Means Of Production Quotes

“For their never-ending endeavours to obtain or retain wealth, countries desperately need companies, because they—unlike most human beings—have the means of production, and human beings, because they—unlike all companies—have the means of reproduction.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Use and Misuse of Children

“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life.”
― Friedrich Engels

“What the engineers had first seen in the October coup d'état was ruin. (And for three years there had been ruin and nothing else.) Beyond that, they had seen the loss of even the most elementary freedoms. (And these freedoms never returned.) How, then, could engineers not have wanted a democratic republic? How could engineers accept the dictatorship of the workers, the dictatorship of their subordinates in industry, so little skilled or trained and comprehending neither the physical nor the economic laws of production, but now occupying the top positions, from which they supervised the engineers? Why shouldn't the engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its activity?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and the "Unique.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy

“Il s'avère en effet que la "propriété privée des moyens de production" n'institue nullement le système du travail abstrait ni ne lui donne sa structure spatiotemporelle, mais que c'est à l'inverse le mode de production à base de travail abstrait, la fin en soi du "sujet automate", qui institue la forme juridique de la propriété privée au niveau des moyens de production (ainsi que le mouvement d'automédiation du travail abstrait/de la valeur via la sphère de la circulation). Le fait d'en rester uniquement à la question (juridique) de la propriété est tout sauf radical, et revient même à mettre la charrue avant les boeufs.”
― Robert Kurz, The Substance of Capital

“Seize the means of propaganda! Confiscate the central-planner’s ability to steer the collective as if it were livestock.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Seize the means of propaganda! Take the reigns from the central-planners. Deny them the ability to steer you like livestock.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Radicals want to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization. They hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful. They feel that this minority control of production facilities is injurious to the large masses of people not only because of economic monopolies but because the political power inherent in this form of centralized economy does not augur well for an ever expanding democratic way of life. Radicals want to see the established political rights or political freedom of the common man augmented by economic freedom. They believe that Lincoln’s statement that a nation cannot exist half-free and half-slave is applicable to the entire world and includes economic as well as political freedom. In short, radicals are convinced that the marriage of political rights to economic rights will produce a social morality in which the Golden Rule will replace the gold standard.

Possessed of this sketch of a world to be, radicals find themselves adrift in the stormy sea of capitalism.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals