capitalism

Now, it so happens that our culture__r lack of it, for our culture is in a state of flux and crisis__laces a high value on materialism, and, by extension, greed. Our culture__ emphasis on greed is such that people have become immune to satisfaction. Having acquired one thing, they are immediately ready to desire the next thing that might suggest itself. Today, the object of desire is no longer satisfaction, but desire itself.

American corporate capitalism is a murder-suicide mission.

A human being can only take so much when their basic rights as a citizen of the earth are being denied to them _ or sold at a high cost.

All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple.

The question shouldn't be, 'Are we guilty about our Colonial past?' it should be, 'Why aren't we more guilty about our corporate present?

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

If inanimate objects are left to stand in their world, and are not invited out to mingle with our sense of self, they will quietly console and delight us. But to bind possessions up closely with the mind is less than fair to both.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Experience has taught us that material wants know no natural bounds, that they will expand without end unless we consciously restrain them. Capitalism rests precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for all its success, it remains so unloved. It has given us wealth beyond measure, but has taken away the chief benefit of wealth: the consciousness of having enough.

Christ, back in Chicago, we don__ make bicycles any more. It__ allhuman relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out newways for everybody to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matter what;and if somebody does accidentally make a bicycle, the union accusesus of cruel and inhuman practices and the government confiscates thebicycle for back taxes and gives it to a blind man in Afghanistan.___nd you think things will be better in San Lorenzo?___ know damn well they will be. The people down there are poorenough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have somecommon sense!

In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.

You see, it is my passionately held belief that the right to possess property is at best a contingent one. When disparities become too great, a superior right, that to life, outweighs the right to property. Ergo, the very poor have the right to steal from the very rich.

The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that's why they call it an education.

...Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.

For whom, I asked myself innocently, were the riches and dominions that the English conquered and held on to at any price in the most remote corners of the planet? The neighborhoods which succeeded one another interminably down the narrow cobbled streets were not inhabited by the beneficiaries of those enterprises.

Capitalism brings wealth and inequality with intellectuality.

Perhaps the answer is that it is necessary to slow down, finally giving up on economistic fanaticism and collectively rethink the true meaning of the word __ealth._ Wealth does not mean a person who owns a lot, but refers to someone who has enough time to enjoy what nature and human collaboration place within everyone__ reach. If the great majority of people could understand this basic notion, if they could be liberated from the competitive illusion that is impoverishing everyone__ life, the very foundations of capitalism, would start to crumble (p. 169).

...those thoroughly incorporated within the inexorable logic of the market and its demands find that there is little time and space in which to explore emancipatory potentialities outside what is marketed as 'creative' adventure, leisure, and spectacle. Obliged to live as appendages of the market and of capital accumulation rather than as expressive beings, the realm of freedom shrinks before the awful logic and the hollow intensity of market involvements