James Baldwin 1971
My 2017 look is nailed down.
Walter Benjamin, notes on “Prostitution, Gambling’ in the Arcades text,” Excerpt From: Wizisla, Erdmut. “Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship.” Verso.
Civil War II #2
Thus far the bourgeoisie has raced along the track of civilisation at a quicker rate than the proletariat, not because they are intellectually more powerful than the latter indeed one might properly argue the contrary case - but because the political and economic organisation of society has been such that, hitherto, the bourgeoisie alone have enjoyed access to learning and science has existed only for them, and the proletariat has found itself doomed to a forced ignorance, so that if the proletariat has, nevertheless, made progress (and there is no denying it has) then that progress was made not thanks to society, but rather in spite of it.
Mikhail Bakunin (1869) “On Education”
“When I lean on the shoulder of the woman I love, and can see, let’s say, the peace of twilight over a mountain landscape, gold-green fields, the shadow of trees, black-nosed sheep motionless behind hedges and the sun about to disappear behind craggy peaks, and know – not from the expression on her face, but from within the world as it is – that the woman I love is seeing the same world, and that this convergence is part of the world and that love constitutes precisely, at that very moment, the paradox of an identical difference, and promises to continue to exist. The fact is she and I are now incorporated into this unique Subject, the Subject of Love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference, so this world can be conceived, be born, and not simply represent what fills my own individual gaze. Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world.”
Alain Badiou (2009) In Praise of Love, London: Serpent’s Tail: 25-26.
malenkho reblogged
Here in Fraga, you can throw banknotes into the street and no one will notice. Rockerfeller, if you were to come to Fraga with your entire bank account, you would not be able to buy a cup of coffee. Money, your God and your servant, has been abolished here, and the people are happy.
article in an anarchist paper during the Spanish Civil War (via kropotkitten)
#Tarwater
Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as “natural,” and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassing general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten. Since they do not yet grasp our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things differently.
Terry Eagleton (1990) The Significance of Theory
malenkho reblogged
Sir Patrick Stew going in for the hetro male kiss. This is kinda amazing the fact that it tears down all that macho bullshit and is closer to love and compassion of one’s fellow man.
O CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN
The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.
Karl Marx ‘Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation‘ Capital.
The true Northern Powerhouse
From Gabriella Coleman (2015) Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous Paperback (London: Verso)