Sara Salem

“It is a pure tautology to say that crises are provoked by a lack of effective demand or effective consumption. The capitalist system does not recognize any forms of consumer other than those who can pay, if we exclude the consumption of paupers and swindlers. The fact that commodities are unsaleable means no more than that no effective buyers have been found for them, i.e. no consumers (no matter whether the commodities are ultimately sold to meet the needs of productive or individual consumption).”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“Describing African students sent to London to study in the 1970s, she writes (and Achebe quotes): They work hard for the Doctorates – They work too hard, Giving away Not only themselves, but All of us – The price is high, My brother, Otherwise the story is as old as empires.”
― Laura Chrisman, Postcolonial contraventions: Cultural readings of race, imperialism and transnationalism

“A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” The startling results were published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups.39 These results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today. Whites constituted the vast majority of drug users then (and now), but almost no one pictured a white person when asked to imagine what a drug user looks like. The same group of respondents also perceived the typical drug trafficker as black.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“All pursuit of commodity production becomes at the same time pursuit of the exploitation of labour-power; but only capitalist commodity production is an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which in the course of its historical development revolutionizes the entire economic structure of society by its organization of the labour process and its gigantic extension of technique, and towers incomparably above all earlier epochs.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2