lena ∵

“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

“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

“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