The gadget lover

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar.

Marshall McLuhan

1911 - 1980

Por que não me ufano

O irracionalismo no saber se consolida quando não se pode fornecer um rigoroso ensino em termos de conhecimento filosófico científico para os pobres da periferia do capitalismo.

Há uma onda antielitista que está afastando a juventude da melhor literatura. Os grotões nacionais estão coalhados de igrejas, mas não há um mísero sebo. A luta de classes também se faz com a edificação de pontos de cultura. A formação de leitores é um importante fator social para construir a qualidade de vida.

Meditation on obedience and liberty

Marxists have not helped towards forming a clear view of the problem by picking out economics as the key to the social riddle. If one considers a society as a collective being, then this great beast, like all other beasts, can principally be defined by the way in which it makes sure of its food, sleep, shelter from the elements — in short, its life.

Simone Weil

1909 - 1943

Contact

To clear her head, Ellie it was her practice to go for long solo drives in her one extravagance, a carefully maintained 1958 Thunderbird with removable hardtop and little glass portholes flanking the rear seat. Often she would leave the top at home and speed through the scrub desert at night, with the windows down and her dark hair streaming behind her. Over the years, it seemed, she had gotten to know every small impoverished town, every butte and mesa, and every state highway patrolman in southwestern New Mexico. After a night observing run, she would love to zoom past the Argus guard station (that was before the cyclone fencing went up), rapidly changing gears, and drive north. Around Santa Fe, the faintest glimmerings of dawn might be seen above the Sange de Cristo Mountains. (Why should a religion, she asked herself, name its places after the blood and body, heart and pancreas of its most revered figure? And why not the brain, among other prominent but uncommemorated organs?)

Carl Sagan

1934 - 1996

Memória e sociedade

Nas caminhadas entre a casa e a escola eu fui me instruindo sobre as desigualdades sociais. Via mansões, casas humildes e meditava, sem que ninguém me dissesse nada, sobre a desigualdade social.

O que escolhi para a minha tese de doutorado? As operárias. Por que leitura? Porque é uma área problemática. As operárias, aliás, todos nós somos colhidos pelos fluxos da televisão e dos outros meios de massa. Mas a leitura exige uma vontade, uma opção de escolha. É um ato mínimo de vontade, mas esse passo precisa ser dado. E, no caso das operárias, envolve um grande empenho pessoal, porque não há livrarias nos bairros populares. O que impede a leitura da operária?

Ecléa Bosi

1936 - 2017

O irracionalismo brasileiro

 

O pensamento crítico ataca o populismo porque ele não ameaça os privilégios culturais da classe alta.

O irracionalismo nacional

Em pleno século XXI o brasileiro ainda aceita a crença de que a pobreza é uma punição ou um teste divino. Essa convicção dificulta a busca por melhoria de vida, construir uma boa sociedade ou colocar em prática a qualidade de vida.

O ateísmo é inseparável do comunismo

Não há atrocidades que a religião não tenha justificado: guerras, pilhagens imperialistas, prostituição, exploração extrema das massas e assassinatos em massa de trabalhadores - tudo foi santificado em nome da igreja e da religião, como se fossem ordens divinas.

Emelian Iaroslavski

1878 - 1943

Fronteiras

Existe uma "cultura autêntica" e uma "cultura alienada", isso é visível para quem usa cinco por cento do cérebro.

Note-se que a posição antielitista é anticientífica e visceralmente reacionária. Serve para a perpetuar os feudos.

A malta que se apropriou do discurso antielitista sabota a razão a pretexto de valorizar a "cultura popular", vence o Silvio Santos. 

Nada mais legítimo que desenvolver no país uma cultura letrada e dissipar a poeira do atraso e a miséria intelectual.

Contra todos os anti-intelectualismos é preciso afirmar enfaticamente que a libertação dos oprimidos passa pelo desenvolvimento integral da sua capacidade cognitiva.

