Quotation Marx

13 Jun, 2013

Reblogged from existenti-al

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Capitalism subverts all traditional codes, values, and structures that fetter production, exchange and desire. But it simultaneously ‘recodes’ everything within the abstract logic of equivalences (exchange value), ‘territorialising’ them within the state, family, law, commodity logic, banking systems, consumerism, psychoanalysis and other normalising institutions. Capitalism substitutes for qualitative codes an ‘extremely rigorous axiomatics’ that quantitatively regulate and control all decoded codes. Capitalism re-channels desire and needs into inhibiting psychic and social spaces that control them far more effectively than savage and despotic societies.

- Steven Best & Douglas Kellner, commenting on Anti-Oedipus (via existenti-al)

(Source: class-struggle-anarchism)

Notes (84)

2 Jun, 2013

Reblogged from existenti-al

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Deterritorialized production signifies that work and life are no longer separate; society is collapsed into the logic and processes of capitalist development.

- Antonio Negri & Felix Guattari (via existenti-al)

(Source: communistslikeus)

Notes (35)

10 Sep, 2012

Reblogged from arrivingandleaving

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All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.

- Karl Marx, Capital (via ecaudate)

(Source: daveomitchell)

Notes (13)

4 Sep, 2012

Reblogged from its-london-calling

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Millions died, not outside the “modern world system,” but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed many were murdered by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill.

- Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts. (via its-london-calling)

Notes (9)

2 Sep, 2012

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Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves.

You do not need the capitalist. He could not exist an instant without you. You would just begin to live without him. You do everything, and he has everything, and some of you imagine that if it were not for him, you would have no work. As a matter of fact, he does not employ you at all; you employ him to take from you what you produce, and he faithfully sticks to this task.

If you can stand it, he can; and if you don’t change this relation, I am sure he won’t. You make the automobile, he rides in it. If it were not for you, he would walk; and if it were not for him, you would ride.

- Eugene V. Debs, 1905

Notes (7)

25 Jul, 2012

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In a well-known passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development [of capitalism] positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. The lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.

- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Notes (6)

5 Jul, 2012

Reblogged from amodernmanifesto

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We must agree that war has been an indispensable feature of capitalist development.

- Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (via antistate)

Notes (83)

2 Jul, 2012

Reblogged from pieceinthepuzzlehumanity-deacti

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Tragically, the well-off and the poor are often united in capitalist culture by their shared obsession with consumption. Oftentimes the poor are more addicted to excess because they are the most vulnerable to all the powerful messages in media and in our lives in general which suggest that the only way out of class shame is conspicuous consumption. Propaganda in advertising and in the culture as a whole assures the poor that they can be one with those who are more materially privileged if they own the same products. It helps sustain the false notion that ours is a classless society. When these values are accepted by the poor they internalize habits of being that make them act in complicity with greed and exploitation. Who has not heard materially well-off individuals talk about driving through poor neighborhoods and seeing fancy cars or massive overeating of junk food? These are the incidents the well-off emphasize to denigrate the poor while simultaneously holding them accountable for their fate.

- Bell Hooks (via wretchedoftheearth)

Notes (1272)

17 Jun, 2012

Reblogged from amodernmanifesto

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….this democracy is always hemmed in by by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation and consequently always remains a democracy for the minority, only for the rich.

- V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (via overtheeventhorizon)

(Source: baseddzerzhinsky)

Notes (66)

16 Jun, 2012

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Capitalist democracy is a contradiction in terms, for it encapsulates two opposed systems. On the one hand there is capitalism, a system of economic organization that demands the existence of a relatively small class of people who own and control the main means of industrial, commercial, and financial activity, as well as a major part of the means of communication; these people thereby exercise a totally disproportionate amount of influence on politics and society both in their own countries and in lands far beyond their own borders. On the other hand there is democracy, which is based on the denial of such preponderance, and which requires a rough equality of condition that capitalism repudiates by its very nature. Domination and exploitation … are at the very core of capitalist democracy, and are inextricably linked to it.

- Ralph Miliband

Notes (110)