A People's Guide to Capitalism Quotes

“Capitalism is not designed to meet human need; it is designed to generate profit. This means not only robbing workers of our humanity and life, but also the soil, the air, the planet.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“Inequality has long been built into the core fabric of the American business model. Pitting Black workers against white workers against immigrant workers has been a particularly potent, tried-and-true tactic of employers to drive down all wages. But the cursory sketch laid out here does not even begin to discuss the very many oppressions—of people with disabilities, of gay people, of transgender people, of Native peoples, of elders, and more—that play an integral role in upholding the profitability of US capitalism. In fact, any place where bosses can hold down the wages of one section of the workforce not only ensures a cheaper labor pool among the oppressed demographic, but also, in the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, divides both in order to conquer each, so that everyone’s wages are pushed down.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“the bulk of day-to-day responsibilities for the reproduction of labor at home fall on wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters. This unpaid labor does not directly create surplus value, yet it is critical to workers’ abilities to produce surplus, and therefore necessary to maintaining the profitability of the system. And so it is no coincidence that sexist ideologies that relegate women to second-class citizens emphasize women’s nurturing capacity, which make us “naturally suited” to prioritizing husbands and children over our own lives.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“A very basic definition of classes as they exist in capitalist society begins with this premise. Workers have to sell our ability to work, and capitalists buy and command our labor-power. You can’t understand either the worker’s or the boss’s class position without understanding that the whole of the system is one in which labor is set to work on means of production, in order to produce a profit for someone else. Class, in other words, is a relationship of exploitation.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“Price, Marx argued, is not the same thing as value. While value is determined by socially necessary labor-time, prices tend to fluctuate above and below this value, and sometimes wildly so. In volume 1 of Capital, Marx presented a theoretical assumption in which prices and values coincide. He did so for the sake of unearthing the elemental dynamics of value. But this assumption has to do with his method of scientific inquiry, and not his belief that price and value are the same. Confusion about Marx’s method has been used to deny the validity of the labor theory of value; critics point out the various examples in the concrete world in which prices clearly don’t line up with the amount of labor-time that has gone into producing a particular commodity.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“The first traces of modern humans date back to more than two hundred thousands years ago. But it was only in the last five thousand years (i.e. during less than three percent of human history) that the first class societies arose.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“Marxism is not a simple blueprint, with obvious rights and wrongs. Instead, it is a living, breathing theory, applied to social relations, which themselves are always in motion.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“At its core, capitalism was defined by Marx as a social relation of production. He meant that profits are not the result of good accounting or the inventive ideas of the superrich, but are instead the outcome of an exploitative relationship between two classes of people: bosses and workers.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“Is this rotten system the best we can do?”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“We live in a society in which decades of budget cuts have made a run on overwhelmed hospitals inevitable and which has set countries and states bidding against one another for ventilators on the “free market” rather than devise centralized plans for their production and distribution.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“The treacherous practice of pushing subprime mortgages onto working class and poor people in no way represents a departure for banks… and they have gotten away with imposing the highest interest rates on workers, the poor, and people of color… thus subprime mortgages have joined overdraft fees, high-interest rate credit cards complete with astronomical fees and penalties, and payday loans in a long list of predatory products, which are designed to sap income from the poor… as anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko once remarked, “It is very expensive to be poor.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“Modern-day exploitation, however, is designed by the appearance of a fair deal. It seems that workers are paid a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, as the saying goes. But we are not paid for our work, we are paid for our labor-power, and therein lies the rub.”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics

“Every contradiction for capitalism is both a great hazard to our lives - since we are made to pay the price - and also an important crack in the system. Every periodic crisis is a potential point around which to organize. If the system seems impenetrable, all the more reason to find its weakest links”
― Hadas Thier, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics