Quotation Marx

A collection of Leftist quotations, sayings, and aphorisms. Compiled by Euan and Brandon

[dailydebord-blog]

68: The pseudo-needs imposed by modern consumerism cannot be contrasted with any genuine needs or desires that are not themselves also shaped by this society and its history. Commodity abundance represents a total break in the organic development of social needs. Its mechanical accumulation unleashes an unlimited artificiality which overpowers any living desires. The cumulative power of this autonomous artificiality ends up by falsifying all social life.

Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle (via dailydebord)

[feelingpolitical]

When we choose a theory or a method, are we choosing something momentous, like a self, or something innocuous, like an ‘intellectual construct’ or 'conceptual scheme’? or something depersonalized, like a 'series of logically consistent, interconnected, and empirically verifiable propositions, or like a 'generalized statement of the interrelationships of a set of variables’? …If the question is slightly reformulated to read, what is the human significance of choosing a theory?, then it becomes evident much more is involved. Choosing a theory is significant for two conflicting reasons: it initiates new ways of thinking, evaluating, intuiting, and feeling; and it demands a substantial sacrifice in the existing forms of these same human processes.

Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as Vocation,” p. 1075 (via feelingpolitical)

[anorganisch-deactivated20171123]

What distinguishes bourgeois society from other class societies – from ancient society and from the social order of the Middle Ages? Precisely the fact that class domination does not rest on ‘acquired rights’ but on real economic relations – the fact that wage labour is not a juridical relation, but purely an economic relation. In our juridical system there is not a single legal formula for the class domination of today. The few remaining traces of such formulae of class domination are (as that concerning servants), survivals of feudal society. How can wage slavery be suppressed the ‘legislative way,’ if wage slavery is not expressed in laws? Bernstein, who would do away with capitalism by means of legislative reforms, finds himself in the same situation as Uspensky’s Russian policeman who said: 'Quickly I seized the rascal by the collar! But what do I see? The confounded fellow has no collar!’ And that is precisely Bernstein’s difficulty.

Rosa Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution?” (via mir-nicht)

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

Racial capitalism is a support system: the uneven distribution of bodily precarity is the uneven distribution of support. […] To be black, of colour, poor is to have less to fall back on when you fall.

Sara Ahmed, “Feminism and Fragility” (via coocoolah)

[masrekaya]

Armed with their billions, these NGOs have waded into the world, turning potential revolutionaries into salaried activists, funding artists, intellectuals and filmmakers, gently luring them away from radical confrontation, ushering them in the direction of multiculturalism, gender equity, community development–the discourse couched in the language of identity politics and human rights… The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human rights has been a conceptual coup.

Arundhati Roy | Capitalism: A Ghost Story (via queernuck)

[weil-weil-lautre]

True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth. The only way organized authority meets this grave situation is by extending still greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of government–laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons,–is strenuously engaged in ‘harmonizing’ the most antagonistic elements in society.

Emma Goldman, “Anarchism” from Anarchism and Other Essays, p. 59 (via weil-weil)

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

[N]ot only does the white world impose the most intolerable conditions on Negro life, they also presume to dictate the mode, manner, terms, and style of one’s reaction against these conditions.

James Baldwin, “Theater: The Negro In and Out” (1961)

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

I’m talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, no matter what you do, you are powerless, you are really powerless, against the force of the world that is out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive. And no amount of liberal jargon, and no amount of talk about how well and how far we have progressed, does anything to soften or to point out any solution to this dilemma. In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself.

James Baldwin, “The Uses of the Blues” (1964)

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

No one has pointed out yet with any force that if I am not a man here, you are not a man here. You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves.

