General ripening

“By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the process of production, [the concentration of capital] matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements for the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one”

-Karl Marx, 1867 (Capital Volume 1.  New York: The Modern Library.  Pg 552)

Factory enthusiasts

“It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of the labor of society, than that it would turn all society into one immense factory.”

-Karl Marx, 1867 (Capital, volume 1. New York: The Modern Library. Pg 391)

Standard issue

“Even those intellectuals who have all the political arguments against bourgeois ideology at their fingertips, undergo a process of standardization…What they subjectively fancy radical, belongs objectively so entirely to the compartment in the pattern reserved for their like, that radicalism is debased to abstract prestige, legitimation for those who know what an intellectual nowadays has to be for and what against.  The things they opt for have long since been just as accepted, in numbers just as restricted, in their hierarchy of values just as fixed, as those of student fraternities…their views…are allowed to partake only of pre-selected nutrition, cliches against cliches. [Van Gogh, Proust, books about forest animals, some stalwart spirit, and a few noisy jazz records that make you feel at once collective, audacious and comfortable]  Every opinion earns the approbation of friends, every argument is known by them before-hand.  That all cultural products, even non-conformist ones, have been incorporated into the distribution-mechanisms of large-scale capital, that in the most developed country a product that does not bear the imprimatur of mass-production can scarcely reach a reader, viewer, listener at all, denies deviationary longings their subject matter in advance.  Even Kafka is becoming a fixture in the sub-let studio…they no longer desire anything that does not carry the highbrow tag”

-Theodor Adorno, on ‘Expensive Reproduction’, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 206-7)

Assignment

“Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.  Though, having lost autonomy, no longer trusts itself to comprehend reality, in freedom, for its own sake.  This it leaves, respectfully deluded, to the highest-paid, thereby making itself measurable”

-Theodor Adorno, ‘IQ’, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 196)

Shall we overcome?

“[Marx's] analysis implies that overcoming capital entails more than overcoming the limits to democratic politics that result from systematically grounded exploitation  and inequality; it also entails overcoming determinate structural constraints on action, thereby expanding the realm of historical contingency and, relatedly, the horizon of politics”

-Moishe Postone, 2006 (“History and Helplessness: mass  mobilization and contemporary forms of anticapitalism”.  Public Culture 18(1).  P 94)

Banknotes

“A descriptive analysis of banknotes is needed. The unlimited satirical force of such a book would be equaled only by its objectivity. For nowhere more naively than in these documents does capitalism display itself in solemn earnest. The innocent cupids frolicking about numbers, the goddesses holding tablets of the law, the stalwart heroes sheathing their swords before monetary units, are a world of their own; ornamenting the facade of hell.”

-Walter Benjamin’s Tax Advice, 1926 (in “One Way Street”. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926. Cambridge MA: Harvard. 1996. Pg 481.)

Underdogs

“In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so”

-Theodor Adorno, “They, the People”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005)