Ajey N

“Saint-Simon was aware of the role of class struggle in history. Thus he divided contemporary French society into the industriels and the oisifs—those who worked, and the rich parasites who lived off their labor.”
― Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx

“We cannot prove that privileged owe something to the rest, any more than we can prove that theft is wrong.”
― Jean Drèze, Sense And Solidarity - Jholawala Economics for Everyone

“In our own time, the thought leaders have often been deployed to help us see problems in precisely the opposite way. They are taking on issues that can easily be regarded as political and systematic—injustice, layoffs, unaccountable leadership, inequality, the abdication of community, the engineered precariousness of ever more human lives—but using the power of their thoughts to cause us to zoom in and think smaller. The feminists wanted us to look at a vagina and zoom out to see Congress. The thought leaders want us to look at a laid-off employee and zoom in to see the beauty of his feeling his vulnerability because at least he is alive. They want us to focus on his vulnerability, not his wage.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society