James Baldwin, From Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States (1961)

[artgroupie]

In liberal democracies, the corrective function of public reason is not merely located in the give and take of discourse, but in the give and take of formal and informal institutions. In other words, the dynamic among the domains of liberal society—between the public sphere, civil society, various formal institutions of government—should ideally mimic the self-correcting movement of reasoned public debate. Take for instance the juridical branch in Australia. Jurists may well represent themselves as basing decisions on precedent and other genre-specific procedures of the juridical domain. But they also understand themselves to be continually realigning the relevance of the common law to contemporary public opinion of what constitutes public understandings of the good, the tolerable, the abhorrent, and the just. Indeed, the actions of each “estate” are represented and understood to be liable to correction by another, and all, ultimately, to the franchised public. […] And yet, in the real-time of social life, democratic nations contain the violent suppression of Islamic fundamentalisms, David Koresh and Move members are burnt to the ground, queers are staked out in all senses of the term, and many, even voluntary, social practices are outlawed. Even public practices that seem aligned to reasoned public debate are the target of sometimes severe forms of governmental control. In other words, rather than edging toward a horizon of shared epistemic and moral values, these discursive and institutional gaps could be seen as always already allowing repressive acts. By the time the legislative branch catches up, the law has already sentenced a generation to death.

Elizabeth Povinelli, Radical worlds: the anthropology of incommensurability and inconceivability (via artgroupie)

[weil-weil-lautre]

The total number of people in US jails and prisons has largely stabilized since the onset of the Great Recession, but no major contraction appears in sight. The US incarceration rate of about 700 per 100,000 is still the highest in the world and rivals the estimated rate for the Soviet Union at the height of the gulags in the 1950s.

Marie Gottschalk (via weil-weil)

[weil-weil-lautre]

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life… In the end communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.

W.E.B. Du Bois (via weil-weil)

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

Cultural hegemony is never about pure victory or pure domination (that’s not what the term means); it is never a zero-sum cultural game; it is always about shifting the balance of power in relations of culture; it is always about changing the dispositions and the configurations of cultural power, not getting out of it.

Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’?” (468)

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

[D]emocracy remains to come … belonging to the time of the promise, it will always remain, in each of its future times, to come: even when there is democracy, it never exists, it is never present, it remains the theme of a non-presentable concept.

Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (306)

[mahakavi]

Lifestyle feminism ushered in the notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was being slowly removed from feminism. And the assumption prevailed that no matter what a woman’s politics, be she conservative or liberal, she too could fit feminism into her existing lifestyle. Obviously this way of thinking has made feminism more acceptable because its underlying assumption is that women can be feminists without fundamentally challenging and changing themselves or the culture.

bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody (via mahakavi)

[post-makhno]

So who’s paying for the war? America’s poor. Its students, its unemployed, its single mothers, its hospital and home-care patients, its teachers, and its health workers. And who’s actually fighting the war? Once again, America’s poor. The soldiers who are baking in Iraq’s desert sun are not the children of the rich. Only one of all the representatives in Congress…has a child fighting in Iraq. America’s ‘volunteer’ army in fact depends on a poverty draft of poor whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians looking for a way to earn a living and get an education. Federal statistics show that African Americans make up twenty-one percent of the total armed forces and twenty-nine percent of the U.S. Army. They account for only twelve percent of the general population. It’s ironic isn’t it—the disproportionately high representation of African Americans in the army and prison? Perhaps we should…look at this as affirmative action at its most effective. Nearly four million Americans have lost the right to vote because of felony convictions. Of that number 1.4 are African Americans, which means that thirteen percent of all voting-age Black people have been disenfranchised. For African Americans there’s also affirmative action in death. A study by the economist Amartya Sen shows that African Americans as a group have a lower life expectancy than people born in China, in the Indian State of Kerala, Sri Lanka, or Costa Rica. Bangladeshi men have a better chance of making it to the age of sixty-five than African American men from here in Harlem.

Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire p. 59-60 (via post-makhno)

[books-and-barricades]

It is impossible to imagine that a transformation as formidable as the passage from capitalist society to socialist society can be realised in one happy act.

Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (1900)