Sign in with Facebook
Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Followers (14)
Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Born
in France
January 04, 1899
Died
April 06, 1990
Genre
More books by Alfred Sohn-Rethel…
“If a society has the form of its synthesis determined by the labour relationship in the production process, thus deriving its fundamental order directly from the labour process of man's acting upon nature, then the society is, or has the possibility of being, classless. We have spoken of such societies under Marx's term 'communal modes of production'. Labour is either done collectively by members of a tribe, or if done individually or in groups the workers still know what each one does, and work in agreement. People create their own society as producers. The structure enables us to call them ' societies of production '. The alternative is a form of society based on appropriation .”
― Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology
― Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology
“What is reflected and becomes the conceptual basis of the intellect [in the capitalist society] is the socially-synthetic capacity of the exchange abstraction or is the exchange abstraction in its socially-synthetic function. The intellect thinking in the forms of the exchange abstraction, in other words, think in the forms of the social synthesis. It thinks in social forms, thinks for society, and is, in fact, a mind socialized by form.”
―
―
“The dictatorial power of the Nazis was the blind power of the unchangeability and the inner contradictions of the fascist path which they pursued. It could be threatened by the bourgeoisie only in the purely theoretical event that from outside the country (from heaven perhaps!), the entire financial and economic deficit of German capitalism were wiped out, the contradictions removed and the position of the German bourgeoisie re-normalized. For then the fascist party would not only be dispensable, it would actually have to be removed speedily for the renormalization to succeed. We can thus see that the party derives its power not from its own strength or from any original political concept or line of its own but solely by virtue of the unavoidable predicament of the bourgeoisie, trapped between the profit and the loss calculations of its own class interest; as this predicament intensifies, so does the power of the Nazis. And the Nazis can hardly do better in their own interests than to employ the maximum possible ignorance and stupidity. The more bourgeois china is broken, the better fares the Party, the more inextricably is the bourgeoisie tied to its protection racketeers and the more noiselessly it has to abdicate lever after lever of its economic power to the Party. The black of the fascist cloth is the black of the ink into which the bourgeoisie has fallen. The dialectic of fascism is uncontrollable.”
― Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism
― Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism
