1. "The idea of the… fanatic, as the utmost threat to the orderly reproduction of society, the one who collapses the City of God into the City of Man in an apocalyptic conflagration -an idea that has since exercised a powerful hold on Western political thought"
    Alberto Toscano - The Resurrections of Thomas Muntzer (via effusionofbiopower)
  2. "

    Capitalism, enveloped in the flames of a war of its own making, shouts from the mouths of its cannons to humanity: ‘Either conquer over me, or I will bury you in my ruins when I fall!’

    All the evolution of the past, the thousands of years of human history, of class struggle, of cultural accumulations, are concentrated now in the sole problem of the proletarian revolution. There is no other answer and no other escape.

    "
    Leon Trotsky (via danncove)
  3. "Slovenia may be a small country, but this decision is a symptom of a global tendency towards the limitation of democracy. The idea is that, in a complex economic situation like today’s, the majority of the people are not qualified to decide – they are unaware of the catastrophic consequences that would ensue if their demands were to be met. This line of argument is not new. In a TV interview a couple of years ago, the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf linked the growing distrust for democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a “valley of tears”. After the breakdown of socialism, one cannot directly pass to the abundance of a successful market economy: limited, but real, socialist welfare and security have to be dismantled, and these first steps are necessarily painful. The same goes for western Europe, where the passage from the post-second world war welfare state to new global economy involves painful renunciations, less security, less guaranteed social care. For Dahrendorf, the problem is encapsulated by the simple fact that this painful passage through the “valley of tears” lasts longer than the average period between elections, so that the temptation is great to postpone the difficult changes for the short-term electoral gains."
    Slavoj Zizek, We Are Willing to Talk About the Financial Crisis, But Less Discussed Is the Appalling Decline of Democracy (via jayaprada)
  4. "We are born female and male *, biological sexes, but we are created woman and man, socially recognized genders. How we are so created is that second aspect of the mode of production of which Engels spoke, “the production of human beings themselves, the propogation of the species”.
    How people propagate the species is socially determined."

    Heidi L. Hartmann, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, p.12 Capital & Class Summer 1979 vol. 3 no. 2 1-33 (via fuckyeahdialectics)

    * and of-course intersex, apologies. 

  5. "Omnia sunt communia."
    Thomas Müntzer. (via chemicalelements)
  6. "…it is crucial to keep open the radical ambi­guity of how cyberspace will affect our lives: this does not depend on technology as such but on the mode of its social inscription. Immersion into cyberspace can intensify our bodily experience (new sensuality, new body with more organs, new sexes…), but it also opens up the possibility for the one who manipulates the machinery which runs the cyberspace literally to steal our own (virtual) body, depriving us of control over it, so that one no longer relates to one’s body as to “one’s own."
    Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing, Verso 2012, p.335 (via fuckyeahdialectics)
  7. "In the labour-process, therefore, man’s activity, via the instruments of labour, effects an alteration, in the object of labour which was intended from the outset. The process is extinguished in the product. The product of the process is a use-value, a piece of natural material adapted to human needs by means of a change in form. Labour has become bound up in its object: labour has been objectified, the object has been worked on. What on the side of the worker appeared in the form of unrest [Unruhe] now appears, on in side of the product, in the form of being [Sein], as a fixed, immobile characteristic. The worker has spun, and the product is a spinning."

    Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1 (NLR/Penguin 1972), pp. 287 (via fuckyeahdialectics)

    Karl gettin’ all spinozist.

  8. "We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. At’ the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned."

    Lenin In England

    Mario Tronti

  9. "In the ‘war of position’ that happens throughout a crisis of hegemony…there is no place for the messianic wait for the ‘great day’… for the ‘assault on power’. The main criterion for the resolution of the crisis is the initiative of collective political subjects, the ability to act politically, to include large masses in the solution of their own problems, to struggle day-to-day for spaces and positions without losing sight of the final goal, that is, to bring forth structural transformations that put an end to the socio-economic capitalist formation. If the economic crisis does not translate itself spontaneously into the disaggregation of the ruling bloc (in certain conditions, it may even favour a re-aggregation of the bloc), this means the disaggregation depends directly on the ability of the dominated class to act politically; in other words, to gradually conquer for itself the hegemony that was lost or is about to be lost to the ruling classes."
    Carlos Nelson Coutinho, ‘Gramsci’s Political Thought’, pp 98-99. (via chemicalelements)
  10. "If you tell students, future workers, that they should be ‘flexible,’ to expect nothing, to owe everything, to work hard for little reward, to live without security and without comfort, then they will do exactly this. The students involved in the protests and occupations were and are utterly articulate, incredibly organized, faster, and smarter than those who would strip their assets—precisely because you forced them to be by creating an anxious world in which everyone must live by their wits in a constant state of precariousness."
    Nina Power | Dangerous Subjects: UK Students and the Criminalization of Protest, SAQ, Duke UP  (via derica)

About me

Towards an Apocalyptic Marxism ☭

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established , an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."---- The German Ideology, 1845