Expropriation Quotes

“Now you're being sentimental, Marija. You shouldn't waste your pity on machines! If you want to pity someone, pity the poor guestworker who's chucked out of the territory when they build a robot to do his job! Pity the janitors, the nightwatchmen, the dustcart drivers. My God, even the whores have been put out of business now! We live in a country where we even fuck machines!”
― Chris Beckett, The Holy Machine

“The law itself was originally created in order to protect property. However, the law has been falsely attributed to being the reason property exists in the first place. At least, this is what the state would have us believe. The law does not create property rights because these already existed before the law was created. It is this false attribution that allows the state apparatus to conduct its mission of expropriation.”
― Daniel Alexander Brackins, Private Property, Law, and the State

“The only way for the state to finance its operations is through the forcible expropriation of productive wealth from its citizens.”
― Daniel Alexander Brackins, Private Property, Law, and the State

“What in essence happened under the Treuhand was a complete transfer without compensation of property and assets accumulated over forty years through hard work and effort by GDR citizens, as well as the land they owned (which in the GDR had no monetary value as such) to, in the main, West German owners. This transfer of a country's assets — unprecedented anywhere in the world during peacetime — amounted to billions of Euros: a robbing of ordinary people for the enrichment of a few. Of those companies and individuals who bought GDR property, 80 per cent were West Germans, only 10 per cent were from other countries, and a mere 5 per cent went to GDR citizens.”
― Bruni de la Motte, Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?: The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It

“What followed was the largest and most rapid privatisation ever seen in any country in the world (except perhaps in the Soviet Union under Yeltsin). Never in the history of civilisation has a state's total assets and infrastructure been disposed of so rapidly and in such a criminal fashion. Its machinations make Al Capone look like a paragon of capitalist virtue.”
― Bruni de la Motte, Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?: The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It

“In England, in the Netherlands, in France, from the sixteenth century on, economic and political violence expropriated craftsmen and peasants, repressed indigence and vagrancy, imposed wage-labor on the poor. Between 1930 and 1950, Russia decreed a labor code which included capital punishment in order to organise the transition of millions of peasants to industrial wage-labor in less than a few decades. Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labor power, that he must sell it to a business unit to be able to live, that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around market exchange ... such facts now taken for granted result from a long, brutal process.”
― Gilles Dauvé, The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement

“Apparence de paix

Pas de carnage ici, pas de mise à mort.
Les drames de l'histoire sont parfois
comme une musique qui demeure
au fond d'un champ où l'on marche
parmi le bruissement du maïs,
aimanté par des oiseaux fous
à l'orée du bois et sous un ciel
que strie la fumée blanche d'un avion
— en haute altitude, des voyageurs sans doute
sirotent l'apéro dans une carlingue
qui les protège du froid absolu —
mais ici-bas sous le vent tiède de septembre
la terre joue sa partition
ancienne, les enfant des fermes
s'en sont allés en sifflant dans l'herbe
et des veuves inconsolables hantent toujours
les parages de la rivière que l'on dit
paresseuse, à croire que le jour entier
va refermer sur elle sa masse bleue,
elles seront dans la caverne du temps,
les années chanteront leur absence
et très haut, oiseaux et bolides
iront vers ailleurs en ignorant tout
de leurs peines, leurs douleurs, leurs coffres
remplis de robes d'un autre âge.”
― Pierre Nepveu, Lignes aériennes

“it was Marx who declared that the whole idea of Communism could be summed up in a single formula—the abolition of private property; that the state of the future must take over the centralized management of the means of production, and that the abolition of capital meant the abolition of wage-labour. There was nothing flagrantly illogical in deducing from this that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the nationalization of industry and agriculture would bring about the general emancipation of mankind.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“Unlike most bourgeois theorists, Marx realized that what capitalism claims to be and what it actually
is are two different things. What is unique about capitalism is the systematic expropriation of labor for the sole purpose of accumulation. Capital annexes living labor in order to accumulate more capital. The ultimate purpose of work is not to perform services for consumers or sustain life and society, but to make more and more money for the investor irrespective of the human and environmental costs.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“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