Jabari Bell

“Benjamin was right when he wrote that in view of the crimes men daily commit against themselves and against external nature, instead of realizing the correct practice, there is good sense even in the most eccentric fantasies and extravagant utopias. Today, when men’s technical possibilities have outstripped the dreams of the old Utopians many times over, it appears rather that these possibilities, negatively realized, have changed into forces of destruction, and therefore, instead of bringing about an albeit always humanly limited salvation, lead to total destruction, a grim parody of the transformation intended by Marx, in which Subject and Object are not reconciled, but annihilated.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“The gameboard became what I imagine as a galaxy of 8 ½ million lives connected to each other in ways beyond counting: those with the most connections—and therefore the most access to favors, advice, job tips, and string pulling—shone the brightest, and the reconnection and reorganization of New Yorkers sent new tastes, ideas, resources, and behaviors coursing through every borough, unleashing financial, human, and social capital. Like a giant brain, the more connections, the more synapses firing, the higher functioning New York became. Those without wide connections, or with none at all, were left behind.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“It belongs essentially to the advance of civilization as more and more organized increasing domination, that nature takes revenge on the men who have degraded it to mere material for human aims, by ensuring that men can only buy their domination by an ever-increasing suppression of their own nature. The division of nature and man in labour is reflected in the irreconcilability of the pleasure principle and the reality principle.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“The free social individual can only come into existence with the abolition of the division of labour, and the division of labour is fundamentally identical with the division of society into classes.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx