"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 Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology.
"Although I wrote as an anthropologist rather than as a professional historian, I think history matters. It is also important to understand how an why these systems develop and extend their sway over people, and I located the rationale in the ways power and the economy sustain and drive each other on."
"American wheat, sold in Europe at lower prices than the domestic product, brought on a crisis in European peasant agriculture, sending a migrant stream of ruined peasants to seek new sources of livelihood in the burgeoning Americas. Ironically many of them made the journey westward on the same ships that carried to Europe the wheat that proved their undoing."
"Anthropology is the most scientific of humanities, the most humanistic of sciences. (1964)"
"There may be "pie in the sky when you die" but how the pie is dished out on the ground has considerable existential relevance."
"Our methods were becoming more sophisticated, but their yield seemed increasingly commonplace. To stem a descent into triviality, I thought, we needed to search out the causes of the present in the past."
"Under the conditions of the new mode, capital was able to embark on a process of continual internal and international migration, drawing ever more groups of people into its orbit and reproducing its strategic relationships wherever and whenever it took root."