Lena

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“How exactly should we envisage the process whereby a movement, mobilised precisely on the basis of its abstraction from the prevailing conditions of class and class-interest and a deliberate detachment of its aims from a fundamental challenge to the existing structure of social relations and domination, might be transformed into a stable collective forces directed against those class-conditions and that structure of domination? Unless, of course, the movement itself becomes the terrain of class-struggle.”
― Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Ellen Meiksins Wood Reader

“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

“The retreat of race prejudice has begun. Sad though it may be, that is the way humanity progresses. The anniversary orators and the historians supply the prose-poetry and the flowers.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution