Capitalist Inspiring Quotes

We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.

A free state is a corporate state.

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

Every capitalist is rich, but every rich is not a capitalist.

While we don’t select friends because they might help us advance our careers, here’s the dirty capitalist truth: friendship has been the source of some of our biggest professional leaps. We are women for whom work is a huge part of our identity, in a way that wasn’t true for either of our mothers. Friends are how we’ve figured out the salary we deserve and how to negotiate for it. They’ve been a source of solace when our bosses shortchanged us, and they’ve been the inspiration to keep going when, having moved up, we become the bosses and feel like imposters.

It remains one of the great inequalities of the world that some children are born light years ahead of others. They may come from more stable homes, from wealthy homes, from homes with cleaners and domestic staff, cooks and tutors. Everything is easier, more streamlined, more conducive to educational and career success. Others will come from one-bedroom huts with no running water and no electricity, little chance of a good education, and little time to do anything besides work. The child born into a rich family will, no doubt, progress at a faster rate and develop the sort of self-assurance that comes from stability. This is the case wherever you’re from; it is as true of communist societies as it is of capitalist ones. I have travelled the world and seen these inequalities. I have witnessed the problems such different starting blocks can bring. But if I’ve learned anything, it is that success is possible, whatever your situation and however your life begins. I hope that this story, my story, will prove inspirational and that it will encourage others to dream big, take a plunge, use whatever resources are available. If a small poor boy fishing for prawns on a lake in Ningbo can do it, then so can you.

Capitalism is an ability to stay rich and keep getting rich.

The very same bourgeois mentality which extols the manufacturing division of labour, the life-long annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and the unconditional subordination of the detail worker to capital, extols them as an organisation of labour which increases productivity - denounces just as loudly every kind of deliberate social control and regulation of the social process of production, denounces it as an invasion of the inviolable property rights, liberty and self-determining genius of the individual capitalist. It is characteristic that the inspired apologists of the factory system can find nothing worse to say of any proposal for the general organisation of social labour, than that it would transform the whole of society into a factory.

a quote from John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. In a dedicated product team, the team acts and feels a lot like a startup within the larger company, and that's very much the intention.

Though the Son of Man expressed His federation with humanity, He was very careful to note that He was like man in all things save sin. He challenged His hearers to convict Him of sin. But the consequences of sin were all His as the Son of Man. Hence the prayer to let the chalice pass; His endurance of hunger and thirst; His agony and bloody sweat; perhaps even His seeming older than He actually was; His condescension to wash the feet of His disciples; His absence of resentment as the swine-owning capitalists ordered Him from their shores; His endurance of false charges of being a winebibber, a glutton; His gentleness, which expressed itself in hiding when His enemies would have stoned Him; above all, His endurance of worry, anxiety, fear, pain, mental anguish, fever, hunger, thirst, and agony during the hours of His Passion-all these things were to inspire men to imitate the Son of Man. Nothing that was human was foreign to Him.

Our capitalistic society emphasizes pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps and making one’s own way to the top of the economic ladder, or as high as one can possibly reach. While there is nothing inherently wrong with making a legitimate and honest living, the emphasis on individuality that pervades our society often causes people to overlook the plight of the poor or even to believe that the poor owe their impoverished state to their own purported laziness. While this may be true of some of the poor, it is not fair to make sweeping judgments that allege all of the poor to be slothful parasites who live off taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

Perhaps it is time to question goals that run counter to near-universal behavior. There may be lessons for us in the failure of Soviet-style Communism. It is our era's foremost example of a system that made mesmerizing promises of an earthly paradise but betrayed those promises. Millions of people were inspired by an ideology that would do away with capitalist exploitation. Marxists believed that the working class would seize the means of production, the state would wither away, selfishness would disappear, and man would live 'from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.' In the name of this ideology millions gave their lives and took the lives of millions of others. Communism failed. It failed for many reasons, not least because it was a misreading of human nature. Selfishness cannot be abolished. People do not work just as hard on collective farms as they do on their own land. The almost universal rejection of Communism today marks the acceptance of people as they are, not as Communism wished them to be. Is it possible that our racial ideals assume that people should become something they cannot? If most people prefer the company of people like themselves, what do we achieve by insisting that they deny that preference? If diversity is a weakness rather than a strength, why work to increase diversity?

In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.

Just as we have created a society in which it would be unthinkable to light up a cigarette in the Kennedy Center lobby, we can create a society where it is unthinkable that a child suffers abuse, fails in school, becomes delinquent, or faces teasing and bullying. We could have a society in which diverse people and organizations work together to ensure that families, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods are nurturing and that our capitalistic system functions to benefit everyone.

I try at best to be capitalistic but whenever i see the suffering of the unfortunate members of the community,a socialist hormone is induced into my system that whenever i try to balance between the two worlds again i realize i know where i belong,that my identity is not robbed but truly an altruistic African.

mobilize citizens against elites, inspired democratic leaders, and a good dose of luck. These moments tend not to last. The institutions often turn out to be more fragile than they first appear, and they require continual renewal. In a basically capitalist economy, financial elites, even when constrained, retain an immense amount of residual power. That can be contained only by countervailing democratic power. The Bretton Woods era suggests that a more benign form of globalization is possible. But the postwar brand of globalization, balancing citizenship and market, above all required a politics. Today, a few thinkers could sit in a seminar room and design a thinner globalization and a stronger democratic national polity. Keynes and his generation did just that after World War II. But they had the political winds at their backs. Today’s architects of democratic capitalism face political headwinds. Though ideas do matter, they are no substitute for political movements.

The church and capitalists responded to the rising egalitarian threat by creating a hierarchy which demonized women to divide the previously united peasants. Where all had previously worked together in a society, waged labour created class warfare and a new master-servant relationship between men and women.

While a capitalist who invests in anything that produces income is entitled to a return on investment, women who produced the entire work force are entitled to none.

The creation of officially sanctioned knowledge removed ownership of knowledge from women and indigenous societies and placed it all under rigid capitalist control. Practices which had been used and tested for centuries were not considered official or tested until the Great Men approved and claimed ownership of them.

Photographs from Distant Places (1) In distant villages, You always see the same scenes: Farms Cattle Worship spaces Small local shops. Just basic the things humans need To endure life. (2) ‘Can you stay with me forever?’ She asked him in the airport, While hugging him tightly in her arms. ‘Sorry, I can’t. My flight leaves in two hours and a half.’ He responded with an artificially caring voice, As he kissed her on her right cheek. (3) I was walking in one of Bucharest’s old streets, In a neighborhood that looked harshly beaten by Time, And severely damaged by development and globalization. I saw a poor homeless man Combing his dirty hair In a side mirror of a modern and expensive car! (4) The shape and the color of the eyes don’t matter. What matters is that, As soon as you gaze into them, You know that they have seen a lot. All eyes that dare to bear witness To what they have seen are beautiful. (5) A stranger asked me how I chose my path in life. I told him: ‘I never chose anything, my friend.’ My path has always been like someone forced to sit In an airplane on a long flight. Forced to sit with the condition Of keeping the seatbelt on at all times, Until the end of the flight. Here I am still sitting with the seatbelt on. I can neither move Nor walk. I can’t even throw myself out of the plane’s emergency exit To end this forced flight! (6) After years of searching and observing, I discovered that despair’s favorite hiding place Is under business suits and tuxedos. Under jewelry and expensive night gowns. Despair dances at the tables where Expensive wines of corruption And delicious dinners of betrayal are served. (7) Oh, my poet friend, Did you know that The bouquet of fresh flowers in that vase On your table is not a source of inspiration or creativity? The vase is just a reminder Of a flower massacre that took place recently In a field Where these poor flowers happened to be. It was their fate to have their already short lives cut shorter, To wither and wilt in your vase, While breathing the not-so-fresh air In your room, As you sit down at your table And write your vain words. (8) Under authoritarian regimes, 99.9% of the population vote for the dictator. Under capitalist ‘democratic’ regimes, 99.9% of people love buying and consuming products Made and sold by the same few corporations. Awe to those societies where both regimes meet to create a united vicious alliance against the people! To create a ‘nation’ Of customers, not citizens! (9) The post-revolution leaders are scavengers not hunters. They master the art of eating up The dead bodies and achievements Of the fools who sacrificed themselves For the ‘revolution’ and its ideals. Is this the paradox and the irony of all revolutions? (10) Every person is ugly if you take a close look at them, And beautiful, if you take a closer look. (11) Just as wheat fields can’t thrive Under the shadow of other trees, Intellectuals, too, can’t thrive under the shadow Of any power or authority. (12) We waste so much time trying to change others. Others waste so much time thinking they are changing. What a waste! October 20, 2015

