#marx

The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions. Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird. The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#freud #freudians #internet #marx #marxism

The problem with Marxism is the proletariat isn’t going to rise up against capitalism and consumerism. The only time they’ll rise up is during a commercial break to either go to the bathroom or grab more beer.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#beer #capitalism #commercials #communism #consumerism

Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective. ↗

— John Lithgow

#big #everything #great #groucho #i

For us, Marxism is always open because there are always new xperiences, there are always new facts, including facts about the past, which have to be incorporated in the corpus of scientific socialism. ↗

— Ernest Mandel

#always #because #corpus #facts #including

In the house in Beverly Hills where our four children grew up, living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the old tenement on New York's East 93rd Street we Marx Brothers called home. ↗

— Harpo Marx

#beverly hills #brothers #called #children #conditions

Of course, Marxism is an example of what Carl Popper would have called a 'World Three' structure, in that it's got immense power as an idea, but you couldn't actually hold up anything in the world and say: 'this is Marxism'. ↗

— Alan Moore

#anything #called #carl #course #example

There's something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages. ↗

— P. J. O'Rourke

#brings #economic #economic system #encourages #growth

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. ↗

— Barack Obama

#active #avoid #being #black #carefully

I grew up Jewish, became an atheist and a Marxist, and 28 years ago, at age 26, became a Christian. ↗

— Marvin Olasky

#ago #atheist #became #christian #grew

Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise. ↗

— John Ralston Saul

#been #before #born #child #delivered