“Capitalism is but the gentleman's method of slavery”

—  Kwame Nkrumah

Quoted in The Jewel of Africa, Vol. 1 (1968), p. 22.
Context: Capitalism is a development by refinement from feudalism just as feudalism is a development by refinement from slavery. Capitalism is but the gentleman's method of slavery.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Capitalism is but the gentleman's method of slavery" by Kwame Nkrumah?
Kwame Nkrumah photo
Kwame Nkrumah26
Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Gh… 1909–1972

Related 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 (1923–1999) American anthropologist

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

Joseph Goebbels photo

“... it would be better for us to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under capitalism.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle by Anthony Read (2004) p. 142, diary entry Oct. 23, 1925
Diary excerpts

Henry George photo

“It is as to whether its services or uses are to be exchanged or not which makes a tool an article of capital or merely an article of wealth. Thus, the lathe of a manufacturer used in making things which are to be exchanged is capital, while the lathe kept by a gentleman for his own amusement is not.”

Henry George book Progress and Poverty

Book I, Ch. 3
Progress and Poverty (1879)

Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.”
Illiberales autem et sordidi quaestus mercennariorum omnium, quorum operae, non quorum artes emuntur; est enim in illis ipsa merces auctoramentum servitutis.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book I, section 150; translation by Walter Miller
De Officiis – On Duties (44 BC)

William C. Davis photo

“Thanks to slavery, in the South capital and labor were combined in nearly four million sweating field hands picking cotton and planting rice.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), p. 21

Linda McQuaig photo

“Not only has capitalism failed to bring us to the brink of a scarcity-free world, but in a sense, you could say that capitalism invented scarcity - at least as a deliberate method of economic organization…. The flipside of this bounty, this endless feast, is scarcity.”

Linda McQuaig (1951) journalist and author

All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism (2001)

Charles Dickens photo

“Once a gentleman, and always a gentleman.”

Charles Dickens book Little Dorrit

Bk. II, Ch. 28
Little Dorrit (1855-1857)

Anthony Weiner photo

“The gentleman will sit! The gentleman is correct in sitting!”

Anthony Weiner (1964) American politician

Speech on the floor of the House, on the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act (July 29, 2010)

Milton Friedman photo

“I think it is only because capitalism has proved so enormously more efficient than alternative methods that it has survived at all. (…) I'm not sure capitalism is the right word. There is a sense in which every society is capitalist. The Soviet Union was capitalist, but it was state capitalism. Latin American societies in the past have been capitalist, but it has been oligarchic capitalism. So what we really need to talk about is not capitalism but free market or competitive capitalism which is the system that we would like to have adopted, not just capitalism.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Interview with Parker in Randall E. Parker(ed.), Reflection on the Great Depression (2002)

“Slavery is useful for early accumulation of capital, but it is too rigid for industrial development. Slaves had to be given crude non-breakable tools which held back the capitalist development of agriculture and industry. That explains the fact that the northern portions of the U. S. A. gained far more industrial benefits from slavery than the South, which actually had slave institutions on its soil; and ultimately the stage was reached during the American Civil War when the Northern capitalists fought to end slavery within the boundaries of the U. S. A. so that the country as a whole could advance to a higher level of capitalism.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 136.

Related topics