Eric Wolf Quotes (24 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Famous Eric Wolf Quotes

“The rise of industrial capitalism thus rested on the maintenance of slavery in another part of the world, even though that slavery was no longer dependent on the continuation of the slave trade.”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 11, The Movement of Commodities, p. 316.

“The capitalist mode acts to accumulate capital through the hiring of labor power, but is marked by the cyclical alternation of labor mobilization and labor displacement; each intake of labor power uproots some prior adaptation, while each sloughing off of labor power creates a new cohort of the unemployed.”

Eric Wolf

Afterword, p. 386.
Europe and the People Without History, 1982

“I acknowledge my debt to Marxian thought without apology.”

Eric Wolf

Preface (1997), p. xi.
Europe and the People Without History, 1982

“Wealth in the hands of the holders of wealth is not capital until it controls the means of production, buys labor power, and puts it to work, continuously expanding surpluses by intensifying productivity through an ever-rising curve of technological inputs.”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 3, Modes of Production, p. 78.

“If history is the working out of a more moral purpose in time, then those who lay claim to that purpose are by that fact the predilect agents of history.”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 1, Introduction, p. 5.

“Only when the stock of wealth can be related to human energy by purchasing living energy as "labor power", offered for sale by people who have no other means of using their labor to ensure their livelihood: and only when it can relate that labor power to purchased machines - embodiments of past transformation of nature by human energy expended in the past - only then does "wealth" become "capital."”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 10, Crises and Differentiation in Capitalism, p. 298.

Eric Wolf Quotes

“What his vision of free commodity exchange omits are the constraints that governed the selection of particular commodities, and the political and military sanctions used to ensure the continuation of quiet asymmetrical exchanges that benefited one party while diminishing the assets of another.”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 11, The Movement of Commodities, p. 314.
Context: Where Adam Smith and David Ricardo had envisaged a growing worldwide division of labor, they had thought that each country would freely select the commodities it was most qualified to produce, and that each would exchange its optimal commodity for the optimal commodity of others. Thus in Ricardo's example, Britain would send Portugal its textiles, while Britons would consume Portuguese wines in turn. What his vision of free commodity exchange omits are the constraints that governed the selection of particular commodities, and the political and military sanctions used to ensure the continuation of quiet asymmetrical exchanges that benefited one party while diminishing the assets of another.

“Slaving gave rise to a division of labor”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 7, The Slave Trade, p. 229.
Context: Slaving gave rise to a division of labor in which the business of capture, maintenance, and overland transport of slaves was in African hands, while Europeans took charge of transoceanic transport, the "seasoning" or breaking in of slaves, and their eventual distribution.

“Even the slave owner is restricted in his ability to manipulate his labor supply, for he must protect his investment in slaves by feeding them during times when they do not labor. In contrast, capitalist entrepreneurs can hire and fire laborers or very their wages in response to changing circumstances.”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 12 The New Laborers, p. 356.

“The major vehicle of for the transition to the capitalist mode of production was the textile industry of eighteenth - century England. In cloth production mercantile wealth was visibly transformed into capital, as it acquired the dual function of purchasing machines and raw materials, on the one hand, and buying human energy to power their operation on the other.”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 9, Industrial Revolution, p. 267.

“The development of industrial capitalism did not move in a smooth ascending line.”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 11, The Movement of Commodities, p. 311.

“By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls.”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 1, Introduction, p. 6.