No ordinary person in history has willingly gone to war on behalf of the rich elite. It has been said that no one would ever fight in the name of capitalism. There are no martyrs for capitalism, no fiery, inspiring speeches, no people pledging to fight for it to their last breath. Who would go to the stake for the credo “Greed is good”? Capitalism never stirs the blood. It makes no contact with people’s souls. It has no heart. It’s all about the Profit Principle. It’s about private wealth and public exploitation. People would fight against capitalism, never for it. So, capitalism cunningly rebranded itself as “Freedom and Democracy”, and those are things for which people would and do fight. Whenever you hear the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, you can be sure you are listening to the propaganda of a cabal of superrich capitalists, manipulating you to fight on their behalf, in defence of their extortionate profits. Dumbocracy – A political system in which stupid people think they have power when, in fact, all decisions are taken by the rich. Freedumb and Dumbocracy – only the most stupid people on earth would fall for the lies of the rich. Freedom for what – to go shopping for capitalist goods? Democracy – freedom to vote for whomever the rich elite put on your ballot paper. Wake up!

Almost any positive good [positive liberty] can be described in terms of freedom from something [negative liberty]. Health is freedom from disease; happiness is a life free from flaws and miseries; equality is freedom from advantage and disadvantage.. Faced with this flexibility, the theorist will need to prioritize some freedoms and discount others. At its extreme we may get the view that only some particular kind of life makes for ‘real freedom’. Real freedom might, for instance, be freedom the bondage of desire, as in Buddhism and Stoicism. Or it might be a kind of self-realization or self-perfection only possible in a community of similarly self-realized individuals, pointing us towards a communitarian, socialist, or even communist ideal. To a laissez-faire capitalist, it is freedom from more than minimal necessary political and legal interference in the pursuit of profit. But the rhetoric of freedom will typically just disguise the merits or demerits of the political order being promoted. The flexibility of the term ‘freedom’ undoubtedly plays a huge role in the rhetoric of political demands, particularly when the language of rights mingles with the language of freedom. ‘We have a right to freedom from…’ is not only a good way, but the best way to start a moral or political demand. Freedom is a dangerous word, just because it is an inspirational one. The modern emphasis on freedom is problematically associated with a particular self-image. This is the 'autonomous' or self-governing and self-driven individual. This individual has the right to make his or her own decisions. Interference or restraint is lack of respect, and everyone has a right to respect. For this individual, the ultimate irrationality would be to alienate his freedom, for instance by joining a monastery that requires unquestioning obedience to a superior, or selling himself into slavery to another. The self-image may be sustained by the thought that each individual has the same share of human reason, and an equal right to deploy this reason in the conduct of his or her own life. Yet the 'autonomous' individual, gloriously independent in his decision-making, can easily seem to be a fantasy. Not only the Grand Unifying Pessimisms, but any moderately sober reflection on human life and human societies, suggest that we are creatures easily swayed, constantly infected by the opinions of others, lacking critical self-understanding, easily gripped by fantastical hopes and ambitions. Our capacity for self-government is spasmodic, and even while we preen ourselves on our critical and independent, free and rational decisions, we are slaves of fashion and opinion and social and cultural forces of which we are ignorant. A little awareness of ethics will make us mistrustful of sound-bite-sized absolutes. Even sacred freedoms meet compromises, and take us into a world of balances. Free speech is sacred. Yet the law does not protect fraudulent speech, libellous speech, speech describing national secrets, speech inciting racial and other hatreds, speech inciting panic in crowded places, and so on. In return, though, we gain freedom from fraud, from misrepresentation of our characters and our doings, from enemy incursions, from civil unrest, from arbitrary risks of panic in crowds. For sure, there will always be difficult cases. There are websites giving people simple recipes on how to make bombs in their kitchens. Do we want a conception of free speech that protects those? What about the freedom of the rest of us to live our lives without a significant risk of being blown up by a crank? It would be nice if there were a utilitarian calculus enabling us to measure the costs and benefits of permission and suppression, but it is hard to find one.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, Bold is a playbook. Our deepest hope is that it inspires you to get off the couch and change the world. Said differently, because of the amazing opportunities created by exponentially growing communications technology, many of today’s best and brightest have been lured in by an app-tilted playing field, which has both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists believing that three years to profitability and exit should be the norm. Of course, if your true passion is building apps, then build away. But let’s be clear: when Steve Jobs said that the goal of every entrepreneur should be to “put a dent in the universe”—he wasn’t talking about inventing the next Angry Birds. This book is for those who want to make the Giant Dent. It’s about the fact that, because of exponential empowerment, anyone can make that Giant Dent. Seriously, what are you waiting for?

