lena ∵ > lena ∵'s Quotes

“Liberalism's thought is quite liberal with the chaos of its idealist contents.”
― Jun Tosaka, The Japanese Ideology: A Marxist Critique of Liberalism and Fascism

“A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the "value-forming substance", the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“The retreat of race prejudice has begun. Sad though it may be, that is the way humanity progresses. The anniversary orators and the historians supply the prose-poetry and the flowers.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

“But nothing, however profitable, goes on for ever. From the very momentum of their own development, colonial planters, French and British bourgeois, were generating internal stresses and intensifying external rivalries, moving blindly to explosions and conflicts which would shatter the basis of their dominance and create the possibility of emancipation.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

“Yet Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth. ... Today by a natural reaction we tend to a personification of the social forces, great men being merely or nearly instruments in the hands of economic destiny. As so often the truth does not lie in between. Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. ... In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

“Parliament may be ultimately accountable to its electorate, but the 'people' are not truly sovereign. For all intents and purposes, there is no politics - or at least no legitimate politics - outside Parliament. Indeed, the more inclusive the 'people' has become, the more the dominant political ideologies - from Conservative to mainstream Labour - have insisted on depoliticising the world outside Parliament and delegitimating 'extra-parliamentary' politics.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Ellen Meiksins Wood Reader

“How exactly should we envisage the process whereby a movement, mobilised precisely on the basis of its abstraction from the prevailing conditions of class and class-interest and a deliberate detachment of its aims from a fundamental challenge to the existing structure of social relations and domination, might be transformed into a stable collective forces directed against those class-conditions and that structure of domination? Unless, of course, the movement itself becomes the terrain of class-struggle.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Ellen Meiksins Wood Reader

“Without theoretical consciousness, without the need to express it in articulate language, but making their statement with their bodies and their actions, they cried out that there can be no civil and political equality as long as there is economic inequality, and that the way to end this inequality is not with laws, decrees, lectures and sermons, but by overthrowing by force the bases of a society divided into classes.”
― Amadeo Bordiga, The Science and Passion of Communism : Selected Writings of Amadeo Bordiga