Leadership Quote by Walter Ulbricht

Ulbricht’s line doesn’t argue economics so much as prosecute motives. By framing capitalism’s “guiding principle” as profit for “a few,” he turns a complex system into a moral alibi: scarcity and inequality aren’t accidents or growing pains, they’re the plan. The sentence is built like a courtroom contrast - “not to manufacture” versus “rather to earn” - and it quietly smuggles in a standard of legitimacy: any economy worth defending should be organized around meeting needs. If it isn’t, it forfeits the right to call itself rational.

The context matters. As the East German leader presiding over a Soviet-aligned state, Ulbricht had a political need to make the socialist project feel not just alternative but inevitable. In the 1950s and 60s, when West Germany was enjoying the “economic miracle,” the GDR had to explain why abundance appeared on the other side of the border. This quote functions as counter-narrative: Western plenty is depicted as misdirection, a shop window masking extraction.

The subtext is also defensive. Planned economies were routinely criticized for shortages and poor consumer goods; Ulbricht flips that liability into a virtue by delegitimizing consumer satisfaction as the wrong metric. If capitalism produces more, it’s implied, it does so for the wrong reasons and the wrong people. “Everyone needs” is the rhetorical trump card - expansive, hard to dispute, and conveniently undefined - while “a few capitalists” personalizes an enemy, making systemic critique feel like common sense.