Organic Marxism Quotes

“Marxism criticizes the world’s dominant economic system, which allows people to amass as much wealth as they can and to spend it as they wish. Should we be surprised that this critique generates backlash? To acquire things and to use them selfishly is a big part of human nature. Technological advances—the new smartphone, the new app, the new car—make each new toy more enticing and addictive. Today technology, more than religion, has become the opium of the people. In developed and developing countries alike, people long to acquire more and consume more.”
― Philip Clayton, Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe

“Most of us Americans have far more goods than we need. Our problem is to store them or clear out our closets to make room for new ones. This flood of goods replaced a situation in which most of the things people really needed were produced by hand. Today handiwork is more of a hobby than a primary occupation, but a shift back in this direction would be a welcome one. If handiwork were prized and its products could be profitably sold, unemployment would cease to be a major problem. We would use fewer resources and own fewer goods, but what we would have would bring us greater satisfaction and its production would be a creative rather than a routine act.18”
― Philip Clayton, Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe

“The richest 400 families in America possess more wealth than the bottom 155 million Americans combined.7 The evidence is overwhelming that the wealthiest nations have designed the world economic system to bring maximum gains to themselves. This is not a “free” market; it is a market of virtual slavery for the increasingly impoverished classes around the globe. It is time for us to rise up and require markets to play the role of servant, not of master. Henceforth we expect markets to serve a subordinate role, fostering the goal of the “common good” for the planet as a whole.”
― Philip Clayton, Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe

“The whole concept of absolute individuals with absolute rights, and with a contractual power of forming fully defined external relations, has broken down. The human being is inseparable from its environment in each occasion of its existence. The environment which the occasion inherits is immanent in it, and conversely it is immanent in the environment which it helps to transmit.28”
― Philip Clayton, Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe

“Derrida believes that the “triumph” of capitalism in the West has only served to highlight its own failures, as human suffering continues and environmental catastrophe appears inevitable. Western economic systems have only exacerbated the plagues of underemployment, foreign debt, arms trade, and inter-ethnic violence.4”
― Philip Clayton, Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe

“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.9”
― Philip Clayton, Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe

“Most people find it counterintuitive that a system motivated exclusively by greed and cutthroat competition would bring the greatest benefits to the greatest number of people. We now see that there is a good reason people find this claim counterintuitive: it is false. Abuses are only overcome when governments, multinational agencies, labor groups, consumer advocates, and a well-organized system of checks and balances all serve as watchdogs over market competition.”
― Philip Clayton, Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe

“Part of the American dream, for example, is to deny that there are class lines drawn through the middle of American society. Each year, however, the widening gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent turns that persistent American dream into more of a myth. Particularly instructive in this regard is the famous boast by Warren Buffett (quoted by the Marxist theorist Joerg Rieger) that “there is such a thing as class warfare and that his class is winning it.”1”
― Philip Clayton, Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe