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The Divide: A Bri...
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  (page 31 of 368)
""And as the water table drops, Palestinian wells are running dry. Palestinians are not allowed to deepen their wells or sink new ones without Israeli permission —- and permission is almost never granted. If they build without permission, as many do, Israeli bulldozers arrive the next day. So Palestinians are forced to buy their own water back from Israel at arbitrarily high prices."" Mar 14, 2026 09:27AM

 
Caliban and the W...
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  (page 92 of 285)
""forcing women to procreate against their will or (as a feminist song from the 1970s had it) forcing them to "produce children for the state," only in part defined women's function in the new sexual division of labor. A complementary aspect was the definition of women as non-workers, a process much studied by feminist historians, which by the end of the 17th century was nearly completed."" Apr 06, 2026 12:14PM

 
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Antonio Gramsci
“I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.

The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power. The mass ignores because it is careless and then it seems like it is the product of fate that runs over everything and everyone: the one who consents as well as the one who dissents; the one who knew as well as the one who didn’t know; the active as well as the indifferent. Some whimper piously, others curse obscenely, but nobody, or very few ask themselves: If I had tried to impose my will, would this have happened?

I also hate the indifferent because of that: because their whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me. I make each one liable: how they have tackled with the task that life has given and gives them every day, what have they done, and especially, what they have not done. And I feel I have the right to be inexorable and not squander my compassion, of not sharing my tears with them.

I am a partisan, I am alive, I feel the pulse of the activity of the future city that those on my side are building is alive in their conscience. And in it, the social chain does not rest on a few; nothing of what happens in it is a matter of luck, nor the product of fate, but the intelligent work of the citizens. Nobody in it is looking from the window of the sacrifice and the drain of a few. Alive, I am a partisan. That is why I hate the ones that don’t take sides, I hate the indifferent.”
Antonio Gramsci

Vladimir Lenin
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution

Karl Marx
“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Iain Banks
“You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history”
Iain Banks

Jonas Salk
“Who owns the patent on this vaccine?'
'Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Jonas Salk

52785 Marxism — 1112 members — last activity May 18, 2026 04:43PM
Reading works by and about Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels.
1132602 Marx's Capital Volumes I, II, III (Study Group - 2020 and beyond) — 368 members — last activity Jan 06, 2026 05:51AM
We see symptoms of crises all around us, from the immediate "public health" pandemic of COVID19 to repeated "financial" crises to escalating "environm ...more
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