From an economic point of view, the only meaning of the word “proletarian” is a wage laborer who produces and valorizes “capital” and is thrown out on the street as soon as he is no longer indispensable for the valorization needs of “Mr. Capital”. (Karl Marx)
Our blind dance has only one impersonal choreographer, who dictates the steps through the market. The language we speak – with which we try to address others in this fog – is the language of value. It is not the only language that can be heard, if one listens carefully, but it is the most deafening. It is the language of the capital community. (Endnotes)
For liberalism, revolt is an outdated requirement and necessity, valid for past eras, but too extreme, too explosive for the present. Rebellion has a memorial value. When it arises, alive – occupation of a campus or a wild march through the streets – it must be quickly suppressed. In liberalism, there is a form of spectacular capture that only neutralizes the revolt by transforming it, more and more, into an image, a tamed story to be exhibited in the galleries of power, into resistance successfully reduced to the state of a thing of the past. The liberal imagination celebrates revolt as representation while actively working to pacify its real presence. (Ian Alan Paul)
This is the development, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of what C. B. Macpherson was the first to call “possessive individualism”, by which he means that people began to see themselves increasingly as isolated beings who no longer define their relationship to the world in terms of social relations, but in terms of property rights. (David Graeber)
(For the new rulers), intersectional analyses and “queer theory” are generational references, but those who adhere to them obviously do so out of political calculation, because the “new feminism” is a godsend for them. It relegates social inequalities well behind the discrimination suffered by “minorities”; it calls for women to be better integrated into existing society and for more protection from the state – and it sweeps away the hierarchy between the sexes by blowing up the categories “men” and “women”, to reduce the social question to a recognition of individual identities and relationships between “chosen communities”. (Vanina)
Every human society, including its economy, is a subsystem of planet Earth. It lives off the flow of materials in this higher order system, and its capacity to provide water, breathable air, food, minerals and relatively stable weather conditions. The Earth can very well manage without human societies and economies, but these societies and economies cannot exist for a moment without the ultra-complex living system that is the Earth. If the higher-order system collapses, the subsystem also perishes. For this simple reason, the idea that human economy and technology can dominate nature is absurd. A subsystem can never take control of the higher-order system on which it depends. (Fabian Scheidler)
Before capitalism, all over the world, thanks to daily access to land, tools or other resources, people produced both goods that they consumed themselves and those that were monopolized by lords or masters of all kinds. Under such arrangements, monetary exchange could only represent a small fraction of economic life. It took centuries for the foundations of the commercial economy to be laid, during which time in Europe, agricultural producers – the vast majority of the population, with various traditional rights and duties of land use and other means of production – were either evicted from their land or turned into tenants paying rents. Subsistence production increasingly gave way to the production of raw materials that manufacturers, who employed the newly landless as wage labor, transformed into marketable products. (Paul Mattick Jr.)
To resist the unfolding catastrophe, thought must invent, confronting forms of life it knows little about, cosmologies it has never before taken seriously. And surely there is no unambiguous horizon other than to heal the world and give new reasons to believe in it. Thought is neither given in advance nor condemned to a dead end. It is to be found. It is a thought that works to imagine other beginnings, to trace paths that escape the dominant normativities, to construct images of the world that have an operational value. (Romain Huet)
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.
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