Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use capitalism in a sentence

40 example sentences · noun

Capitalism means a socio-economic system based on private ownership of resources, and capital and their exploitation for profit. Example: “Marx believed that the contradictions of capitalism would lead to socialism.”

Examples of capitalism by meaning

nounA socio-economic system based on private ownership of resources, and capital and their exploitation for profit.

  • What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism—that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit—does not work.1941, George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, Pt. II
  • The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.1941, George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, Pt. I

More sentences with capitalism

  • Marx believed that the contradictions of capitalism would lead to socialism.From the entry contradiction
  • The restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe made way for improvement in human rights.From the entry restoration
  • Under capitalism, the wealthy live off the fat of the land.From the entry fat of the land
  • Christmas is exploited by capitalism. That said, it is still a religious festival.From the entry that said
  • Poverty is the ugly face of capitalism.From the entry face
  • The restoration of capitalism in Russia gave rise to unemployment.From the entry restoration
  • The fiercely competitive pressures of shareholder capitalism will also impose a remorseless logic of their own.2026 April 18, John Thornhill, “Lunch with the FT: Dario Amodei”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd.…. From the entry shareholder capitalism
  • It’s easy to say, as I often do, that it’s capitalism at work.2024 August 8, Angela Garbes, “Menopause tests and anti-ageing face oils: welcome to midlife consumerism”, in The Guardian, →ISSN…. From the entry consumerism
  • “The individualization of systemic problems under late-stage capitalism is crazy,” Diacono later said.2023 August 28, Michelle Lhooq, quoting Tommy Diacono, “Burning Man attendees roadblocked by climate activists: ‘They have a privileged…. From the entry individualization
  • Trumpian postfascism, in other words, emerged as an “accident” specific to U.S. neoliberal capitalism.2021, Barney Warf, editor, Political Landscapes of Donald Trump, Routledge, →ISBN, page 141. From the entry postfascism
  • The world’s techno-billionaires are forging a new kind of capitalism: Muskism.2021 November 4, Jill Lepore, “Elon Musk Is Building a Sci-Fi World, and the Rest of Us Are Trapped in It”, in The New York Times. From the entry Muskism
  • Why not call out capitalism as a culprit by renaming the Anthropocene the Capitalocene?2020, Vincent Ialenti, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now, MIT Press, page 17. From the entry Oliganthropocene
  • It seems fitting that in the cut-throat capital of capitalism, even the air is for sale.2019 June 1, Oliver Wainwright, “Super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive: the ‘pencil towers’ of New York’s super-rich”, in Katharine…. From the entry skywards
  • Angara rely on a participatory mixed economy, applying elements of socialism, capitalism, and an informal barter system.2017, BioWare, Mass Effect: Andromeda (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →OCLC, PC, scene: Angaran Culture: Economics Codex…. From the entry mixed economy
  • At the heart of platform capitalism is a drive to extract more data in order to survive.2017 August 30, Nick Srnicek, “We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s why”, in The Guardian. From the entry platform capitalism
  • Francis is saying that the environmental crisis is really a crisis in laissez-faire capitalism.2015 June 28, Paul Vallely, “The Pope's Ecological Vow”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry laissez-faire
  • What you are watching is the collapse of feudalism and the emergence of early capitalism.2014 November 2, Paul Mason, “What Shakespeare taught me about Marxism”, in The Guardian. From the entry mode of production
  • But this bias has also helped preserve the long-term health of America's democratic capitalism.2012, Luigi Zingales, A Capitalism for the People, page 10. From the entry antifinance
  • Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism.2009, Mark Fisher, chapter 5, in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Zero Books, →ISBN, page 36. From the entry SSRI
  • Aren't we supposed to be a big, terrifying country, a Godzilla of capitalism wrecking the globe?2009, P. J. O'Rourke, Peace Kills, Atlantic Books, →ISBN. From the entry Godzilla
  • Hunt writes, “while Marx is rebranded as the acceptable, postpolitical seer of global capitalism.” Mr.2009 August 19, Dwight Garner, “Fox Hunter, Party Animal, Leftist Warrior”, in New York Times. From the entry postpolitical
  • This is partly because of my opinion that capitalism can't defend secularism against religious fundamentalism.2006, Gao, Re: To hell with the SWP and their muslim friends!, alt.politics.socialism.trotsky. From the entry Muslimophobe
