Nishanth Bala

“We owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in , our habits and opinions , the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions. All of this we learned from other people , most of them long dead. Does it make sense to think of all this as debt we we to others ?”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“As a mutant form of capitalism, neoliberalism transforms workers into entrepreneurs. It is not communist revolution that is now abolishing the allo-exploited working class - instead, neoliberalism is in the course of doing so. Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

“But money doesn’t work in the sense that labor or tangible capital expends
effort to produce commodities. Credit is debt, and debt extracts interest. Financial salesmen who promise investors, “Make your money work for you” actually mean that society should work for the creditors — and that means for the banks that create credit.

The effect is to turn the economic surplus into a flow of interest payments, diverting revenue from tangible capital investment. As the economy’s reproductive powers are dried up, the financialization process is kept going by easing credit terms and lending — not to produce more goods and services, but to bid up prices for the real estate, stocks and bonds being pledged as collateral for larger and larger loans.”
― Michael Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond

“If your economy requires people to consume things they don't need or even want, and to do more of it each year than the year before, just in order to keep the whole edifice from collapsing, then you need a different economy”
― Jason Hickel