمليارات الدولارات تمنح عن طريق البنتاجون وتنفذها وتكسب منها الصناعات الكبرى”
― Bertrand Russell, جرائم الحرب في فيتنام

“We are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absord their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

“In a world where we didn't have to commit most of our energy to making enough money to keep a roof over our heads, we might actually have time to engage in self-reflection, community care and collective healing that will truly sustain us.”
― Cradle Community, Brick By Brick: How We Build a World Without Prisons

“Capitalism is disgusted by those whose happiness is not a result of buying … or selling.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“In every society are men of base instincts. The sadists, brutes, conveyors of all the ancestral atavisms go about in the guise of human beings, but they are monsters, only more or less restrained by discipline and social habit. If they are offered a drink from a river of blood, they will not be satisfied until they drink the river dry.”
― Fidel Castro, The Declarations of Havana

“Father’s Day was invented mainly to further milk a father, through the buying of gifts for him by his children and their mother … with his money.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Our standard of living is not declining because of migrants but because of unregulated neoliberal capitalism, which has allowed corporations and the rich to avoid paying taxes or decent wages. It is a system that must be changed.”
― Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing

“There was a deep solace to be found within each other, we discovered. Within shared suffering, collective pain, and mutual hope. A kind of solidarity no one besides us could ever understand.
We were not dead yet.
We were alive!
Another hour, another day, another year, another eternity.
Not dead yet, just not yet.”
― Antonio Melonio, The Factory: A Marxist Tale of Revolution

“We don't want to be passive squares, boring phonies, or conformists seduced by comfort trapped in a repetitive, endless ritual of consuming, who keep buying shit that's thrown at us as a bone, who forget how to ask honest and important questions, who are just trying to make it through the day.”
― Nadya Tolokonnikova, Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism

“No one can be certain whether our civilization will be able to cope with the ecological, demographic, and spiritual dangers it has caused or whether it will fall victim to catastrophe. So we cannot tell whether the present 'anti-capitalist', 'anti-globalist', and related obscurantist movements and ideas will quietly fade away and one day come to seem as pathetic as the legendary Luddites at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or whether they will maintain their strength and fortify their trenches.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“For urban and rural workers, and for the poor more generally in Spain, the state still had overwhelmingly negative connotations: military conscription, indirect taxation, and everyday persecution — particularly for the unionized. Thus for many Spanish workers, resistance to the military rebels was initially also directed ‘against the state’ and was bound up with the building of a new social and political order, often on radical anti-capitalist economic lines (money was frequently abolished).”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“Rzecz w tym, że rozwój kapitalizmu i rewolucja przemysłowa w Europie nie wzięły się znikąd. Stały się one możliwe dzięki towarom produkowanym przez niewolników na terenach zagrabionych skolonizowanym ludom oraz przetwarzanym w fabrykach obsadzonych europejskimi chłopami, których siłą pozbawiono dostępu do ziemi przez grodzenia. Zwykle rozpatrujemy każdy z tych procesów osobno, tymczasem wszystkie one były elementami tego samego projektu i opierały się na tej samej logice. Grodzenia stanowiły proces kolonizacji wewnętrznej, kolonizacja zaś była w istocie procesem ogradzania. Europejscy chłopi zostali wyzuci z ziemi tak samo jak rdzenni Amerykanie (choć trzeba przyznać, że tych ostatnich spotykał o wiele gorszy los — nie przyznawano im żadnych praw, a nieraz nawet negowano ich człowieczeństwo). Handel niewolnikami zaś to nic innego jak grodzenie i kolonizacja ludzkich ciał, zawłaszczanych tak jak ziemia w celu akumulacji nadwyżki i tak jak ziemia traktowanych jako czyjaś własność.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“Some products are superior to some products, but are unnecessary to some people.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“He who has more money or possessions than you is not necessarily happier than you, happy more often than you, or happy like you.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Capitalism owes a third of its success to conspicuous consumption, and another third to the consumption of caffeine.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I watched as they all lifted their hammers again and again, thousands upon thousands, a wave of iron. I gazed at the Tower as we let out a cry for freedom that shook the Factory and could be heard all the way to its golden crown. Soon, this crown would melt.”
― Antonio Melonio, The Factory: A Marxist Tale of Revolution

“There would be no prosperity for all; there could not be as long as the Tower stood and these false gods ruled.

It was nothing but an instrument of control, the Tower, I saw. Built to sustain the status quo forever. These gods writhing in wealth and comfort, walking their grand lonely halls, while we would keep building their monuments of vain, under the false hope that we’d someday reach the heavens. And if not in this world, then in the afterlife.

Lies! All of it!”
― Antonio Melonio, The Factory: A Marxist Tale of Revolution

“Why do they all loathe capitalism? Why do they, while en-joying the well-being capitalism bestows upon them, cast long-ing glances upon the “good old days” of the past and the miser-able conditions of the present-day Russian worker?”
― Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-capitalistic Mentality

“Perseus wore a magic cap so that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over our own eyes and ears so as to deny that there are any monsters.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3

“Healing the planet is ultimately about creating infrastructures of caretaking that will replace infrastructures of capitalism. Capitalism is contrary to life. Caretaking promotes life.”
― The Red Nation, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth

“There are times when you'd give a whole month away for fifty kopecks, and others when you wouldn't give up half an hour for any price.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“In a capitalist society a carefree life for the working people is inconceivable. In this society even those who are fairly well-to-do are always fearful of sudden bankruptcy, job-loss and poverty. Living a prosperous life in idleness without any thought for others cannot be regarded as a genuine human life.”
― Kim Jong Il, Abuses of Socialism are Intolerable