#capital

[W]hat counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. … [E]mancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable. ↗

— Mark Fisher

#capitalist-realism #ideology #nature #neoliberalism #possibility

Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison. ↗

— Eduardo Hughes Galeano

#change

Buffett was a billionaire who drove his own car, did his own taxes, and still lived in a home he had bought in 1958 for $31,500. He seemed to answer to a deeply rooted, distinctly American mythology, in which decency and common sense triumphed over cosmopolitan guile, and in which an idealized past held firm against a rootless and too hurriedly changing present. ↗

— Roger Lowenstein

#capitalist #warren-buffett #change

...Communism, it's a reactive formation derived from capitalism. For this reason it's less flexible and has a lower survival potential. The days of laissez-faire capitalism are completely dead, and the assumptions of nineteenth-century Communism are equally dead, because they were based on laissez-faire capitalism. While there's hardly a trace of it left in capitalist countries, Communism is still reacting to something that's been dead for over a hundred years. And present-day Communism clings to this outmoded concepts, refusing to acknowledge the contradictions and failures of the Marxist system. Communism doesn't have any capacity to change. Capitalism is flexible, and it's changing all the time, and it's changed immeasurably. Communism apparently are still asserting that they are not changing, they're following the same Marxist principles. We don't have any principles. It's an advantage. ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#laissez-faire-capitalism #change

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#death-penalty #gandalf #j-r-r-tolkien #lord-of-the-rings #death

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#crime #death #justice #punishment #death

There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#death #life #right-to-die #suicide #death

Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself. ↗

— Chris Hedges

#death

In the developed countries of the capitalist world, the mass media are beginning to become businesses, and huge businesses at that. The freedom of journalists is now becoming, in most cases, a very relative thing: it ends where the interests of the business begin... In socialist areas, it is enough to recall that the means of social communication are the monopoly of the party. ↗

— Hélder Câmara

#journalism #media #socialism #business

The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep. ↗

— Guy Debord

#death