Capitalism Quotes

“In some regions, that decline in employment amounted to full-fledged deindustrialization. Even though the IMF announced in 1997 that “deindustrialization is not a negative phenomenon, but a natural consequence of further growth in advanced economies,” its social and distributional consequences caused upheaval, undermining the material basis of the golden age in the industrial heartland.80 In the twenty-three most advanced economies, manufacturing employment decreased from 28 percent of the workforce to 18 percent between 1970 and 1994. In the United States, 28 percent of jobs in 1965 had been in manufacturing; this dropped to just 11.8 percent in 2008. In Japan, manufacturing jobs declined from 27 percent in 1973 to 18.4 percent in 1994; in the European Union (including Norway), from 30 percent in 1970 to 18.3 percent in 2007. Of course, there was some variation: Among OECD member countries, the UK experienced the greatest absolute decline in manufacturing employment, while Germany’s fall was quite modest.81 Yet the trend everywhere was the same.”
― Sven Beckert, Capitalism: A Global History

“Still, in the wake of the Depression, many democratic regimes floundered. It has been estimated that at the height of this wave, up to half of the world’s people lived under authoritarian rule. Already in the early 1920s, Italy, along with Spain, Hungary, and Albania, had turned authoritarian, even fascist. By the mid-1920s, Portugal, Poland, and Lithuania had followed. And then came Yugoslavia in 1929; Romania in 1930; Germany in 1933; Austria, Latvia, Estonia, and Bulgaria in 1934; and Greece in 1936. All these regimes embraced authoritarian measures in response to the Depression, which made them, despite some policy similarities, radically different from their social democratic counterparts.204”
― Sven Beckert, Capitalism: A Global History

“The millions of indentured servants who newly peopled the world’s plantation belt started off in debt, too, as their (often long) journeys to their places of employment, as well as the provisions provided to them upon arrival, had to be paid for. These workers, as one observer proclaimed, were “born in debt, lived in debt and died in debt”—debt that could even pass on to the next generation.76 Employers everywhere used debt to bind workers to their jobs. In Ceylon, Ordinance No. 11 of 1865 made it a crime for workers to leave their employers without having first settled their debts. But doing so was often impossible, and employers kept it that way. Plantation stores charged inflated prices and high interest—with workers’ wages insufficient to cover these subsistence costs. Elsewhere, wages were only paid four or perhaps six times a year, forcing cultivators to secure their subsistence on credit. Moreover, since many workers were illiterate, it was easy for employers to cheat them out of their meager earnings. After serving their original indentures, they often remained snarled in debt and hemmed in by laws against vagabondage. In Burma, as elsewhere, these migrants became so deeply mired in debt that no matter how hard they worked, their low pay made it impossible to get free.77”
― Sven Beckert, Capitalism: A Global History

“as Adam Smith so bluntly observed”
― Sven Beckert, Capitalism: A Global History

“fascism never broke with a fundamentally capitalist organization of economic life. Capitalism’s basic building blocks—the commodification of inputs”
― Sven Beckert, Capitalism: A Global History