If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.
(via rethinksocialism)
The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.
(Source: haereticum, via rethinksocialism)
Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions – there the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought.
Walter Benjamin
In the present and eternal moment, everything is simultaneously in motion and at rest.
(via forexample)
(via praxismakesperfect)
I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.
Whatever Naomi said, I could only nod in response. Even after her form had vanished again into the darkness of night, my sharp sense of smell pursued her gradually fading fragrance as one pursues a phantom.
I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew.
(Source: theunconventionallife2, via hand-me-downs-et-cetera)
What is property, what is capital in their present form? For the capitalist and the property owner they mean the power and the right, guaranteed by the State, to live without working. And since neither property nor capital produces anything when not fertilized by labor - that means the power and the right to live by exploiting the work of someone else, the right to exploit the work of those who possess neither property nor capital and who thus are forced to sell their productive power to the lucky owners of both. Note that I have left out of account altogether the following question: In what way did property and capital ever fall into the hands of their present owners? This is a question which, when envisaged from the points of view of history, logic, and justice, cannot be answered in any other way but one which would serve as an indictment against the present owners. I shall therefore confine myself here to the statement that property owners and capitalists, inasmuch as they live not by their own productive labor but by getting land rent, house rent, interest upon their capital, or by speculation on land, buildings, and capital, or by the commercial and industrial exploitation of the manual labor of the proletariat, all live at the expense of the proletariat.
One of the central precepts of Marx’s historical materialism is that we have to eat in order to live, think, argue, raise children, fight, enjoy ourselves, or whatever. How basic wants and needs are fulfilled has varied historically and continues to vary geographically. It is by way of a study of daily life that we can begin upon the task of theory construction. For example, if I were to trace back where my dinner came from, I would become aware of the myriads of people involved in putting even the simplest of meals upon the table. Yet I can consume my repast without having to know anything about them. Their conditions of life and labor, their joys, discontents and aspirations remain hidden from me. This masking arises because our social relations with those who contribute to our daily sustenance are hidden behind the exchange of things in the market place. Marx calls this the masking effect of market exchange “the fetishism of commodities.” We cannot use only the experience of shopping in the supermarket as a way to understand how daily life is reproduced. There is no trace of exploitation upon the lettuce, no taste of apartheid in the fruit from South Africa. We have to get behind the surface appearances, unmask the fetishism of commodities in the market place and build a general theory of how commodities are produced, traded and consumed in order to better appreciate the technical conditions and social relations which put our daily bread on the table.
David Harvey, The Urban Experience (via effusionofbiopower)
This is the most concise definition of the fetishism of the commodity I’ve ever read. I love David Harvey.
(via fuckyeahanthrotheory)
(via sociologic)
worshipping in the middle of summer
i can’t see past the next full moon
if you’re here or not.
i’d like to think you are,
because i’d like to think i am.
there’s not much difference
when you know what it is that you want,
and it can only be just around the corner.