Por que não me ufano

O indivíduo que domina o "código culto" tem uma capacidade maior de expressar-se, de compreender seu próprio contexto, de refutar e argumentar.

Na outra mão, o indivíduo que se expressa na "linguajeira popular" tem um horizonte cognitivo mutilado, um "código restrito", vocabulário pobre e um alto grau de redundância. Esse "linguajar espontâneo" impede o acesso a um código mais rico e mais complexo.

O meio social afeta o ritmo e a amplitude da psicogênese. As crianças subdesenvolvidas apresentam uma defasagem cognitiva considerável em relação às crianças que crescem em países desenvolvidos. E isso vale para adultos e idosos que cresceram numa sociedade cuja cultura letrada não faz parte do cotidiano e tampouco tem valor.

Indivíduos de classe baixa e média sem contato com o “código elaborado” dificilmente terão condições cognitivas para pensar de modo totalizante e refletir sobre os fatores responsáveis pela injustiça e pela desigualdade.

Os telecomunicadores, "artistas", políticos e religiosos manterão em seu gueto linguístico o indivíduo marginalizado que já vive em um gueto sócio-econômico. Assim, perpetua-se a desigualdade sócio-espacial e as discrepâncias financeiras.

Cultura alienada

O telespectador provinciano de televisão (e agora de redes sociais) continua tendo a sua disposição uma "produção cultural" capaz de satisfazer as exigências mínimas do imaginário. Nada mudou para os alienados, apenas deslocaram de um aparelho a outro.

Por que não me ufano

O Brasil está muito longe de ser uma sociedade livre, igualitária e democrática fundada na razão. 

A consciência depende do conhecimento e das condições de vida de cada indivíduo. Ela não cai do céu.

The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility

Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.

Walter Benjamin

1892 - 1940

Por que não me ufano

O Brasil nunca teve um ministro da educação de orientação marxista. Mas o cargo já foi preenchido por todo tipo de embusteiro do cristianismo. Na folha de pagamento consta até pastor e cosplay de nazista. É uma periferia que está literalmente nas mãos de Jesus.

Darcy Ribeiro foi o mais próximo de um marxista que sentou na cadeira do ministério da educação. Isto diz muito (e tudo) sobre o país continuar a ter um dos piores sistemas de educação do mundo.

Não é de ficar surpreso que os egressos desse sistema deficitário transformem fascistas em presidentes e faladores de merda em milionários.

Manifesto against labor

The “democracy” inherent in the labour society is the ever most perfidious system of domination in history – a system of self-oppression. That’s why such a democracy never organises its members free decision on how the available resources shall be utilised, but is only concerned with the constitution of the legal fabric forming the reference system for the socially segregated labour monads compelled to market themselves under the law of competition. Democracy is the exact opposite of freedom. As a consequence, the “labouring humans” are necessarily divided into administrators and subjects of administration, employers and employees (in the true sense of the word), functional elite and human material. The inner structures of political parties, applying to labour parties in particular, are a true image of the prevailing social dynamic. Leaders and followers, celebrities and celebrators, nepotism-networks and opportunists: Those interrelated terms are producing evidence of the essence of a social structure that has nothing to do with free debate and free decision. It is a constituent part of the logic of the system that the elite itself is just a dependent functional element of the labour idol and its blind resolutions.

The treadmill has to run at all cost, and “that’s all there is to it”. Advertising departments and armies of entertainers, company psychologists, image advisors and drug dealers are responsible for creating meaning. Where there is continual babble about motivation and creativity, there is not a trace left of either of them – save self-deception. This is why talents such as autosuggestion, self-projection and competence simulation rank among the most important virtues of managers and skilled workers, media stars and accountants, teachers and parking lot guards.

The state-run labour-simulation is violent and repressive by birth. It stands for the absolute will to maintain the rule of the “labour idol” by all means; even after its decease. This labour-bureaucratic fanaticism will not grant peace to those who resorted to the very last hideouts of a welfare state already fallen into ruins, i.e. to the ousted, jobless, or non-competitive, let alone to those refusing to labour for good reasons. Welfare workers and employment agents will haul them before the official interrogation commissions, forcing them to kow-tow before the throne of the ruling corpse.

The modern “working poor” may shine the shoes of the last businessmen of the dying labour society, may sell contaminated hamburgers to them, or may join the Security Corps to guard their shopping malls. Those who left behind their brain on the coat rack may dream of working their way up to the position of a service industry millionaire.

The police, salvation sects, the Mafia, and charity organisations become responsible for that annoying human litter. In Latin America, day after day an ever-larger number of street urchins and other poor are hunted down by free enterprise death-squads than dissidents were killed during the worst periods of political repression. There is only one social function left for the ostracised: to be the warning example. Their fate is meant to goad on those who still participate in the rat race of fighting for the leftovers. And even the losers have to be kept in hectic moving so that they don’t hit on the idea to of rebelling against the outrageous impositions they face.

Gruppe Krisis | 1999

Por que não me ufano

O brasileiro ficou preso em alguma mania do século V. A humanidade passou pela Renascença, pelo Iluminismo mas por onde andou o brasileiro?

A ilustração foi um movimento iconoclasta, voltado contra toda forma de obscurantismo e, em primeira instância, contra a religião.

A religião ainda é vista como aliada do despotismo político à medida que mantém as pessoas no infantilismo. Principalmente as mulheres.

O Iluminismo, diferente da mistificação, é maioridade, é autonomia, teoria, sistematização do conhecimento. Botou as coisas no lugar. E a religião ou a sua aceitação bloqueia o crescimento, adiando indefinidamente o acesso à idade adulta, à idade da razão e perpetuando a miséria.

Time for study

Comrades, 

Distinguished guests, 

Karl Marx was, as Friedrich Engels aptly remarked, one of those outstanding men who are only born a few to a century.

Erich Ernst Paul Honecker

1912 - 1994

Genealogy of fanaticism

 

Look around you: everywhere, specters preaching: each institution translates a mission; city halls have their absolute, even as the temples - officialdom, with its rules - a metaphysics designed for monkeys… Everyone trying to remedy everyone’s life: even beggars, even the incurable aspire to it: the sidewalks and hospitals of the world overflow with reformers. The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder or a desired malediction. Society - an inferno of saviors! What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited among the martyrs not quite beheaded.

Emil Cioran

1911 - 1995

A Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Karl Marx

1818 - 1883

Contact

Anything you don’t understand, you attribute to god. god for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say god did it.

Carl Sagan

1936 - 1994

World literature and class conflict

What Marx said about literature at various times in his life; what use he made of the many novels, poems, and plays which he read for enjoyment, recreation, or instruction; and how he introduced, into works not overtly concerned with literature, the terminology and concepts of literary criticism. The task seems necessary because mountains of commentary and elaboration are beginning to hide Marx's own words from view; because the standard compilations of his utterances on aesthetic matters tend to create confusion by mixing up pronouncements made atlarious times of his life, as well as pronouncements by Marx and by Engels; and because only a small proportion of Marx's references to literary works has so far been recognized and made available in English.

Siegbert Salomon Prawer

1925 - 2012

On the significance of militant materialism

The keen, vivacious and talented writings of the old eighteenth-century atheists wittily and openly attacked the prevailing clericalism and will very often prove a thousand times more suitable for arousing people from their religious torpor than the dull and dry paraphrases of Marxism, almost completely unillustrated by skillfully selected facts, which predominate in our literature and which (it is no use hiding the fact) frequently distort Marxism.

Vladimir Lenin

1870 - 1924

Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung

 

The social principles of christianity have now had eighteen hundred years to be developed.

The social principles of christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorifies the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, with somewhat doleful grimaces. 

The social principles of christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable.

The social principles of christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor’s compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of these infamies on earth.

The social principles of christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed.

The social principles of christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.

The social principles of christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary.

So much for the social principles of christianity. 

Karl Marx

1818 - 1883

Letter

 

Religion in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself. Finally, I desired that, if there is to be talk about philosophy, there should be less trifling with the label “atheism” (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy should be brought to the people. Voilà tout.

Karl Marx

1818 - 1883

The League of Militant Atheists

 

I Краевой Сибирский съезд Союза безбожников

Новосибирск | 1929

The plague

Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.

Albert Camus

1913 - 1960

The tyranny of structurelessness

As long as friendship groups are the main means of organizational activity, elitism becomes institutionalized.

For those groups which cannot find a local project to which to devote themselves, the mere act of staying together becomes the reason for their staying together. When a group has no specific task (and consciousness raising is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. There are limits placed on the compulsion to remold every person in our image of what they should be.

The end of consciousness-raising leaves people with no place to go, and the lack of structure leaves them with no way of getting there.

Jo Freeman

Collected works

The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, under mine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

1870 - 1924

Bezbozhnik II

Os trabalhadores de países desenvolvidos tendem a se libertar mais facilmente das crenças religiosas do que os trabalhadores de países subdesenvolvidos. Os preconceitos religiosos são uma prática comum em sociedades arcaicas, por isso a qualidade de vida é uma realidade exclusivamente de primeiro mundo.

Bezbozhnik

Os jovens dos países desenvolvidos encontram mais facilidade em abandonar as crenças religiosas, pois estas não estão profundamente enraizadas em suas mentes, no Brasil se dá o contrário, enraíza-se muito cedo as mistificações nas jovens cabecinhas. Os pequenos firewalls da fé são numerosos e facilmente manipulados por políticos fascistas. No entanto, para os idosos, se desvencilhar dessas convicções é mais desafiador, sobretudo no terceiro mundo. De maneira geral, as mulheres com muito pouca instrução enfrentam ainda mais dificuldade para se libertarem da religião do que os homens.

Program of the CPSU on the question of religion

The program of the Communist International also states dearly that communists fight against religion, as it is a counter-revolutionary force, an ally and a weapon of the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the revolutionary movement. Our Party is convinced that only when all social life, including economic life, proceeds according to a conscious, well-thought-out plan, will religion lose its authority over the peasantry and over the working class.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky

1878 - 1943

Slum of capitalism

In Brazil, good minds submitting to stupid ones.

The poverty of Brazil frustrates individual creativity.

It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a safe common sense and settle in. Don’t make changes in your mind.

Rêveries du promeneurs solitaire

J’étais sur les six heures à la descente de Ménilmontant presque vis-à-vis du Galant Jardinier, quand des personnes qui marchaient devant moi s’étant tout à coup brusquement écartées je vis fondre sur moi un gros chien danois qui, s’élançant à toutes jambes devant un carrosse, n’eut pas même le temps de retenir sa course ou de se détourner quand il m’aperçut. Je jugeai que le seul moyen que j’avais d’éviter d’être jeté par terre était de faire un grand saut si juste que le chien passât sous moi tandis que je serais en l’air. Cette idée plus prompte que l’éclair et que je n’eus le temps ni de raisonner ni d’exécuter fut la dernière avant mon accident. Je ne sentis ni le coup ni la chute, ni rien de ce qui s’ensuivit jusqu’au moment où je revins à moi.

