Economic Reductionism Quotes

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

I have a weakness for treating people's economic interests as their only interest, ignoring things like belonging and pride and the desire to send a message to those who ignore you.

We no longer see the world as a single entity. We've moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world.

Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.

the leaders of globalization ... have tied themselves to a single measurement by which they judge success and failure ... They only measure money and the bottom line.

I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.

Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities.

Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities.

Economists, firstly, regard only one part of man's nature, and treat him simply as a money-making animal; secondly, they disregard the influence of custom, and only take account of competition.

Where all of the man is what property he owns, it does not take long to annihilate him.

We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.

Everyone is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom-line, cost-effective terms. Freedom is no longer about equality, social justice, or the public welfare, but about the trade in goods, financial capital, and commodities.