The world, however, still remains very heterogeneous. The coercive imperialism of advanced nations is able to exist only because backward nations, oppressed nationalities, colonial and semicolonial countries, remain on our planet. The struggle of the oppressed peoples for national unification and national independence is doubly progressive because, on the one side, this prepares more favorable conditions for their own development, while, on the other side, this deals blows to imperialism. That, in particular, is the reason why, in the struggle between a civilized, imperialist, democratic republic and a backward, barbaric monarchy in a colonial country, the socialists are completely on the side of the oppressed country notwithstanding its monarchy and against the oppressor country notwithstanding its “democracy.
29 May, 2012
Reblogged from fuckyeahmarxismleninism
28 May, 2012
Reblogged from e-schatology
If people do not actively combat a political regime which oppresses them, it may not be because they have meekly imbibed its governing values. It may be because they are too exhausted after a hard day’s work to have much energy left to engage in political activity, or because they are too fatalistic or apathetic to see the point of opposing the regime; or they may spend too much time worrying about their jobs and mortgages and income tax returns to give it much thought. Ruling classes have at their disposal a great may techniques of ‘negative’ social control, which are a good deal more prosaic and material than persuading their subjects that they belong to a master race or exhorting them to identify with the destiny of the nation.
- Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an introduction, p.34
(Source: itsworsethanthat)
28 May, 2012
Reblogged from amodernmanifesto
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
- George Orwell (via socialuprooting)
(Source: lewrockwell.com)
27 May, 2012
Reblogged from amodernmanifesto
Capitalism sets itself up as the regime which is most favorable to production; the colonist is the only one capable of exploiting the wealth which the native would leave fallow. Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
- Simone de Beauvoir (via wretchedoftheearth)
27 May, 2012
Reblogged from ajitprop
I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
- Stephen Jay Gould (via pisumsativa)
27 May, 2012
Reblogged from rethinksocialism
From the communist perspective, humanity has no foundation and no ends, it is the definition of groundlessness. Its metaphysical function lies not in a philosophical essence but in its non-essence, the incessant surprising of the human condition and its exposure to the event that radically changes the world.
- Costas Douzinas, “Adikia: On Communism and Rights” (via rethinksocialism)
(Source: nicoie)
24 May, 2012
Reblogged from e-schatology
The human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism.
- Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (via mirrortheories)
23 May, 2012
Reblogged from amodernmanifesto
Contrary to those critics of consumer society who fear that shorter working hours would create only more time for mindless consumption, thereby ensuring our further descent into commodity fetishism, there is reason to expect that if given more time, people will find ways to be creative — even if those ways do not necessarily conform to traditional notions of productive activity. Rather than simply a state of passivity, it is important to recognize the potential social productivity of nonwork. By this measure, the problem posed by an expansion of nonwork time is not, as E. P. Thompson notes, “‘how are people going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure?’ but `what will be the capacity of experience of the people who have this undirected time to live?”’ Perhaps if what Thompson calls the Puritan time-valuation were to relax, we could, as he speculated, “re-learn some of the arts of living.
- Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (via wretchedoftheearth)
22 May, 2012
Reblogged from e-schatology
Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer. Production not only supplies a material for the need, but it also supplies a need for the material.
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Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin / NLR 1973) p.92 (via itsworsethanthat)
(via e-schatology)
(Source: marxists.org)
Workers’ struggles determine the course of capitalist development; but capitalist development will use those struggles for its own ends if no organized revolutionary process opens up, capable of changing that balance of forces. It is easy to see this in the case of social struggles in which the entire systemic apparatus of domination repositions itself, reforms, democratizes and stabilizes itself anew.
- Mario Tronti, “Our Operaismo”