Il était presque nuit quand je repris connaissance. Je me trouvai entre les bras de trois ou quatre jeunes gens qui me racontèrent ce qui venait de m’arriver. Le chien danois n’ayant pu retenir son élan s’était précipité sur mes deux jambes et, me choquant de sa masse et de sa vitesse, m’avait fait tomber la tête en avant : la mâchoire supérieure portant tout le poids de mon corps avait frappé sur un pavé très raboteux, et la chute avait été d’autant plus violente qu’étant à la descente, ma tête avait donné plus bas que mes pieds.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1712 - 1778

Caderno de significados

Ler exige recolhimento, uma ociosidade adequada, num gosto de anonimato que não se pode dizer que seja louvado. Não há tempo para ler, a distância entre a casa e o emprego é cada vez maior (...) a leitura não é protegida numa sociedade comprimida entre livros de ponta e telenovelas. A sociedade não se organizou no sentido de fazer do leitor um património cultural. Aquele que lê modera as leis da imbecilidade, que é o mesmo que dizer as leis do mal.

Ler e educar são coisas inseparáveis. A leitura é um movimento ginástico em que participam o coração e o cérebro.

Agustina Bessa Luís

1922 - 2019

Haussmann in the tropics

Brazil's most famous walled and Americanized edge city is Alphaville, in the northwest quadrant of greater Sao Paulo. Named (perversely) after the dark new world in Godard's dystopian 1965 film, Alphaville is a complete private city with a large office complex, an upscalemall, and walled residential areas - all defended by more than 800 private guards. Security is one of the main elements in its advertising and an obsession of all involved with it. In practice, this has meant vigilante justice for criminal or vagrant intruders, while Alphaville's own gilded youth are allowed to run amuck.

It is important to grasp that we are dealing here with a fundamental reorganization of metropolitan space, involving a drastic diminution of the intersections between the lives of the rich and the poor, which transcends traditional social segregation and urban fragmentation. Some Brazilian writers have recently talked about "the return to the medieval city", but the implications of middle-class secession from public space - as well as from any vestige of a shared civic life with the poor - are more radical. Rodgers, following Anthony Giddens, conceptualizes the core process as a "disembedding" of elite activities from local territorial contexts, a quasi-utopian attempt to disengage from a suffocating matrix of poverty and social violence. Laura Ruggeri (discussing Hong Kong's Palm Springs) stresses as well the contemporary quest of deracinated Third World elites for a "real imitation life", modeled on television images of a mythified Southern California, that "to succeed must be bounded - [i.e.], isolated from the ordinary landscape".

Fortified, fantasy-themed enclaves and edge cities, dis embedded from their own social landscapes but integrated into globalization's cyber-California floating in the digital ether - this brings us full circle to Philip K. Dick. In this "gilded captivity"; Jeremy Seabrook adds, the Third World urban bourgeoisie "cease to be citizens of their own country and become nomads belonging to, and owing allegiance to, a superterrestrial topography of money; they become patriots of wealth, nationalists of an elusive and golden nowhere".Back in the local world, meanwhile, the urban poor are desperately mired in the ecology of the slum.

Mike Davis

1946 - 2022

Architecture of fear

This lifestyle (iron gates, roadblocks and checkpoints, high walls, topped by glass, barbed wire, electrified wiring, panic button and heavy iron bars on all windows) is commonplace in the Third World and it reaches a global extreme in large urban society with the greatest socio-economic inequalities.

Por que não me ufano

As condições de moradia e a falta de estrutura socio-cultural configuram o ponto de vista ideológico do cidadão pouco instruído do terceiro mundo. Nesse sentido, a ideologia significa farsa.

Planet of slums

 

Global inequality as measured by world bank economists across the entire world population, reached an incredible Gini coefficient level of 0,67 by the end of the century - this is mathematically equivalent to a situation where the poorest twothirds of the world receive zero income, and the top third receives everything.

Mike Davis

1946 - 2022

Algoritmo

Tecnologia não se refere somente a ferramentas e a dispositivos eletrônicos, mas também é um conjunto de práticas discursivas e terapêuticas motivacionais que permite normalizar comportamentos, posições hierárquicas e coloniais dominantes.

