fuckyeahdialectics reblogged
“OK BOOMER” Hegel x Marx
Batty / Hegel
Kurt Vonnegut on 'Rule Britannia':
“The equation which links a strong defense posture to not being enslaved is laid down in that stirring fight song, much heard lately, ‘Rule Britannia’. I will sing the equation:
‘Rule Britannia; Britannia rule the waves’
That, of course, is a poetic demand for a Navy second to none. I now sing the next line, which explains why it is essential to have a Navy that good:
‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’.
It may surprise some of you to learn what an old equation that is. The Scottish poet who wrote it, James Thomson, died in 1748 – about one quarter of a century before there was such a country as the United States of America. Thomson promised Britons that they would never be slaves at a time when the enslavement of persons with inferior weaponry was a respectable industry. Plenty of people were going to be slaves, and it would serve them right, too – but Britons would not be among them. So that isn’t really a very nice song. It is about not being humiliated, which is all right. But it is also about humiliating others, which is not a moral thing to do. The humiliation of others should never be a national goal. There is one poet who should have been ashamed of himself”.
Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 142.
Physics is just an extremely epistemologically self-confident social science.
Everything the Communists told us about communism was a complete and utter lie. Unfortunately, everything the Communists told us about capitalism turned out to be true.
Russian joke from the 1990s.
fuckyeahdialectics reblogged
On this day, 10 March 1919, Polish-German communist Leo Jogiches was murdered in Berlin while trying to investigate the killings of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Karl and Rosa had been killed earlier that year by the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps, who had been tasked with crushing a working class uprising by the social democratic government. Leo, who was a former lover of Luxemburg, was also arrested by the Freikorps, tortured and then killed. This is a detailed history and analysis of this period of German history: https://ift.tt/2p4L9Xy https://ift.tt/2TGTvGd
...in the United States... no strategy for socialism is particularly plausible... the crucial immediate question for the American Left is less 'how to make a revolution', but rather 'how to make the social conditions within which we can know how to make a revolution.'
Erik Olin Wright, 1978, Class, Crisis and the State, London: Verso, Footnote to p.233.
Red Rosa
Now has vanished too
Is hid from
View
She told the poor
What life is about
And so the rich
Have rubbed
Her out
Epitaph 1919, Bertolt Brecht, Poem Lost
...it is our very HATE of the work that keeps us going. Speaking just for myself, I want REVENGE for all the years
they've ALREADY TAKEN. They've extorted 3/4's of my waking hours, half my dreams, and have no doubt shaved 20 years off my lifetime thanks to hypertension, stress, etc. I WILL DIE OF WORK. Even if I can eventually make a living off the things I like - i.e., endless rants like this - instead of corporate uselessness, it's STILL ALL WRONG. I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO. I don't mind DOING it - what I mind is the fact that I'm not given a CHOICE.
Rev Ian Stang, Introduction, in Black, B. (1986). The Abolition of Work and other essays. Port Townsend: Loompanics Unlimited.
Unemployment, economic crises, militarization, terrorist regimes — in a word, the whole condition of the masses — are not due, for example, to limited technological possibilities, as might have been the case in earlier periods, but to the circumstances of production which are no longer suitable to our time. The application of all intellectual and physical means for the mastery of nature is hindered because in the prevailing circumstances these means are entrusted to special, mutually opposed interests. Production is not geared to the life of the whole community while heeding also the claims of individuals; it is geared to the power-backed claims of individuals while being concerned hardly at all with the life of the community. This is the inevitable result, in the present property system, of the principle that it is enough for individuals to look out for themselves.
Horkheimer, M. (2002). Critical Theory: Selected Essays of Max Horkheimer. New York: Continuum. p.213
Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying 'Faster! Faster!', though
she had no breath left to say so.
The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything . . .
'Well, in our country,', said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran for a long time as we've been doing.'
'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit - and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate - died of malnutrition - because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939.
We have known, we have had contact with a world (as children we partook of it), where a man condemned to poverty was at least secure in poverty. It was a kind of unspoken contract between man and fate, and before the onset of modern times fate had never reneged on this contract. It was understood that those who indulged in extravagance, in caprice, those who gambled, those who wished to escape poverty, risked everything. Since they gambled, they could lose. But those who did not gamble could not lose. They could not have suspected that a time would come, that it was already here — and this, precisely, is modern times — when those who do not gamble lose all the time, even more assuredly than those who do.
Charles Peguy, d’Argent.
fuckyeahdialectics reblogged
Marx’s letter to his wife Jenny.
Manchester, June 21, 1865 My heart’s beloved: I am writing you again, because I am alone and because it troubles me always to have a dialogue with you in my head, without your knowing anything about it or hearing it or being able to answer… Momentary absence is good, for in constant presence things seem too much alike to be differentiated. Proximity dwarfs even towers, while the petty and the commonplace, at close view, grow too big. Small habits, which may physically irritate and take on emotional form, disappear when the immediate object is removed from the eye. Great passions, which through proximity assume the form of petty routine, grow and again take on their natural dimension on account of the magic of distance. So it is with my love. You have only to be snatched away from me even in a mere dream, and I know immediately that the time has only served, as do sun and rain for plants, for growth. The moment you are absent, my love for you shows itself to be what it is, a giant, in which are crowded together all the energy of my spirit and all the character of my heart. It makes me feel like a man again, because I feel a great passion; and the multifariousness, in which study and modern education entangle us, and the scepticism which necessarily makes us find fault with all subjective and objective impressions, all of these are entirely designed to make us all small and weak and whining. But love - not love for the Feuerbach-type of man, not for the metabolism, not for the proletariat - but the love for the beloved and particularly for you, makes a man again a man… There are many females in the world, and some among them are beautiful. But where could I find again a face, whose every feature, even every wrinkle, is a reminder of the greatest and sweetest memories of my life? Even my endless pains, my irreplaceable losses I read in your sweet countenance, and I kiss away the pain when I kiss your sweet face… Good-bye, my sweetheart. I kiss you and the children many thousand times. Yours,
Karl
Gresford
The fireman’s reports they are missing, The records of forty-two days, The colliery manager had them destroyed To cover his criminal ways. Down there in the dark they are lying, They died for nine shillings a day; They’ve worked out their shift and it’s now they must lie In the darkness until Judgement Day. The Lord Mayor of London’s collecting To help both the children and wives. The owners have sent some white lilies To pay for the colliers’ lives. Farewell our dear wives and our children, Farewell our dear comrades as well. Don’t send your sons in the dark dreary mine They’ll be damned like the sinners in Hell.
Anonymous