Iluzie

“A document of legitimation cannot be transformative -- it must be as formal and static as the regime it is legitimating. Thus, many branches of radical thought are kept from growing, others are cut off, some bent and broken, and still others isolated. Through the formalizing processes of the German Social Democratic Party, the Second International, and finally the Soviet Union, Marx was transformed from a source of infinite self-transformation into a monument -- static in form and content. The turning of a thinker into a monument is equivalent to their death -- as it is in death that one's potentiality is cut off and it is finally said what one "was" -- reduced to bones, to the rigid and the inanimate. The thinker becomes a statue, and statues, as Lenin once reportedly said, are "for pigeons to shit on." If the statue is successfully established, its weight grows in accordance with its influence; and then, one must heed Zarathustra's warning to "be careful lest a statue fall and kill you!”
― Jonas Čeika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century

“The greatest barrier to the emergence and spread of these movements is not the overwhelming power of capital. It is the conviction, held by millions of people, that change is impossible. The moment we let go of our collective belief in the inevitability of the current system is the moment we start to build a new one.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“All of these statist manifestations of Marx had rivals who tried to preserve Marx's revolutionary potential, to wield him as a hammer against these regimes, but, over time, they were marginalized and conquered, and sometimes, to add insult to injury, portrayed as Marx's enemies, both by the open anti-Marxists and those who used Marx to defend existing capitalist regimes. This same vulgarization was committed against Nietzsche by those Nazis who proclaimed the arrival of the Ubermensch in the Third Reich, even when this Ubermensch was characterized by two of Nietzsche's most hated things -- a German and an anti-Semite.”
― Jonas Čeika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century

“We may think the world in which we live is unchangeable, and therefore believe it makes more sense to submit than to fight back. Free-market capitalism might not be the best system in the world, but it's better than all the others we've ever tried.

Such thinking is based on the arrogant and implausible assumption that all possible ways of organizing society have - at this particular point in time- already been put to the test. When you look at the history of the world, it becomes quite clear that the ideals of democracy and socialism -as articulated by liberals and socialists- have never really been put into practice. True political and economic democracy has always and consistently been thwarted by those in charge.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom