Leadership Quote by Walter Ulbricht

Ulbricht’s line is less an observation than a weaponized diagnosis: profit isn’t merely a motive, it’s an appetite, and appetites don’t negotiate. “Hunger” turns capitalism into something bodily and uncontrollable, a drive that keeps consuming even when the social cost is obvious. The phrasing invites a simple moral geometry - on one side, “profits,” abstract and cold; on the other, “the people,” a collectivized victim whose suffering is made to feel inevitable rather than accidental.

The specific intent is disciplinary as much as persuasive. In the East German communist repertoire, blaming misery on the profit motive didn’t just critique Western markets; it justified a state that would police prices, production, and speech in the name of ending exploitation. The subtext is a transfer of culpability: hardship is not the result of policy failures or postwar scarcity but of an external system with an internal compulsion to harm. It’s also a prophylactic against dissent. If misery is caused by “profits,” then complaints about shortages at home can be reframed as lingering capitalist sabotage, not socialist mismanagement.

Context matters. Ulbricht spoke as the architect of the GDR’s Stalinist consolidation, a period when the regime needed a clear villain to legitimize rapid nationalization, collectivization, and the tightening of borders that culminated in the Berlin Wall. The sentence works rhetorically because it’s blunt, portable, and emotionally legible: it compresses an ideology into a single causal story. Its power lies in that compression - and its danger, too, because once suffering is assigned to an enemy “hunger,” almost any coercion can be sold as self-defense.