Consciousness-raising again

 

And now, here's another charming picture. At Christmas-time one year my daily newspaper, the Independent, was looking for a seasonal image and found a heart-warmingly ecumenical one at a school nativity play. The Three Wise Men were played by, as the caption glowingly said, Shadbreet (a Sikh), Musharaff (a Muslim) and Adele (a Christian), all aged four.

Charming? Heart-warming? No, it is not, it is neither; it is grotesque. How could any decent person think it right to label fouryear-old children with the cosmic and theological opinions of their parents? To see this, imagine an identical photograph, with the caption changed as follows: "Shadbreet (a Keynesian), Musharaff (a Monetarist) and Adele (a Marxist), all aged four". Wouldn't this be a candidate for irate letters of protest? It certainly should be. Yet, because of the weirdly privileged status of religion, not a squeak was heard, nor is it ever heard on any similar occasion. Just imagine the outcry if the caption had read, "Shadbreet (an Atheist), Musharaff (an Agnostic) and Adele (a Secular Humanist), all aged four". Mightn't the parents actually be investigated to see if they were fit to bring up children?

Richard Dawkins

Relatório para os alienados

Tecnologia não se refere somente a ferramentas e a dispositivos eletrônicos, mas também é um conjunto de práticas discursivas e terapêuticas motivacionais que permitem normalizar comportamentos, posições hierárquicas e coloniais dominantes.

Tecnologias de construção de verdade.

Invenção da verdade.

Verdades capturadas pelo neoliberalismo.

Técnicas de produção de subjetividade.

Regimes epistemológicos.

Mudanças de paradigmas.

Plutocracy

Government without serious discussions or thoughtful deliberations generally facilitates misappropriation of resources and coup d'état.

Capital

 

The capitalist mode of production, while on the one hand en forcing economy in each individual business, on the other hand begets by its anarchical system of competition the most outrageous squandering of labour power and of the social means of production not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous.

The development of the productive forces of social labour is the historical task and privilege of capital. It is precisely in this way that it unconsciously creates the material requirements of a higher mode of production.

Por que não me ufano

A democracia brasileira é uma tartufaria de uma pequena festa oligárquica. Muito se rouba e pouquíssimo se recupera.

Latifúndio da comunicação

O conjunto de discursos do senso-comum, motivacionais e das letras de música ruim produz uma estática confusa para os oprimidos que faz perder de vista a causa material e cultural de sua opressão e os lança no vácuo a-histórico. Não se cria nada, não se produz nada de significativo. É neste vazio que entram as mentiras teológicas e os picaretas conseguem controlar regiões inteiras formando (e perpetuando) assim os seus currais eleitorais.

Social Democracy and Fascism

The distinction of Social Democracy and Fascism is no less important to understand than the parallelism. Both are instruments of the rule of monopoly capital. Both fight the working-class revolution. Both weaken and disrupt the class organisations of the workers. But their methods differ. Fascism shatters the class organisations of the workers from without, opposing their whole basis, and putting forward an alternative “national” ideology. Social Democracy undermines the class organisations of the workers from within, building on the basis of the previous independent movement and Marxist ideology, which still holds the workers’ traditions and discipline, in order more effectively to carry through the policy of capital and smash all militant struggle. Fascism accordingly requires for its full realisation the “totalitarian” terroristic class-State.

Social Democracy controls the workers most favourably and successfully in the liberal-parliamentary class-State, utilising its own “internal” methods of discipline, and occasional State coercion, for the suppression of all militant struggle.

Fascism operates primarily by coercion alongside of deception.

Social Democracy operates primarily by deception, alongside of coercion.

Rajani Palme Dutt

1896 - 1974

A joy of question

Young man, ask yourself: 

What kind of job 

society predestined 

for me?

Why my poor small town

doesn't have a bookstore?

A joy of question

Marx and Heine on a walk, by Alisa Poret | 1960

Young man, ask yourself: 

What is the place where I live? 

What is the future?

Where is the future?

