Introducing Capitalism Quotes

“The State of Nature Hobbes took this view of mankind and imagined a time when there was no effective government. He thought that without strong government “the wickedness of bad men also compels good men to have recourse, for their own protection, to the virtues of war, which are violence and fraud”. The result is that everyone battles with everyone else for every small advantage. It is, in effect, a war of all against all. Hobbes called this imagined pre-history the “state of nature”.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“wealth is power” – not because wealth automatically gives its owner political power, but because it gives him or her control of other people’s labour.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Islam and Capitalism Capitalism continues to spread untouched by all this theorizing, and one of its biggest growth areas is Sharia banking (banking that conforms to Islamic law). Like the Bible, the Koran takes a dim view of charging interest.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“All these corporations owe their international scale of business to Henry Ford’s ingenious, widespread use of the production line.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Germany made every effort to acquire a small empire in the bits left unclaimed in Africa, China and the Pacific, only to lose it all to Britain after the First World War. All this was a signal that, by the late 19th century, being the largest empire no longer guaranteed having the largest economy.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The Rise of the US and Germany By the time the United States was strong enough to join the imperialist land grab, very few territories remained. Beyond its small island bases in Puerto Rico and Hawaii, the US did little except relieve Spain of its last colonial post in the Philippines, and to force Japan to open itself to foreign trade.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“But capitalism without some form of imperialism is actually quite a recent development. It was not even seriously considered until the end of the First World War, and not implemented on a global scale until after the Second World War. By then, European countries had lost their world domination to the USA and the Soviet Union. Imperialism was extracted from capitalism with the arrival in the late 19th century of the big corporations”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Marx thought that capitalism’s essential urge to expand and look for further markets and cheaper labour was the driving force behind the European imperialism of the 19th century.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Under these conditions the middle class is destined to disappear, and become part of the proletariat. Capital will be increasingly concentrated in fewer hands of extremely rich capitalists, while the rest will grow increasingly poor.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“There are three ways to increase profit: expand the market, increase the level of exploitation, and improve the technology so as to make production cheaper.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Everybody could have everything they wanted, so there would no longer be any real need for class divisions. Capitalism was destined to create the conditions necessary for the coming of the true “end of history”, in which all contradictions disappear. However, for the end of history to come, capitalism must first collapse and make room for true communism. This will necessarily happen, according to Marx, because of the inner workings of capitalism.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Contrary to the popular view, Marx did not predict the formation of communist countries, with which he is so closely identified. Rather, he predicted that capitalism would be utterly successful on a number of fronts.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“So capitalists, according to Marx, quite literally rob the proletariat of their freedom, their culture and their essentially human traits, and force them to work endlessly just to acquire the basic means of survival.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The goods produced by labour above what is necessary for survival Marx called the “Surplus Value”.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The wages that workers actually get in exchange for their labour equals only the amount that allows them to survive so as to keep on being exploited, and to raise children to be exploited in the future. Workers who are more skilled and irreplaceable may gain a higher standard of living perhaps, but only because they are worth a lot more to their employers than unskilled labourers. The vast majority of the value produced is always taken as profit by the ruling class, who own the means of production.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Das Kapital”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“the factory-owners and traders, grew stronger as a result of the new trade frontiers in America, Africa and the Far East.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“To take an example, ancient Greece and Rome ran on a slave economy. Slaves were the principal means of production, and slave-owners the ruling class. According to Marx, their culture – politics, ethics, art, philosophy – reflected that fact. For example, they considered citizenship to be a natural trait of mankind. People not of their citizenship were thus considered essentially of a different nature. Those not sharing their politics and culture were not even considered fully human, and so there was nothing wrong in enslaving them.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Socialism is basically a call for greater equality in political power and the distribution of goods. It managed to rally much of the working class behind it.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“In Ireland, the Great Famine of 1845–50 was exacerbated by the British government’s insistence on a hands-off approach to managing the economy, with the result that, despite horrendous conditions, Ireland was a net exporter of food during the years of the great hunger. The population reduced by 20–25 per cent – almost 1 in 4 either died or emigrated.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Without any legal limit on working hours or minimum wages, the working day lasted for sixteen hours and the pay sufficed for only the most meagre existence. Trade unions began to form, but they could do little as long as labour was unskilled and each worker immediately replaceable by another.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“The best that workers can hope for is a condition of full employment, and that can be achieved only by increasing production at a rate matching the growth of the population. This solution, however, was not enough for the most prominent thinker of classical liberal ideology”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“This means that workers can expect to get more money as society becomes more advanced, but only because more money is produced. As more of it is produced, it skews the balance of supply vs. demand and so causes inflation – it is as if money itself gets cheaper. So the rate at which wages increase will tend to be the same as the rate of inflation – nominal but never real, in economic terms.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Ricardo’s second principle is that labour is destined never to become more expensive. From the Labour Theory of Value it follows that all increases in productivity and profit principally happen because labour got cheaper.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“the more productive a region becomes, the higher the rent will get and the wealthier the landowners. On the other hand, the more productive a region gets, the more capital it produces, so the capitalists will get richer too.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“At the end of the second Opium War (in which it was joined by France), Britain forced the Chinese to fully legalize both the trade in opium and the shipment of Chinese indentured labourers to the Americas (where they worked as slaves in all but name).”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“In the late 1830s, China stepped up its efforts to stop the trade in opium and this led to the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Britain alone controlled almost a fifth of the world.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Industry could now exploit raw materials at a pace far beyond the ability of the colonies to provide them. To have available raw materials cheaply and in abundance, the colonies themselves had to be mechanized.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide

“Industrialization finally drove the West out of a mercantile economy and into a capitalist one. Before industrialization, the most important factor in determining the wealth of a country was its volume of trade, or exports minus imports. After industrialization, the value of what a country could produce became more important.”
― Dan Cryan, Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide