The Relentless Revolution Quotes

“بطبيعة الحال ، لم تتخذ الرأسمالية منذ بدايتها هذا الشكل المحدد ؛ ففي بادئ الأمر لم تكن الرأسمالية نظامًا أو مصطلحًا أو مفهومًا ، بل كانت عدة أساليب متفرِّقة لأداء الأمور أداءً مختلفًا ، وأثبتت هذه الأمر بإحداث ثغرة في سَدٍّ لم يكن من الممكن سدها ثانية بعد أن سمحت بانطلاق فيض هادر من الطاقة الحبيسة . لكن إحداث هذه الثغرة تطلب حب استطلاع وتوفيق وتصميم وشجاعة للتصرف بما يتعارض مع العرف ، والصمود أمام الضغط القوي للخضوع .”
― Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

“إن ثروة العالم الغربي أنشأت نوعًا من شبكة الأمان ضد المجاعة العالمية ، لكن لا تزال هناك مجتمعات تتشابه تقاليدها الراسخة مع التقاليد التي سادت أوروبا ما قبل العصر الحديث . ومن خلال تعاملنا مع العالم الإسلامي نلاحظ الآن أيضًا هيمنة الأفكار المتعلقة بالشرف ، والفصل بين دوري الرجل والمرأة ، وأهمية عذرية الأنثى ، وطمس رغبات الفرد في إرادة الجماعة التي يعيش داخلها . لقد عززت الهجمات الإرهابية في الآونة الأخيرة الأمل لدى العديد من مواطني الغرب بأن تنمية الاقتصاد قد تستوعب هؤلاء الشباب الذين الندرة الحادة .”
― Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

“Capitalism has produced some enduring tensions, evident from the sixteenth century onward. Where the extremes of riches in a society of scarcity were usually tolerated, capitalism’s capacity to generate wealth made salient, and hence open to criticism, inequalities in the distribution of economic and political power. Similarly, government interference was acceptable when the society was at risk of starving, but no longer so when the system seemed to function better when its participants had the most freedom. This very lack of government regulation in market economies enhanced chances for cycles of boom and bust, as we know so well today. These issues will continue to surface through the history of capitalism. Finding just solutions to the problems they cause remains the challenge.”
― Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

“People blame capitalism for social ills that have long caused great misery. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—oppression, war, famine, and devastation—come to mind. Unattractive personal motives, traits like greed and indifference to suffering, are often projected onto capitalists. Greed is as old as Hammurabi’s code. It could be said that capitalism is the first economic system that depends upon greed—at least upon the desire of bettering one’s condition, as Smith said.”
― Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

“Karl Marx, observing this disruption in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, could not accept the English evolutionary explanation for the emergence of capitalism. He believed that coercion had been absolutely necessary in effecting this transformation. Marx traced that force to a new class of men who coalesced around their shared interest in production, particularly their need to organize laboring men and women in new work patterns. Separating poor people from the tools and farm plots that conferred independence, according to Marx, became paramount in the capitalists’ grand plan.6 He also stressed the accumulation of capital as a first step in moving away from traditional economic ways. I don’t agree. As Europe’s cathedrals indicate, there was sufficient money to produce great buildings and many other structures like roads, canals, windmills, irrigation systems, and wharves. The accumulation of cultural capital, especially the know-how and desire to innovate in productive ways, proved more decisive in capitalism’s history. And it could come from a duke who took the time to figure out how to exploit the coal on his property or a farmer who scaled back his leisure time in order to build fences against invasive animals. What factory work made much more obvious than the tenant farmer-landlord relationship was the fact that the owner of the factory profited from each worker’s labor. The sale of factory goods paid a meager wage to the laborers and handsome returns to the owners. Employers extracted the surplus value of labor, as Marx called it, and accumulated money for further ventures that would skim off more of the wealth that laborers created but didn’t get to keep. These relations of workers and employers to production created the class relations in capitalist society. The carriers of these novel practices, Marx said, were outsiders—men detached from the mores of their traditional societies—propelled forward by their narrow self-interest. With the cohesion of shared political goals, the capitalists challenged the established order and precipitated the class conflict that for Marx operated as the engine of change. Implicit in Marx’s argument is that the market worked to the exclusive advantage of capitalists. In the early twentieth century another astute philosopher, Max Weber, assessed the grand theories of Smith and Marx and found both of them wanting in one crucial feature: They gave attitudes to men and women that they couldn’t possibly have had before capitalist practices arrived. Weber asked how the values, habits, and modes of reasoning that were essential to progressive economic advance ever rooted themselves in the soil of premodern Europe characterized by other life rhythms and a moral vocabulary different in every respect. This inquiry had scarcely troubled English economists or historians before Weber because they operated on the assumption that human nature made men (little was said of women) natural bargainers and restless self-improvers, eager to be productive when productivity”
― Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

“Policymakers are very much like stage managers. They don't write the plays, make the props, or act the parts, but like stage managers, they can determine how smoothly the show goes on.”
― Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

“In Europe the emergence of what we now would call a consumer culture dealt the death blow to aristocratic leadership in style and manners.”
― Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

“Without the profits from southern slavery, the American economy would certainly have developed more slowly, but there would have been nothing inherently unprogressive about a slower pace.”
― Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

“When New York law denied legitimacy to holding human beings as property, it constituted the largest peaceful invasion of private property in history.”
― Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism