The division of society into a small, excessively rich class and a large, propertyless class of wage-workers results in a society suffocating from its own super-fuity, while the great majority of its members is scarcely, or even not at all, protected from extreme want. This state of affairs becomes daily more absurd and—more unnecessary. It must be abolished, it can be abolished
Friedrich Engels, Introduction to Wage Labour and Capital: Wages, Price and Profit
Tag: Karl Marx
Quotes: Illusions
STUDYING DAS KAPITAL: Part 1 (of 8)
I can’t argue with William Roberts. Reading Capital, Volume 1, feels like Hell. Marx, in the French preface, likens the reading to the climbing of a mountain. I’m taking baby steps, though.
There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
Preface to French Edition
STUDYING DAS KAPITAL: Part 1 (of 8)
William Roberts argued persuasively in his book “Marx’s Inferno” that Karl Marx structured Das Kapital Volume 1 to parallel Dante’s Inferno. Look over the diagram below which is taken from Robert’s book.
The Collected Works of Karl Marx & Frederick Engels (MECW)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Double Standards
Against Vulgarising the Slogan of Self-Criticism
The slogan of self-criticism must not be regarded as something temporary and transient. Self-criticism is a specific method, a Bolshevik method, of training the forces of the Party and of the working class generally in the spirit of revolutionary development. Marx himself spoke of self-criticism as a method of strengthening the proletarian revolution. 1 As to self-criticism in our Party, its beginnings date back to the first appearance of Bolshevism in our country, to its very inception as a specific revolutionary trend in the working-class movement.
Dancing While the Dollar Depreciates
Feels appropriate to drop some remixes to go along with the Reagan era remix—Stephen Miran’s nomination to the Federal Reserve Board is just the latest track in a long playlist of dollar devaluation, austerity for the rest of us, and profits for the usual suspects. Still waiting on a proper critique from economists like Michael Roberts or Michael Hudson, but from what I’ve gathered so far, the “Miran Doctrine” is collapse choreography: pain for the working class, leverage for capital.
Marx saw this coming: the ruling class conjures up the ghosts of past ideologies to mask present-day extraction.
So here’s this DJ set of Madonna remixes—because I need an escape, and maybe you do too.
Late-Night Reading, Upgraded 📖✨
Vladimir Lenin: On the Question of Dialectics
Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness—voilà the epistemological roots of idealism. And clerical obscurantism (= philosophical idealism), of course, has epistemological roots, it is not groundless; it is a sterile flower undoubtedly, but a sterile flower that grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge.
Choreographed Dissent
How Reform Rebrands Power Without Redistributing It
Notice: This is not an endorsement of Mr. Reagan. What strikes me is how long it’s taken some folks to catch on—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was never the political outsider she was marketed to be. I remember watching these videos years ago. Even then, it was clear her role was never to disrupt the machinery, but to redirect dissent—to shepherd disillusioned voters back into the Democratic fold. The Justice Democrats weren’t a rupture; they were a renovation.
You can’t change the system from within.
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Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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