  • During the Cold War, capitalism and socialism competed on two fronts: livingry and weaponry.1999 November 27, Kirby Urner, “Some "quickie" analysis”, in alt.politics.org.cia (Usenet). From the entry livingry
  • It is true that competition in capitalism precurses new economic order.1987, Shrikant Jichkar, Explorations in Economic Theory of Socialism, page 151. From the entry precurse
  • It is the nature of monopoly capitalism to create unused industrial capacity and unemployment.1986, Avner Cohen, Steven Lee, Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Humanity. From the entry take up the slack
  • No one, at the time, had set himself the aim of 'establishing' capitalism'.1978 [1976], Leszek Kołakowski, translated by P[aul] S[teven] Falla, Main Currents of Marxism, volume I: The Founders, Oxford: Clarendon…. From the entry millennium
  • No one, at the time, had set himself the aim of 'establishing capitalism'.1978 [1976], Leszek Kołakowski, translated by P[aul] S[teven] Falla, Main Currents of Marxism, volume I: The Founders, Oxford: Clarendon…. From the entry establishing
  • Capitalism has no lure for them, as socialism does for their West Central European counterparts.1973, Robert G. Collins, Kenneth McRobbie, The Eastern European Imagination in Literature, page 103. From the entry Besserwisser
  • As the economic derivative of libertarianism, laissez-faire capitalism is an economics of life, of rationality.1971 January 10, Stan Lehr, Louis Rossetto, “The New Right Credo–Libertarianism”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry laissez-faire
  • The directions followed by the apologists for modern monopoly capitalism are quite varied.1959 December, G. Khromushin, anonymous translator, “The Bourgeois Revisionist Myth of the ‘Democratization of Capital’”, in Problems of…. From the entry herostratically
  • Before the nineteenth century closed, industrial capitalism and agriculturalism came to a showdown.1935, Roscoe Lewis Ashley, Our Contemporary Civilization: A Study of the Twentieth Century Renaissance, page 44. From the entry agriculturalism
  • Capitalism is not democracy; and is admittedly, by trend and savour, rather against democracy.1933, G. K. Chesterton, “On Industrialism”, in All I Survey. From the entry plutocracy
  • Unless passive managers were active stewards of the companies in their funds, the whole concept of shareholder capitalism would be weakened.2025 November 14, John Authers, “Has Passive Investing Grown Too Big to Proxy? The inconvenient truth of shareholder detachment surfaces…. From the entry big three
  • Yet his footprint and departure reveal a pervasive rift between staunch supporters of sustainable capitalism and hard-rugged corporate activists.2021 March 20, Frank Van Gansbeke, “Sustainability And The Downfall Of Danone CEO Faber (1/2)”, in Forbes. From the entry stakeholder capitalism
  • The problems in this country that feed white supremacy—racism, patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, misogyny, homomisia, transmisia, Islammisia, xenomisia—are systemic.2020 November 16, Данилов, “диклайн 2020 11”, in alt.russian.z1 (Usenet), retrieved 30 Jan 2022. From the entry homomisia
  • This is how capitalism is killing our culture and preventing us from putting our heart in each artisanal piece we produce.”2020 May 1, Bartlomiej Kaftan, “Queens’ Land: the indigenous Mayan queens of Guatemala – photo essay”, in The Guardian. From the entry put one's heart in
  • For some DSA grandees, like NYC chapter co-chair Bianca Cunningham, socialism means a planned economy that replaces market capitalism.2019 March 3, Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “When Did Everyone Become a Socialist?”, in New York Magazine, archived from the original on 16 Mar…. From the entry nyc
  • Inevitabilism enshrines the apparatus of ubiquity as progress but conceals the realpolitik of surveillance capitalism at work behind the scenes.2019, Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Hachette, →ISBN. From the entry inevitabilism

Meaning of capitalism

  1. noun A socio-economic system based on private ownership of resources, and capital and their exploitation for profit.
  2. noun An economic system based on private control of the means of production and the exploitation of labour by capital.
  3. noun An economic system based on private property and the abstraction of resources into the form of privately owned capital, with economic decisions made largely through the operation of a market unregulated by the state.

Full definition of capitalism

Questions about capitalism in a sentence

How do you use capitalism in a sentence?
Capitalism is used as a noun. For example: “Marx believed that the contradictions of capitalism would lead to socialism.”
What is a short sentence with capitalism?
“Poverty is the ugly face of capitalism.”
What does capitalism mean?
Capitalism means a socio-economic system based on private ownership of resources, and capital and their exploitation for profit.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: capitalism (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use capitalism in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/capitalism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.