Wit & Attitude Quote by Stokely Carmichael

Calling capitalism "stupid" and "backward" is less an economic critique than a strategic insult aimed at puncturing the aura of inevitability around the system. Stokely Carmichael - speaking from the heat of Black Power politics - isn’t auditioning for a policy seminar. He’s doing movement work: stripping capitalism of its prestige and recoding it as something primitive, not modern. The provocation matters. In a country that sells itself as the endpoint of progress, "backward" flips the moral storyline. If capitalism is retrograde, then radical change isn’t reckless; it’s catching up to the future.

The phrasing is blunt on purpose. "Stupid" refuses the comforting idea that capitalism’s harms are unintended side effects. It implies a system that fails basic tests of human intelligence: feed people, house people, stop treating labor and life as expendable. It’s also a shot at liberals who argue the system is fundamentally sound but poorly managed. Carmichael’s subtext: you can’t regulate your way out of a logic built on extraction and racial hierarchy.

Context sharpens the bite. By the late 1960s, Carmichael had moved from civil rights integrationism toward a global anti-imperialist frame, connecting policing, poverty, Vietnam, and colonialism as one machinery. In that worldview, capitalism isn’t just an economic arrangement; it’s the engine that makes segregation profitable, war sustainable, and inequality rational. The line works because it’s diagnostic and mobilizing at once: it names an enemy plainly enough to chant, while hinting at a larger theory - that what America calls "progress" often runs on someone else’s dispossession.