Democratically-oriented Jeffersonian inspiration has prevailed throughout history and certainly been more admired than capitalistic Hamiltonian-style motivations of greed and power.

On September 27, 1919, 128 alienated White socialists, inspired by the recent Russian Revolution, gathered in Chicago to form the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). “The racial oppression of the Negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each intensifying the other,” the CPUSA’s program declared, sounding eerily like the founding racial program of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1903. Since then, SPA leaders, such as the party’s five-time presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, had tended to say that there was “no negro question outside of the labor question.” Like their SPA predecessors, CPUSA officials would also go on to raise capitalist exploitation over racial discrimination, instead of leveling and challenging them both at once. In their incomplete reading of the world’s political economy, racism emerged out of capitalism, and therefore the problem of capitalism came before the problem of racism. The Communists theorized that if they killed capitalism, racism would die, too—not knowing that capitalism and racism had both emerged during the same long fifteenth century, and that since then, they had been mutually fortifying each other while developing separately. The Communist of the CPUSA admonished Blacks (and Whites) during the Red Summer to “realize their misery is not due to race antagonism, but the CLASS ANTAGONISM” between big business and labor.14

There are around two million new businesses started each year in the United States. Fewer than one thousand receive VC funding (a chance of one in two thousand). Typically, fewer than one hundred of those portfolio companies will create really significant wealth (one in ten VC investments). These are steep odds, so venture capitalists have developed fierce survival strategies about how, and in what, they invest their funds. They seek as high a return on their investment as possible in as short a time as possible-hundreds of times their investment within three years, if they can get it. Remember that a VC firm typically sees one significant success out of ten start-up companies. Your start up company, if successful, must therefore make enough profit, and the VC must have enough ownership, to compensate the investment firm for their other nine failures. That puts a lot of pressure on you to deliver.

A compact organization lets all of us spend our time managing the business rather than managing each other.

Handcrafted Humanity Sonnet 12 Here are some words born of narrowness, Activist, woke, religious, atheist, Socialist, communist, capitalist, conservative, Intellectual, intelligent, classy, elitist, Educated, learned, well-versed, sound-mind, Traditional, old-fashioned, spiritual, altruistic, Empiricist, Existentialist, rationalist, freethinker, Godly, compassionate, selfless and mystic. I refuse to be defined by any of them, None of them can explain my true sentiment. I may advocate for the good within each of them, But I refuse to give any of them exclusive endorsement. All these words are too puny to define my identity. My name is human, my heart contains entire humanity.

First, capitalism has created a world that nobody but a capitalist is capable of running.

John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers.

Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. This is what we’re after. This is worth giving up the rooting-tooting boots for: belief, togetherness, equality. This is why people get obsessed with festivals, or clubs, or drugs, or football, or other temporal approximations of togetherness; these distilled vials of the elixir are craved by our starved souls. I’m as materialistic as the next man, probably more, given that the next man is George Orwell, and I am prepared to relinquish my trinkets for a shot at living in that ramshackle paradise. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. Orwell wrote this in the mid-thirties. Consider how radically capitalism has advanced since then. In his great dystopian fiction 1984, Orwell described a totalitarian regime where humans were constantly observed, scrutinized, and manipulated, where freedom had been entirely eroded, omnipotent institutions dominated, and every home glowed with the mandatory TV screen streaming state-sponsored data. Well, he was spot on, aside from a bit of glitter and the fact that we voluntarily install our own screens. Orwell saw this brief period in Spanish history as a potential template for an alternative future. Ordinary workers took over their businesses and factories and ran them democratically. Naturally, they were brutally massacred by a multitude of enemies—the fascists, communists, and liberal democracies all coiled about them in a terrified asphyxiating clench. I’d never heard of this Revolution. The reason for this is, of course, that it’s so fucking inspiring. The Revolutions that we’re taught about are ones that wind neatly back to repression of one flavor or another and convey the bleak, despairing narrative that makes the forms of impoverishment we live with now, whether financial or spiritual, seem preferable. No one, absolutely no one, will tell you that an alternative is possible, and the ways and means are strewn all about us. A lot of other political struggles and social uprisings labeled “Revolutions” are, in my mind, unworthy of the term, in that they were simply a hegemonic exchange. Whether it’s the Russian Revolution, which led to Stalinism, or the American Revolution, which led to corporate oligarchy. The Revolution we advocate ought to have two irrefutable components: 1) nonviolence, and 2) the radical improvement of the quality of life for ordinary people.

Women must begin to realize how much has been stolen from us by patriarchy. We have every right to reclaim all of it. No one is going to suddenly hand it back to us, individually or collectively. We must begin to take back portions for ourselves—little by little—until all of it is reclaimed. Every time a woman does so, she inspires more females to do so... eventually creating a tsunami of change.

Given my insistence on the importance of acknowledging radical negativity and of relinquishing the idea of a society beyond division and power, it will not come as a surprise that I disagree with the attempt by a group of left intellectuals to revive the ‘Idea of communism’.9 They claim that the ‘communist hypothesis’ is absolutely necessary for envisaging a politics of emancipation. They argue that the egalitarian ideal is so intrinsically linked to the horizon of communism that its future depends on bringing back such a model. They are no doubt right in refusing the widely accepted view that the disastrous failure of the Soviet model forces us to reject the entirety of the emancipatory project. But I do believe that there are important lessons to be learned from the tragic experience of ‘really existing socialism’, and this calls for a serious rethinking of some central tenets of the communist project. It would indeed be too easy to simply declare that the Soviet model represents a flawed realization of an ideal that remains to be truly implemented. To be sure, many of the reasons for which the communist ideal went astray could be avoided and the current conditions might provide a more favourable terrain. But some of the problems that it encountered cannot be reduced to a simple question of application. They have to do with the way this ideal was conceptualized. To remain faithful to the ideals that inspired the different communist movements, it is necessary to scrutinize how they conceived their goal so as to understand why those ideals could have become so disastrously misled. It is the very notion of ‘communism’ that needs to be problematized because it strongly connotes the anti-political vision of a society where antagonisms have been eradicated and where law, the state and other regulatory institutions have become irrelevant. The main shortcoming of the Marxist approach lies in its inability to acknowledge the crucial role of what I call ‘the political’. While traditional Marxism asserted that communism and the withering away of the state logically entailed each other, Laclau and I assert that the emancipatory project can no longer be conceived of as the elimination of power and the management of common affairs by social agents identified with the viewpoint of the social totality. There will always be antagonism, struggles and division of the social, and the need for institutions to deal with them will never disappear. By locating socialism in the wider field of the democratic revolution, we indicated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy that the political transformations that will eventually enable us to transcend capitalist society are founded on the plurality of social agents and their struggles. Thus the field of social conflict is extended rather than being concentrated in a ‘privileged agent’ such as the working class. It is for this reason that we reformulated the emancipatory project in terms of a radicalization of democracy. We emphasized that the extension and radicalization of democratic struggles will never have a final point of arrival in the achievement of a fully liberated society. This is why the myth of communism as a transparent and reconciled society – which clearly implies the end of politics – must be abandoned.

For Ki-young, who had just graduated from the Operations Class of Kim Jong Il University of Political and Military Science, commonly called Liaison Office 130, the man's defeatist attitude was surprising. How could he live in enemy territory without being alert? How could he let go of his animosity toward the South, where the great enemy Chun Doo Swan massacred thousands of people in Kwangju in broad daylight? Later, he realized the South specialized in lifelessness and defeatism. Indiscriminate weariness was prevalent. Ki-yong knew what ennui was, but this was the first time he personally observed it. At home, it was an abstract idea batted about when criticizing capitalism. Of course, there was ennui back home, too. But in a socialist society it was closer to boredom. And it was really a matter of inadequate motivation; a bit of stimulation could change the feeling of boredom. But the prototypical capitalist ennui Ki-yong encountered for the first time in the South was heavy and voluminous. Like poisonous gas, it suffocated and suppressed life. Mere exposure to it prompted the growth of fear. Sometimes you encountered people who inspired in you an immediate primal caution, something that made you say, I don't want to live like that. That civil servant in the office had this effect on Ki-yong. He represented depression, emptiness, cynicism.

Initially working out of our home in Northern California, with a garage-based lab, I wrote a one page letter introducing myself and what we had and posted it to the CEOs of twenty-two Fortune 500 companies. Within a couple of weeks, we had received seventeen responses, with invitations to meetings and referrals to heads of engineering departments. I met with those CEOs or their deputies and received an enthusiastic response from almost every individual. There was also strong interest from engineers given the task of interfacing with us. However, support from their senior engineering and product development managers was less forthcoming. We learned that many of the big companies we had approached were no longer manufacturers themselves but assemblers of components or were value-added reseller companies, who put their famous names on systems that other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) had built. That didn't daunt us, though when helpful VPs of engineering at top-of-the-food-chain companies referred us to their suppliers, we found that many had little or no R & D capacity, were unwilling to take a risk on outside ideas, or had no room in their already stripped-down budgets for innovation. Our designs found nowhere to land. It became clear that we needed to build actual products and create an apples-to-apples comparison before we could interest potential manufacturing customers. Where to start? We created a matrix of the product areas that we believed PAX could impact and identified more than five hundred distinct market sectors-with potentially hundreds of thousands of products that we could improve. We had to focus. After analysis that included the size of the addressable market, ease of access, the cost and time it would take to develop working prototypes, the certifications and metrics of the various industries, the need for energy efficiency in the sector, and so on, we prioritized the list to fans, mixers, pumps, and propellers. We began hand-making prototypes as comparisons to existing, leading products. By this time, we were raising working capital from angel investors. It's important to note that this was during the first half of the last decade. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, and ensuing military actions had the world's attention. Clean tech and green tech were just emerging as terms, and energy efficiency was still more of a slogan than a driver for industry. The dot-com boom had busted. We'd researched venture capital firms in the late 1990s and found only seven in the United States investing in mechanical engineering inventions. These tended to be expansion-stage investors that didn't match our phase of development. Still, we were close to the famous Silicon Valley and had a few comical conversations with venture capitalists who said they'd be interested in investing-if we could turn our technology into a website. Instead, every six months or so, we drew up a budget for the following six months. Via a growing network of forward-thinking private investors who could see the looming need for dramatic changes in energy efficiency and the performance results of our prototypes compared to currently marketed products, we funded the next phase of research and business development.

With the onset of the war, each belligerent eagerly scanned its competitors and allies for aspects of state management and intervention in the war economy which could be imitated. The capitalist sectors, appeased by enormous profits and inspired no doubt also by patriotism, raised no objections. The result was a qualitative and quantitative expansion of the role of the state which has never been fully reversed–for though wartime arrangements were sometimes abandoned with peace, in virtually every case they were eventually adopted again, usually permanently.

Modern biomimicry is far more than just copying nature's shapes. It includes systematic design and problem-solving processes, which are now being refined by scientists and engineers in universities and institutes worldwide. The first step in any of these processes is to clearly define the challenge we're trying to solve. Then we can determine whether the problem is related to form, function, or ecosystem. Next, we ask what plant, animal, or natural process solves a similar problem most effectively. For example, engineers trying to design a camera lens with the widest viewing angle possible found inspiration in the eyes of bees, which can see an incredible five-sixths of the way, or three hundred degrees, around their heads. The process can also work in reverse, where the exceptional strategies of a plant, animal, or ecosystem are recognized and reverse engineered. De Mestral's study of the tenacious grip of burrs on his socks is an early example of reverse engineering a natural winner, while researchers' fascination at the way geckos can hang upside down from the ceiling or climb vertical windows has now resulted in innovative adhesives and bandages. Designs based on biomimicry offer a range of economic benefits. Because nature has carried out trillions of parallel, competitive experiments for millions of years, its successful designs are dramatically more energy efficient than the inventions we've created in the past couple of hundred years. Nature builds only with locally derived materials, so it uses little transport energy. Its designs can be less expensive to manufacture than traditional approaches, because nature doesn't waste materials. For example, the exciting new engineering frontier of nanotechnology mirrors nature's manufacturing principles by building devices one molecule at a time. This means no offcuts or excess. Nature can't afford to poison itself either, so it creates and combines chemicals in a way that is nontoxic to its ecosystems. Green chemistry is a branch of biomimicry that uses this do-no-harm principle, to develop everything from medicines to cleaning products to industrial molecules that are safe by design. Learning from the way nature handles materials also allows one of our companies, PaxFan, to build fans that are smaller and lighter while giving higher performance. Finally, nature has methods to recycle absolutely everything it creates. In natures' closed loop of survival on this planet, everything is a resource and everything is recycled-one of the most fundamental components of sustainability. For all these reasons, as I hear one prominent venture capitalist declare, biomimicry will be the business of the twenty-first century. The global force of this emerging and fascinating field is undeniable and building on all societal levels.

the autonomous-driving side of things, Alphabet (formerly Google), which has logged several million self-driving-car test miles, continues to lead the pack. At the end of 2016, it created a new business division, called Waymo, for its autonomous driving technology. In May 2017, Waymo and Lyft announced that they would work together on developing the technology, and later in the year, Alphabet invested $1 billion in the start-up. Others, like Cruise Automation (which GM acquired for $1 billion) and Comma.ai, which offers open-source autonomous driving technology in the same vein as Google’s Android mobile operating system, are chasing hard. Baidu, China’s leading Internet search company, has an autonomous-driving research center in Sunnyvale. Byton—backed by China’s Tencent, Foxconn, and the China Harmony New Energy auto retailer group—has an office in Mountain View, as does Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing company in which Apple invested $1 billion. Many of these companies have taken not just inspiration but also talent from Tesla. Part of the value of an innovation cluster like Silicon Valley lies in the dispersal of intellectual labor from one node to the next. For instance, PayPal is well known in the Valley for producing a number of high performers who left the company to start, join, or invest in others. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn; Max Levchin, whose most recent of several start-ups is the financial services company Affirm; Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and President Trump–supporting venture capitalist who cofounded “big data” company Palantir; Jeremy Stoppelman, who started reviews site Yelp; Keith Rabois, who was chief operating officer at Square and then joined Khosla Ventures; David Sacks, who sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion and later became CEO at Zenefits; Jawed Karim, who cofounded YouTube; and one Elon Musk.

