Before 1979, the prevailing idea was that the State’s job was to regulate the market in order to provide what its citizens wanted.
In the age of neoliberalism the State’s job is now to regulate its citizens in order to provide what the market wants.
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"Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way."EP Thompson’s definition of class and class consciousness from The Making of the English Working Class. (via chemicalelements)
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A Three-Fold Attack On Protest
The film looks at the history of the police, the development of militarised methods of policing, and the increasing criminalisation of protest.
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"The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime."G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, 1908 (via fuckyeahdialectics)
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"The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping."Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (via guydeboring)
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![The Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign has organised a campaign of public meetings to commemorate the hundreds of workers who were recently killed in fire factories in Karachi and Lahore, exposing the criminal behaviour of the owners who had locked all exits bar one [at the Karachi factory] and even then insisted that finished goods should have priority over workers trying to escape to save their lives! The capitalists of Pakistan stand condemned before the whole of the working people.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mavevaW5891rafqpjo1_500.jpg "The Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign has organised a campaign of public meetings to commemorate the hundreds of workers who were recently killed in fire factories in Karachi and Lahore, exposing the criminal behaviour of the owners who had locked all exits bar one [at the Karachi factory] and even then insisted that finished goods should have priority over workers trying to escape to save their lives! The capitalists of Pakistan stand condemned before the whole of the working people.")
The Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign has organised a campaign of public meetings to commemorate the hundreds of workers who were recently killed in fire factories in Karachi and Lahore, exposing the criminal behaviour of the owners who had locked all exits bar one [at the Karachi factory] and even then insisted that finished goods should have priority over workers trying to escape to save their lives! The capitalists of Pakistan stand condemned before the whole of the working people.
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"Violence, we must remember, does not depend on numbers or opinions, but on implements, and the implements of violence, as I mentioned before, like all other tools, increase and multiply human strength. Those who oppose violence with mere power will soon find that they are confronted not by men but by men’s artifacts, whose inhumanity and destructive effectiveness increase in proportion to the distance separating the opponents. Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power."Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (NY: Harcourt, 1969) p.53 (via fuckyeahdialectics)
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"It makes a difference whether we see the word sin in its singular form, or whether we talk about sins and transgressions. Our day-to-day language has forgotten and suppressed the first linguistic approach. Talking about alienation may lead us back to this holistic approach. It is not our particular transgressions, such as sexual activities, but our whole way of life which is wrong. It is not so much our conscious deeds that make us sinners than our half-conscious omissions. We are allowing capital to be our master, we are permitting the system to exploit third world countries. Our holistically understood sin is actually living in a culture of injustice. The confession ‘I am a sinner’ does not make too much sense to me in terms of my sexual life or disobedience towards my mother. It makes more sense to look on a world hunger map. I don’t want to exclude the personal, but the depth of the personal is only reached if it becomes related to the political."
Dorothee Sölle, “Sin and Alienation,” Beyond Mere Dialogue: On Being Christian and Socialist
I uncovered this pamphlet containing Sölle’s lecture while cleaning out the library in the downstairs of my house. It touches on many relevant aspects of my life: the Christian tradition, political economy, sin, justice, and geography.
(via andrewfm)
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"The consumer… is no freer than the producer [the worker]. His judgement depends on his means and his needs. Both of these are determined by his social position, which itself depends on the whole social organization…. Most often, needs arise directly from production or from a state of affairs based on production. World trade turns almost entirely round the needs, not of individual consumption, but of production."Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (via augustuscarmichael)
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"This is something quite different from the old free competition between manufacturers, scattered and out of touch with one another, and producing for an unknown market. Concentration has reached the point at which it is possible to make an approximate estimate of all sources of raw materials (for example, the iron ore deposits) of a country and even, as we shall see, of several countries, or of the whole world. Not only are such estimates made, but these sources are captured by gigantic monopolist associations. An approximate estimate of the capacity of markets is also made, and the associations “divide” them up amongst themselves by agreement. Skilled labour is monopolised, the best engineers are engaged; the means of transport are captured—railways in America, shipping companies in Europe and America. Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation."Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Chapter 1 (via arielnietzsche)
