Antiglobalism Quotes

“Marxist writers are generally either indifferent or mildly hostile to the anti-capitalist movement, which they see as no good substitute for the great projects of communism and social democracy. Now, in one sense this is quite justified[…] However, there seems very little reason to believe that a return to the tactics of the twentieth-century labour movement is going to achieve anything in the future… [W]hat is wrong with commodification is not commodification per se… Marxist tradition goes much further than simply recommending that the excessive power of capital be challenged and curbed. Historically, this tradition tends to assert that such a challenge can only be made by virtue of a direct challenge to the existing relations of production, conceived of as the basis for a social totality, and, crucially, that it can only be made by the proletariat, politically mobilizes as a ‘Class of Itself’. In concrete terms, this means that only the labour movement, being organized and mobilized on the basis of its class identity and demanding the socialization of the means of production, can mount such a challenge… This is where I, and the anti-capitalist movement, part company with classical Marxism… [A]nti-capitalist movement is characterized by a certain pluralism, an unwillingness to impose any one model of social organization, and a refusal of neoliberal hegemony not on the basis of a single class identity or even a single universal human identity, but precisely n the basis of a defence of such pluralism against neoliberalism’s tyrannical monomania.”
― jeremy gilbert, Anti-capitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics

“A fatal mistake in the history of the world which at the current moment still continues to be made is the confusion of the nation with its ethnicity. A nation can be made of many enthicities; tribes unite and divide all the time, and they go from one nation to another; or they just live on the territories of two or other nations, which further helps with the process of fusion of other different countries altogether. The examples are almost everywhere you look. But when a certain type of ethnicity gets confused that it is the nation, it almost certainly leads to discrimination, conflicts, racism and over all pretty bad and nasty things. The same thing happens when an ethnicity which lives in the territory of a certain nation starts to capsulate itself (to deny its belongings to any type of nation), or to seek a national identity elsewhere—then we have separatism.”
― Borislav Vakinov, Heresy & Metaphysics: A Compendium of Thoughts and Ideas about Magic, Philosophy, Art, Identity, the Occult and the Deeply Weird Side of Existence