Commodity Production Quotes

“Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”
― Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy

“The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh.”
― Amadeo Bordiga

“Exchange, fair or unfair, always presupposes and includes the rule of the bourgeoisie.”
― V.I. Lenin

“There cannot exist in the future an economy which is still mercantile but which isn't capitalist anymore. Before capitalism there were economies which were partially mercantile, but capitalism is the last of this genre.”
― Amadeo Bordiga

“The present system is a capitalist system. This means that the world is divided up into two antagonistic camps, the camp of a small handful of capitalists and the camp of the majority - the proletarians. The proletarians work day and night, nevertheless they remain poor. The capitalists do not work, nevertheless they are rich. This takes place not because the proletarians are unintelligent and the capitalists are geniuses, but because the capitalists appropriate the fruit of the labour of the proletarians, because the capitalists exploit the proletarians. Why is the fruit of the labour of the proletarians appropriated by the capitalists and not by the proletarians? Why do the capitalists exploit the proletarians and not vice versa? Because the capitalist system is based on commodity production: here everything assumes the form of a commodity, everywhere the principle of buying and selling prevails. Here you can buy not only articles of consumption, not only food products, but also the labour power of men, their blood and their consciousness. The capitalists know all of this and purchase the labour power of the proletarians, they hire them. This means the capitalists become the owners of the labour power they buy. The proletarians, however, lose their right to the labour power which they have sold. That is to say, what is produced by that labour power no longer belongs to the proletarians, it belongs only to the capitalists and goes into their pockets. The labour power which you have sold may produce in the course of a day, goods to the value of 100 rubles, but that is not your business, those goods do not belong to you, it is the business only of the capitalists, and the goods belong to them - all that you must receive is your daily wage which, perhaps, may be sufficient to satisfy your essential needs if, of course, you live frugally.”
― Joseph Stalin, Anarchism or Socialism?

“Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main points of bourgeois ideology which has become conservative (the family, property, the moral order, the nation), reuniting the petty-bourgeoisie and the unemployed routed by crisis or deceived by the impotence of socialist revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself as it is: a violent resurrection of myth which demands participation in a community defined by archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, the leader. Fascism is technically-equipped archaism. Its decomposed ersatz of myth is revived in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. Thus it is one of the factors in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the old workers’ movement makes it one of the fundamental forces of present-day society.”
― Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

“In fact, this can happen only when the conditions for commodity
production and exchange are equal for all members of society; that is to
say, when they are all independent owners of their means of production
who use these means to fabricate the product and exchange it on the
market. This is the most elementary relationship, and constitutes the
starting point for a theoretical analysis. Only on this basis can later
modifications be understood; but they must always satisfy the condition
that, whatever the nature of an individual exchange may be, the sum of
exchange acts must clear the market of the total product. Any
modification can be induced only by a change in the position of the
members of society within production. In fact, the modification must
take place in this manner because production and the producers can only
be integrated as a social unit through the operation of the exchange
process. Thus the expropriation of one section of society and the
monopolization of the means of production by another modify the exchange
process, because only there can the fact of social inequality appear.
However, since the exchange relationship is one of equality, social
inequality must assume the form of a parity of prices of production
rather than an equality of value. In other words, the inequality in the
expenditure of labour (which is a matter of indifference to capitalists
since it is the labour expenditure of others) is concealed behind an
equalization of the rate of profit. This kind of equality simply
underlines the fact that capital is the decisive factor in a capitalist
society. The individual act of exchange no longer has to satisfy the
requirement that units of labour in exchange shall be equal, and instead
the principle now prevails that equal profits shall accrue to equal
capitals. The equalization of labour is replaced by the equalization of
profit, and products are sold not at their values, but at their prices
of production.”
― Rudolph Hiferding, Finance Capital: A study in the latest phase of capitalist development