Political Economy Quotes

“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Volume 2

“Zamanism is about creating power and private resources for all in society by destroying bureaucratic and monopolistic control on society.”
― Zaman Ali, ZAMANISM Wealth of the People

“There is no longer any difference between the economic and the political, because the same language reigns in both, from one end to the other; a society therefore where the political economy, literally speaking, is finally fully realized.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“Political choice, ideology and agency are everywhere across this narrative with highly consequential results, not merely as disturbing factors but as vital reactions to the huge volatility and contingency generated by the malfunctioning of the giant “systems” and “machines” and apparatuses of financial engineering.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis — the same from the standpoint of its main conditions — due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3

“... this system we call the transnational world order is just feudalism all over again, a set of rules that is anti-ecologic, it does not give back but rather enriches a floating international elite while impoverishing everything else, and so of course the so-called rich elite are in actuality poor as well, disengaged from real human work and therefore from real human accomplishment, parasitical in the most precise sense, and yet powerful too as parasites that have taken control can be, sucking the gifts of human work away from their rightful recipients which are the seven generations, and feeding on them while increasing the repressive powers that keep them in place!”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“Antiracism entails two fundamental tasks: first, diminishing racialization’s ability to facilitate domination, which involves deflating identarian (racist and antiracist) modes of analysis, and, second, displacing exploitation as the basis of political economy, which involves highlighting alternative idioms by which political economy is imagined.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Modern historical research in East Germany is still conducted in the light of Dmitrov's definition of fascism as 'the openly terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialistic elements of Finance-Capital'. No doubt this definition had a function and a degree of plausibility in 1935, but today, in view of the later development of Nazi Germany, it can have only very limited use as a starting point for an investigation, and can certainly not be regarded as an answer to the problem of the relationship between politics and economics under National Socialism.”
― Timothy W. Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class

“We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Economics is only considered the dismal science because economists are so often called on to clean up after innumerate politicians.”
― Ted Seay

“What is raised by printing notes is just as much taken from the public as is a beer-duty or an income-tax. What the Government spends the public pays for. There is no such thing as an uncovered deficit.”
― John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform

“It must be remembered that in studying the vast literature of nineteenth-century political economy, Marx enjoyed one enormous advantage over his contemporaries. He came to the study of political economy having already worked over and mastered the highest achievements of classical German philosophy, and in particular the achievements of Hegel.”
― Geoffrey Pilling, Marx's Capital: Philosophy and political economy

“Conclusion: from the moment the economic is there for something else, there is no point making endless critiques of it or analysing its transformations.
As soon as the Virtual is there for something else, there is no point enquiring into its principles or purposes, no point being for it or against it.
For the destiny of these things lies elsewhere. And the destiny of the analysis too: everything changes depending on whether you analyse a system by its own logic or in terms of the idea that it is there for something else.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“When the institution of transnational corporations and the phenomenon of consumerism emerged in the early twentieth century, nobody could have predicted the dominant role that corporatism and consumerism were destined to play in American capitalism and in American empire-building.”
― Sampie Terreblanche, Lost in Transformation: South Africa's Search for a New Future Since 1986

“It was not easy for the Americans to convince Western Europe of the alleged merits of consumerism and a mass consumer society. In many Western European countries - but especially in France - people regarded American mass consumer culture with suspicion and as an expression of the vulgar materialist culture that had developed in the US. They could not, however, dispute the fact that the US had experienced such astonishing economic growth since 1870 that its citizens were able to maintain much higher living standards than those of Europe.”
― Sampie Terreblanche, Lost in Transformation: South Africa's Search for a New Future Since 1986

“The Americanisation of the South African politico-economic system during the transformation 1994/96 was based on the wrong ideological premises, on the wrong power structures, and put South Africa on the wrong developmental path. The Americanisation of the South Afrocan politico-economic system was integrated into the criminalised global structures and the criminalistaion of the apartheid regime was replaced by the the criminalisation of the system by American-led global capitalism.”
― Sampie Terreblanche, Lost in Transformation: South Africa's Search for a New Future Since 1986

“In spite of the close relationship between wealth and poverty in all neoliberal capitalist countries, the rich are usually not prepared to acknowledge that they are rich because the majority is poor. The rich usually live in denial about the casual relationship between wealth and poverty. They don't like to be the flipside of the poor. The rich are always very self-assured, very complacent and very arrogant about their wealth. They are always of the opinion that what belongs to them does so because of their merit, inventiveness, and perseverance, and that nobody - but nobody - has the right to take it from them.”
― Sampie Terreblanche, Lost in Transformation: South Africa's Search for a New Future Since 1986

“I suspect that the NDP is actually a carefully crafted ideological propaganda document. This version of ideological propaganda could be called the 'ideology of targetism'. The aim of this ideological propaganda is to lull the general public, and especially the impoverished majority, into contentment until 2030”
― Sampie Terreblanche, Lost in Transformation: South Africa's Search for a New Future Since 1986

“Inequality is much cited for its baleful impacts. In this book, we see inequality as a consequence as much as a cause; if the rich are allowed to enrich themselves through unfair processes that hold down wages, and raise prices, then inequality will certainly rise. But not everyone gets rich that way. Some people invent new tools, drugs, or gadgets, or new ways of doing things, and benefit many, not just themselves. They profit from improving and extending other people’s lives. It is good for great innovators to get rich. Making is not the same as taking. It is not inequality itself that is unfair but rather the process that generates it.”
― Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

“Approaching race through political economy will not get at everything that racism is, and does, but it gets at what can be managed, and in the last resort lived.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Instead of an approach to racism that emphasizes racial identity front to back, my approach foregrounds the political economy by which racial identity came to matter at all.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“For Christianity, a genuinely political economy—where individual desire and communal flourishing serve one another—shares patterns of common life built into the divine economy. It only requires the ecclesia to make good on what the 'called out ones' already claim as true.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“My picture of the transition to war grows in part out of the sense that, on the Nazi side, the war itself was to a high degree a war of plunder and destruction; a war, that is, in which the means (military conquest) and the ends ("living space") became totally muddled up with each other on account of the Third Reich's need to live from hand to mouth in its social and economic policies after 1939. Ends became frantically telescoped into means in a manner which could only be self-destructive of the system as a whole, and which marked the actual lived experience of the vast majority of the populations subjected to Nazi rule.

There was a straight line from the so-called "temporary shortage of farmhands" to the enslavement and killing of millions of foreign labourers and prisoners of war after 1939 a straight line from the bottle-necks of 1938/9 to the crude plunder of the occupied territories; a straight line from the "guns-and-butter" policies of the 1930s to the only partial mobilization of German resources for war before 1944 and to the export of the worst sacrifices on to the backs of conquered peoples.”
― Timothy W. Mason

“Crises of every kind — economic crises more frequently, but not only these — in their turn increase very considerably the tendency towards concentration and monopoly.”
― Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

“If Hegel had not died long ago, he would hang himself, with all his theologies he could not have thought up this value which has as many different values as it has prices. It requires once more someone with the positive assurance of Herr Dühring to inaugurate a new and deeper foundation for economics with the declaration that there is no difference between price and value except that one is expressed in money and the other is not.”
― Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science

“The laws of political economy cannot be bent to suit the differences of latitude and longitude.”
― M.M. Trumbull, A history of the free trade struggle in England

“I come from a line of people
who could not discern their exploitation
from someone else’s:
people who will always stop for the car that is pulled over to the side of the road,
but participate in a culture
curated by a ruling class
that individualizes
and disconnects
the marginalized.”
― Belle Townsend, Push and Pull

“Politics always lags behind economics, far behind. The state apparatus is far more resistant than is possible to believe; and it succeeds, at moments of crisis, in organizing greater forces loyal to the regime than the depth of the crisis might lead one to suppose. This is especially true of the more important capitalist states.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“I am numb with confusion and horror at how the corridors of power are inspired by errors, exaggerations and lies to mislead the entire nation. We should be under no illusion the political will to fix what is broken is fully evaporated.”
― Qamar Rafiq

“Of, course, Chinese economic developments forms the great background for the rise of research into British political economy of the eighteenth century. Chinese policymakers and academics are increasingly interested in economic growth and the nature of international competition and tensions between the different nations. Hume and Smith discussed these questions in the eighteenth century and were a source of guidance for Great Britain in that transformative period. China has been undergoing a massive transformation from a traditional society to a modern one, from an agricultural society to a commercial one, and needs a new kind of political economy and moral philosophy to underpin this. The Scottish thinkers, Hume, Smith and Ferguson and their contemporaries debated political and economic problems and also reflected on the most appropriate ethic for the emergence of commercial society. One of the most striking features of their advice wa that it did not lead to the sort of violent revolution often associated with the French Enlightenment philosophers. On the contrary, they managed to contribute to the development and progress of Great Britain without aligning themselves with revolutionary movements. It is this aspect of their thinking that makes them attractive to many in contemporary China.”
― Zhang Zheng-ping, The Scottish Enlightenment: Human Nature, Social Theory and Moral Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Berry