Capitalism and Its Critics Quotes

“In 1864, George Perkins Marsh, a diplomat and philologist, published Man and Nature, a landmark work in which he cataloged how human activity had transformed parts of the natural environment, often with disastrous results. “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste,” Marsh wrote.4 Among other things, he claimed that forest clearing and soil degradation had contributed to the decline of ancient Mediterranean civilizations.”
― John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics: From the East India Company to AI

“In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman described the concentration of government power as “the great threat to freedom,”2 but his libertarian animus toward federal spending and regulation went far beyond concerns about totalitarianism. He questioned the government’s role in highway building, public education, social security, public housing, banking regulation, and even national parks, such as Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.”
― John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics: From the East India Company to AI

“But Robinson insisted there was another issue to be considered, an even deeper one: “Whether capitalism, even when prosperous, can provide us with what we really want.”61 To live a fulfilling life, she pointed out, people needed decent housing, reliable healthcare, and a good education, but “growing wealth always leaves us with a greater deficiency in just those things.” This was no accident, she insisted: it came down to economics and profits. “Capitalist industry is dazzlingly efficient at producing goods to be sold in the shops, and, directly or indirectly, profits are derived from selling,” she wrote in her New Left Review piece. “The services to meet basic human needs do not lend themselves to mass production: they are not an easy field for making profits, especially as, with our egalitarian democratic notions, they have to be offered irrespective of means to pay. Consequently, they must be largely provided through taxation.” Given the opposition of businesses and wealthy people to paying higher taxes, this created a serious problem. “To supply goods is a source of profit, but to supply services is a ‘burden upon industry.’ It is for this reason that when, as a nation, ‘we have never had it so good,’ we find that we ‘cannot afford’ just what we most need.”62”
― John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics: From the East India Company to AI

“Money, social prestige, the bureaucracy, and the armed forces of the state, the channels of public communication—all these are controlled by capital, and they are being and will continue to be used to the utmost to maintain the position of capital.”22 Given this stranglehold, there was little prospect of lasting changes in policy. Should any serious threat emerge, the capitalists would buy off reformist leaders, and media propaganda would keep the masses in check. “The outcome is not the reform of capitalism, but the bankruptcy of reform,” Sweezy concluded. “This is neither an accident nor a sign of the immorality of human nature; it is a law of capitalist politics.”23”
― John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics: From the East India Company to AI

“He said that these efforts: distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital.60”
― John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics: From the East India Company to AI

“an extra hundred pounds is worth a lot more to a poor person than to a rich one because the poor person’s need is far greater. This idea, which economists today refer to as the diminishing marginal utility of income,”
― John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics: From the East India Company to AI

“Thompson highlighting what he viewed as the central paradox presented by British industrialization: rapid technological progress and unprecedented levels of production accompanied by widespread poverty and destitution. “How comes it,” he asked, “that a nation abounding more than any other in the rude materials of wealth, in machinery, dwellings, and food, in intelligent and industrious producers, with all the apparent means of happiness … should still pine in privation?”16 The answer, Thompson went on, was to be found in the basic structure of the new economy: the rigid dividing line between propertyless “producers” of wealth—i.e., the workers—and the property-owning elite of “capitalists,” who owned the factories and machinery used in the production process.”
― John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics: From the East India Company to AI

“Smith acknowledged the immense profits that the Caribbean plantations generated, but he didn’t dwell on the fact that they were produced by slave labor. Indeed, he suggested that they could have made even more money if they had relied on wage labor, writing: “The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any”—meaning the most expensive on a productivity-adjusted basis. Since wage workers could earn money and acquire property, they had an incentive to work hard and produce more, Smith argued. The enslaved worker had no rights, received no wages, and had no”
― John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics: From the East India Company to AI

“In creating what was effectively a corporate state Clive and his colleagues transitioned from traditional merchant capitalism to full-scale corporate plunder.”
― John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics: From the East India Company to AI

“division would eventually generate so much inequality, and such huge social chasms, that the workers would rise up and overthrow the system. So far, history has falsified this prediction, partly because of something that few foresaw in the nineteenth century: the rise of big government. The modern state’s role as a constraining and a supportive force for industrial capitalism is another central theme in this narrative,”
― John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics: From the East India Company to AI

“Nikolai Kondratiev, a Russian economist who theorized that capitalism evolved in “long waves” of roughly fifty years’ duration, is treated at length.”
― John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics: From the East India Company to AI