Anti Capitalist Quotes & Sayings

The important part of the present development is the anti-capitalist sentiment that is permeating our people. — Gregor Strasser

Between the Great Depression and the 1970s, private business was viewed with suspicion even in most capitalist economies.
Businesses were, so the story goes, seen as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedly loftier, goals, such as justice, social harmony, protection of the weak and even national glory. — Ha-Joon Chang

I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good! — Slavoj Zizek

I am an anti-capitalist because I believe we can improve on it. I believe that we can create the vision I have for a totalized system, a unified system, that can effectively do things. Stop global warming. Feed everybody. Settle disputes diplomatically, and when necessary, quash disputes militarily with proportional measure. This may sound unnecessarily harsh, but it needs to be said, because it is part and parcel of any type of system, if it is to be successful. This is what I think can save us. — Slavoj Zizek

Fascism is not [only] squads of the SA or the Blackshirts marching on the streets. Fascism is officials, in uniforms ordering what is capitalist supposed to do with "his" factory, and how he should father "his" children and occasionally - how many Jews (or anti-Semites) should be sent to Auschwitz. — Janusz Korwin-Mikke

In every capitalist economy there are anti-capitalist movements, activists, and even political parties; in a way, that there are no longer anti-democratic movements, activists, and parties. — Geoff Mulgan

This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism. — Tariq Ali

I often refer to myself as a radical, reminding people that the word radical comes from the Latin word radix, meaning root. I think we need to get to the roots of problems as we try to solve them. I also like the word anti-capitalist. — Cynthia Kauffman

The main argument is that capitalism is constituted by a varied of different practices, and so challenging capitalism needs to be about a variety of struggles. I draw on the important work of J.K. Gibson-Graham, who argues that we should model anti-capitalist struggle on feminist struggles. — Cynthia Kauffman

The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date. — Albert Camus

If I rule out violent anarchism, there remains pacifist, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, moral, and anti-democratic anarchism (i.e., that which is hostile to the falsified democracy of bourgeois states). There remains the anarchism which acts by means of persuasion, by the creation of small groups and networks, denouncing falsehood and oppression, aiming at a true overturning of authorities of all kinds as people at the bottom speak and organize themselves. — Jacques Ellul

Capitalism is very far from a perfect system, but so far we have yet to find anything that clearly does a better job of meeting human needs than a regulated capitalist economy coupled with a welfare and health care system that meets the basic needs of those who do not thrive in the capitalist economy. If we ever do find a better system, I'll be happy to call myself an anti-capitalist. — Peter Singer

[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad. — Christopher Hitchens

We got email today from an LGF reader who was browsing the Lexis research system and discovered that anti-American, anti-capitalist icon Noam Chomsky has embarrassingly capitalist tastes; among other expensive property he owns a 36,155 square foot home near Cambridge, a 13,503 square foot vacation home, and four boats. And we won't even mention the cars. Teaching kids to hate their own country seems to pay quite well. — Charles Foster Johnson

Marx is only anti-capitalist
in so far as capitalism is out of date. Another order must be established which will demand, in the name of
history, a new conformity. As for the means, they are the same for Marx as for Maistre: political realism,
discipline, force. — Albert Camus

The novel is... the anti-form proper to modernity itself (which is to say, of capitalism and its cultural and epistemological categories, its daily life). This means... that the novel is also a vehicle of creative destruction. Its function, in some properly capitalist 'cultural revolution', is the perpetual undoing of traditional narrative paradigms and their replacement, not by new paradigms, but by something radically different. To use Deleuzian language for a moment, modernity, capitalist modernity, is the moment of passage from codes to axioms, from meaningful sequences, or indeed, if you prefer, from meaning itself, to operational categories, to functions and rules; or, in yet another language, this time more historical and philosophical, it is the transition from metaphysics to epistemologies and pragmatisms, we might even say from content to form. — Fredric Jameson

One of the problems with traditional anti-capitalist thought is that it defines capitalism as a totality, which encourages us to imagine another totality, socialism, which we can try to replace it with. This totalizing perspective has colonized the imagination of anti-capitalism and left us waiting for a revolution we can never have. — Cynthia Kauffman

We're living in an acquisitive capitalist society that is fundamentally anti-family and fundamentally uncomfortable with just enjoying being human. We'd rather shop than live, acquire than love and stare into a screen than hold each other. — Frank Schaeffer

I'm not an anti-capitalist, or anarchist. I want capitalism to work. — Ha-Joon Chang

You build movements and keep people in a struggle when it feels productive. Anti-capitalists have typically been the people in movements who have declared every gain to be a trick of the capitalist class to buy us off. That line isn't very inspiring, and it shows no sensitivity to how social movements actually succeed. — Cynthia Kauffman