This issue of Stvar we dedicate to the anniversaries. Each effort that commences from historical years and epochal dates, however, is not only supposed to cope with the legacy and lessons of evoked events and figures, but also to question a certain (dominant) relation to the past and history. In other words, the task is not a commemorative one, that is, a fetishist relation to the epoch of decisive dates and big events, but rather the radical grasping of the materiality of history following its work where social contradictions require that fight for emancipation and progress is to be taken up. What is at stake here is not an academic requiem or a leftist memorial service to the era of revolutions and great revolutionaries; it is all about casting our gaze toward the past in order to better examine those moments where the past opens itself toward the future. The relation toward past, therefore, should contain perspectives of different future. Amputation of the future is nowadays one of the features of many current academic, scientific and ideological discourses. Once this perspective of different future has been eliminated, the resignification of Marx, Luxemburg, Kollontai, Lenin and others becomes possible, because their doctrines and results have been quite depoliticized. On the contrary, it is the memory that calls for struggle that is the main cognitive attitude toward the events remembered in the collected texts in this issue. Not nostalgic or collectionist remembrance but critical memory filled with hope. The main question, thus, is that of radical social transformations, i.e. theory and practice of revolution. In this sense, Marx, Kollontai, Lenin and other Bolsheviks, and Gramsci as well, constitute the coordinates in which every theoretical practice that wants to offer resistance to capitalist expansion and its ideological forms is moving. The year 1867, when the first Volume of Marx’s Capital is brought out in Hamburg, then October 1917 in Russia, when all power went to the hands of Soviets, and 1937, when Gramsci dies after 11 years of fascist prison: these are three events that we are rethinking, highlighting and interpreting so that perspective of the change of the current social relations can be further developed and carried on. Publishing of the book after which nothing was the same anymore, a revolutionary uprising and conquest of the power, and then a death in jail are the coordinates of historical outcomes as well: these events can be seen as symptomatic dialectical-historical sequence. Firstly, in Capital Marx laid down foundations for the critique of political economy, indispensable frame for every understanding of production and social relations in capitalism, and then in 1917, in the greatest attempt of the organization of working masses, Bolsheviks undermined seriously the system of capitalist production and created the first worker’s state of that kind; and at the end, Gramsci’s death in 1937 somehow symbolizes a tragical outcome and defeat of all aspirations toward revolutionizing of social relations in the Western Europe. Instead of that, Europe got fascism and the years of destruction and sufferings. Although the 1937 is the symbolic year of defeat, it is also a testimony of hope and survival of a living idea that inspires thinkers and revolutionaries since Marx. Gramsci also handed down the huge material of his prison notebooks, as one of the most original attempts to critically elaborate Marx’s and Lenin’s doctrine in new conditions. Isn’t this task the same today?

If we go back to the classics, or at least what I regard as the classics, say for example, Humboldt's "Limits of State Action" which inspired Mill and is a true libertarian-liberal classic. The world that Humboldt was considering, which was partially an imaginary world. But the world for which he was developing this political philosophy was a post-feudal but pre-capitalist world. It was a world in which there is no great divergence among individuals in the kind of power that they have and what they command, let's say. But there was a tremendous disparity between individuals on the one hand and the state on the other. Consequently, it was the task of a liberalism that was concerned with human rights and equality of individuals and so on. It was the task of that liberalism to dissolve the enormous power of the state which was such an authoritarian threat to individual liberties. And from that, you develop a classical liberal theory in, say, Humboldt's or Mill's sense. Well, of course, that is pre-capitalist. He couldn't conceive of an era in which a corporation would be regarded as an individual, let's say, or in which such enormous disparities and control over resources and production would distinguish between individuals in a massive fashion. Now, in that kind of a society, to take the Humboldtian view is a very superficial liberalism. Because while opposition to state power in an era of such divergence conforms to Humboldt's conclusions, it doesn't do so for his reasons. That is, his reasons lead to very different conclusions in that case. Namely, I think his reasons lead to the conclusion that we must dissolve the authoritarian control over production and resources which leads to such divergences among individuals. In fact, I think one might draw a direct line between classical liberalism and a kind of libertarian socialism, which I think can be regarded as a kind of an adapting of the basic reasoning of classical liberalism to a very different social era. So, my own feeling has always been that to achieve the classical liberal ideals, for the reasons that led to them being put forth in a society so different, we must be led in a very different direction. It's superficial and erroneous to accept the conclusions which were reached for a different society and not to consider the reasoning that led to those conclusions. The reasoning, I think, is very substantial. I'm a classical liberal in this sense, but I think it leads me to be a kind of an anarchist, you know, an anarchist socialist.