beth’s Reviews > Socialism: Utopian and Scientific > Status Update

The third chapter of this really is chef's kiss, it all comes together so beautifully, like poetry... I particularly like Fourier's crisis of plethora.

'He proves ... that civilization moves “in a vicious circle”, in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain, so that, e.g., “under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself”.' (Fourier)

'To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories.'

Re-reading this, but making notes this time.

The creation of these trusts leads to the 'internal monopoly of [...] one company'.

I'm going to need to print chapter 3 out to take notes.

'They determine the total amount to be produced, parcel it out among themselves and thus enforce the selling price fixed beforehand. Since such trusts usually go to pieces as soon as business becomes bad, for this very reason they push towards a still more concentrated socialization.'

'Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the precondition for the unemployment of others and that large-scale industry, which hunts the whole world over for new consumers, confines the consumption of the masses at home to a starvation minimum and thus under mines its own internal market.'

'the social means of production and products were treated as if they were still the means of production and the products of individuals they had been before. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labour had appropriated the product, because it was [...]his own product and the auxiliary labour of others was the exception. Now [...] it was no longer his product, but exclusively the product of the labour of others.'