Very small gardens

FROM TIME TO TIME I get letters from owners of very small gardens, asking what to do about them. These letters usually come from truly keen amateur gardeners, otherwise they would not take the trouble to write. May I quote from a typical letter?

"Our plot is the usual commonplace rectangle, 45 ft. by 175 ft., but I am resolved not to have a commonplace garden. Our house stands 40 ft. back from the road, with this pocket-handkerchief frontage. . . . We hope to plant a camomile lawn, and I have ideas about a lavender hedge . . . and we want one or two trees, not the usual suburban pink cherry. . . ."

Now this is evidently a gardener after my own heart; and there must be many of them up and down the country. They are restricted as to space, but not restricted in their imaginative ideas. Why, indeed, should anyone have a commonplace garden in the commonplace rectangle? Endless variations are possible, and endless suggestions could be made. For my own part, if I were suddenly required to leave my own garden and to move into a bungalow in a housing development, I should have no hesitation at all about ruffling the front garden into a wildly unsymmetrical mess and making it as near as possible into a cottage garden, which is probably the prettiest form of gardening ever achieved in this country in its small and unambitious way. I should plant only the best things in it, and only the best forms of the best things, by which I mean that everything should be choice and chosen. When you have only a very small area to your command you cannot afford to be otherwise than selective. Thus, if I had a lawn, it should be of the purest turf; and if I had shrubs they should be specially picked out, the very best lilacs, for example; and if I had bulbs for spring flowering, they should be of the loveliest, most delicate sorts, coming up through clumps of violets smothering the ground; bulbs of scilla and chionodoxa and the grape hyacinth and the dogtooth violet, and some fritillaries, but always the best and most unusual forms of these; and if I had annuals and biennials to fill up the gaps, they should always be the best, whether they were pansies or carnations.

Naturally, every garden must be a law to itself. So much depends upon soil, aspect, and the taste of the owner. More depends upon his taste than upon his purse. A comforting reflection to end up on.

V. Sackville-West

1892 - 1962

Por que não me ufano

O pior político coincide com o populacho muito pouco instruído. O político ganancioso encontra apoio nos hábitos, nos preconceitos e na péssima educação do povo.

Não se faz uma nação com pessoas ignorantes.

Por que não me ufano

A pobreza e a desorganização da sociedade brasileira frustam a criatividade individual. Sobretudo a leviandade e a desigualdade econômica. Está nação não está adequada a construir uma boa sociedade, a ter belas cidades, à civilização. As mentes inteligentes são submetidas a mentes burras, pois estas são maioria e, por incrível que pareça, ocupam gabinetes do Estado. A força e a coragem são estranguladas pela ganância, cobiça por poder e pelo medo de mudança.

The straight mind and other essays

L'hétérosexualité est le regime politique sous lequel nous vivons, fondé sur l'esclavigisation des femmes.

Our political thought has been for more than a century shaped by dialects. Those of us who have discovered dialetical thought through its most modern form, the Marxian and Englesian one, that is, the producer of the theory of class struggle, had, in order to understand its mechanism, to refer to Hegel, particulary if they needed to comprehend the reversal which Marx and Engels inflicted on Hegel's dialectics. That is, briefly, a dynamization of the essentialist categories of Hegel, a transport from metaphysics to politics (to show that in the political and social field metaphysical terms had to be interpreted in terms of conflicts, and not anymore in terms of essential oppositions, and to show that the conflicts could be overcome and the categories of opposition reconciled).

Monique Wittig

1935 - 2003

To Mrs Reynolds's Cat

 

Cat! who hast passed thy grand climacteric,
   How many mice and rats hast in thy days
   Destroyed? How many tit-bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears - but prithee do not stick
   Thy latent talons in me, and up-raise
   Thy gentle mew, and tell me all thy frays
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -
   For all thy wheezy asthma, and for all
Thy tail's tip is nicked off, and though the fists
   Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
   In youth thou enteredst on glass-bottled wall.

John Keats

1795 - 1821

How the bourgeoisie solves the housing question

 

The transformation of the workesrs into capitalists, the solution of the social question, a house of his own for each worker, all these things have been left behind, up above in "the region of ideals". All that remains for us to do is to introduce the cottage system into the country areas and to make the worker's barracks in the towns as tolerable as possible.

Friedrich Engels

1820 - 1895

Insipid reality

Neoliberals is unable to succeed even on paper in turning his worker into a capitalist.

День Победы

 Alça a bandeira revolucionária

The housing question

Comes the housing shortage? How did it arise? There must be tenants even for the most infamous pigsties.

Whoever declares that the capitalist mode of production, the "iron laws" of present-day bourgeois society, are inviolable, and yet at the same time would like to abolish their unpleasant but necessary consequences, has no other resource but to deliver moral sermons to the capitalists, moral sermons whose emotional effects immediately evaporate under the influence of private interests and, if necessary, of competition. These moral sermons are in effect exactly the same as those of the hen at the edge of the pond in which she sees the family of ducklings she has hatched out gaily swimming. Ducklings take to the water although it is not dry land, and capitalists grab after profit although it is heartless. "There is no room for sentiment in money matters", was said already by old Hansemann.

The capitalist order of society reproduces again and again the evil which are to be remedied. 

Capital is the command over the unpaid labor of others.

A Workers' Inquiry

What is your trade?

Does the shop in which you work belong to a capitalist or to a limited company/ State the names of the capitalist owners or directors of the company.

State the number of rooms in which the various branches of production are carried on. Describe the specialty in which you are engaged. Describe not only the technical side, but the muscular and nervous strain required, and its general effect on the health of the workers.

Describe the hygienic conditions in the workshops; the size of the rooms, space allotted to every worker, ventilation, temperature, plastering, lavatories, general cleanliness, noise of machinery, metallic dust, dampness, etc.

Is there any municipal or government supervision of hygienic conditions in the workshops?

Are there in your industry particular effluvia which are harmful for the health and produce specific diseases among the workers?

Is first-aid organized in your workshop?

How much time do you lose in coming to the workshop and returning home?

Are wages paid entirely in money, or in some other form?

If you rent a lodging from your employer, on what conditions ? Does he not deduct the rent from your wages?

Have you ever known any rank and file workers who could retire from employment at the age of 50 and live on the money earned by them as wage workers.

Do any resistance associations exist in your trade and how are they led? Send us their rules and regulations.

Do you know of cases when the government made unfair use of the armed forces, to place them at the disposal of the employers against their wage workers?

Are you aware of any cases when the government intervened to protect the workers from the extortions of the employers and their illegal associations?

Does the government strive to secure the observance of the existing factory laws against the interests of the employers? Do its inspectors do their duty?

Are there in your workshop or trade any friendly societies to provide for accidents, sickness, death, temporary incapacity, old age, etc.? Send us their rules and regulations.

Are there cooperative guilds in your trade? How are they controlled? Do they hire workers for wages in the same ways as the capitalists? Send us their rules and regulations.

Are there any workshops in your trade in which payment is made to the workers partly in the form of wages and partly in the form of so-called profit sharing? Compare the sums received by these workers and the sums received by other workers who don't take place in so-called profit sharing. State the obligations of the workers living under this system. may they go on strike, etc. or are they only permitted to be devoted servants of their employers?

What are the general physical, intellectual and moral conditions of life of the working men and women employed in your trade?

Karl Marx

La Revue Socialiste | 1880

The future of an ilusion

Sigmund Freud, se estivesse vivo, estaria a completar 169 voltas ao redor do sol. O autor de O futuro de uma ilusão tratou a parte central da história cristã como uma gigantesca fraude:

"A religião é comparável a uma neurose da infância".

The struggle of the scientific spirit against the religious Weltanschauung is, as you know, not at an end: it is still going on today under your eyes.