Quotes

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation." — Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto.

"The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to be justifiable. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog." - George Orwell

"What have the Jews given Europe?" she cried angrily.

"Karl Marx," I said.

"Marx," she cried, "was a fool. Just a typical, low Jew."

"Don't talk nonsense," I said. "One-sixth of the globe is already governed on the basis of his teachings, and on the remainder of the globe his influence is enormous. To denounce him as a fool merely brands you as a thoughtless and ignorant woman. You have never read a word of Marx."

"Have you?"

"Yes, I have; and what's more I have tried to beat his beer drinking record without success. He and Friedrich Engels drank their way from the bottom of Tottenham Court Road to The Spaniards on Hampstead Heath, and then he beat Engels in a game of chess. If that does not prove him to be a great man, there is no such thing as a test of greatness."

(from Shame The Devil)

“The fact is that the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence great is the honour bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant.”

The Italian crisis can only be resolved through the action of the laboring masses. There is no possibility for the liquidation of fascism on the plain of parliamentary intrigues, only a compromise that leaves the bourgeoisie at the lead along with armed fascism at its service. Liberalism, even if inoculated with the glands of the reformist monkey, is powerless. It belongs to the past.

Antonio Gramsci, Neither fascism nor liberalism: Sovietism!

Fuck Khrushchev but this is a based quote.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/41714744

https://www.icit-digital.org/articles/malcolm-x-on-prospects-for-freedom-in-1965-january-7-1965

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/41529835

https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2016/11/17/the-post-election-case-for-speaking-out-naomi-shulman

The idea that politics could or should have any input into science is anathema to skeptics. They often bring out the examples of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, or the racial science of Nazi Germany, to illustrate the dangers of allowing science to be contaminated by political ideology. They less often acknowledge that racial science was not unique to Nazi Germany, and that the same kind of racist garbage was enthusiastically pursued by scientists in the most enlightened liberal democracies of the time, and found in all the standard British and American anthropology textbooks. Eugenics, including racial eugenics, wasn't just supported by Nazis, but by people who considered themselves among the vanguard of all that was good and progressive. Liberal democracy was no guard against the influence of political ideology on scientific thought. (On the contrary, liberal democracy is a political ideology that influences scientific thought.)

What's more, skeptics never acknowledge that racial science was defeated by political ideology, and not by science itself. In fact, there was nothing that could have defeated it within the empirical framework of racial scientists. Their racist experiments confirmed their racist hypotheses based on their racist observations. But while the science supported them, politics, in the aftermath of World War 2 and the Holocaust, did not. After 1945, racial science became politically unacceptable in western liberal democracies, and remains so in spite of the various attempts to revive it. It was not disproved by the scientific method; instead, the political ideologies behind racial science were discarded, and replaced by new ones that did not accommodate it.

You can read the full post HERE.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40318843