Richard Marx Quotes

Capitalism, Marx said, never went beyond those economic models where a few dominate a majority. Capitalism just replaced the dichotomies of master/slave and lord/serf with a new one. A dominating and exploiting minority was still there, but it had a new name: employers.

People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing.

To achieve a society that exhibits liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy, the object to change first and foremost is production.

Recounting the experience of individuals brings home, as nothing else can, the sheer complexity of the choices they had to make, and the difficult and often opaque nature of the situations they confronted. Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in 1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945. If they had known, doubtless the choices they made would have been different. One of the greatest problems in writing history is to imagine oneself back in the world of the past, with all the doubts and uncertianties people faced in dealing with a future that for the historian has also become the past. Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing. These conditions included not only the historical context in which they lived, but also the way in which they thought, the assumptions they acted upon, and the principles and beliefs that informed their behavior. A central aim of this book is to re-create all these things for a modern readership, and to remind readers that, to quote another well-known aphorism about history, 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Marx

Karl Marx, who famously stated in the 1840s: Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Zeb grinned. “You were the only person I know who’s done it on an occupied police car.” I glared at him. “If you want to start trading stories, we can start trading stories. As a former member of the Richard Marx Fan Club, you don’t want to start this arms race.” Zeb smiled meekly around a rib. Agreed.” “Richard Marx?” Jolene asked. “He went through an obnoxiously cheerful pop phase. Don’t ask.

Outside of a dog,” Teddy said, wiggling his eyebrows and puffing on an imaginary Groucho cigar, a whole other Marx than the one Mickey alluded to, “a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

I don't shy away from saying that the single most developed tradition of critical thought devoted to the study of capitalism was initiated by Karl Marx. His work was built on that of many people who preceded him. It does not offer the only set of solutions to our problems; it has its own shortcomings and failures. But if you want to think critically about capitalism, sooner of later you are going to have to encounter the theoretical traditions of Marxism, because it is the most developed and draws from contributions made from every country on Earth, from a thousand struggles against business and governments supporting capitalism. It's a repository, a rich resource that ought to be made use of by anyone who wants to have a balanced perspective when it comes to dealing with the real problems.

IDEOSFERĂ: Ideile sunt ca nişte fiinţe vii. Se nasc, cresc, proliferează, se confruntă cu alte idei şi în cele din urmă pier. Şi dacă ideile, ca şi fiinţele vii, ar avea propria lor evoluţie? Şi dacă ideile s-ar selecta între ele ca să le elimine pe cele mai slabe şi să le reproducă pe cele mai puternice ca în darwinism? În lucrarea Hazard şi Necesitate, apărută în 1970, Jacques Monod a emis ipoteza că ideile ar putea avea o autonomie şi, ca şi fiinţele organice, ar fi capabile să se reproducă şi să se înmulţească. În 1976, în Genă egoistă, Richard Dawkins pomeneşte conceptul de „ideosferă”. Ideosfera ar fi pentru lumea ideilor ceea ce este biosfera pentru lumea fiinţelor vii. Dawkins scrie: „Cînd plantezi o idee fertilă în mintea mea, îmi parazitezi literalmente creierul, transformîndu-l în vehicul pentru propagarea acestei idei”. Şi citează conceptul de Dumnezeu, o idee care s-a născut într-o zi şi a evoluat şi propagat continuu, preluată şi amplificată de parabole, scrieri, apoi muzică, artă, preoţii reproducînd-o şi interpretînd-o astfel încît să o adapteze spaţiului şi timpului în care trăiesc. Dar ideile, mai mult decît fiinţele vii, suferă repede mutaţii. De exemplu, conceptul, ideea de comunism, născută în mintea lui Karl Marx, s-a răspîndit într-un timp foarte scurt în spaţiu pînă la a acoperi jumătate din lume. Ea a evoluat, a suferit mutaţii, ca în cele din urmă să se reducă, stăruind la un număr din ce în ce mai mic de persoane, ca o specie animală pe cale de dispariţie. Dar, în acelaşi timp, a constrîns ideea de „capitalism” să sufere şi ea mutaţii. Din lupta ideilor din ideosferă apare civilizaţia noastră. Actualmente, computerele sunt pe cale să dea ideilor o accelerare a mutaţiei. Datorită Internetului, o idee se poate răspîndi mai repede în spaţiu şi timp, putînd să se confrunte mai rapid cu rivalii sau cu prădătorii ei. E excelent pentru răspîndirea ideilor bune, dar şi pentru cele rele, căci în noţiunea de idee nu există noţiunea de „moral”. De altfel, nici în biologie, evoluţia nu ascultă de nici un fel de morală. Iată de ce poate că ar trebui să reflectăm de două ori înainte de a răspîndi idei. Căci ele sunt de acum înainte mai puternice decît oamenii care le inventează şi decît cei care le vehiculează. În fine, e doar o idee... Edmond Wells, Enciclopedia cunoaşterii relative şi absolute, volumul IV

Capitalism , as Marx defined it, is a system in which productive wealth is privately owned. Communism (which Marx proposed as an alternative) is one in which productive wealth is owned by the community, or by the nation on behalf of the people.

European revolutions followed textbooks—Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Karl Marx’ Communist Manifesto or Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf—while Mexicans wrote their texts after the fighting was over.

The word communism, coined in Paris in the 1840s, refers to three related but distinct phenomena: an ideal, a program, and a regime set up to realize the ideal.*1 The ideal is one of full social equality that in its most extreme form (as in some of Plato’s writings) calls for the dissolution of the individual in the community. Inasmuch as social and economic inequalities derive primarily from inequalities of possession, its attainment requires that there be no “mine” and “thine”—in other words, no private property. This ideal has an ancient heritage, reappearing time and again in the history of Western thought from the seventh century b.c. to the present. The program dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century and is most closely associated with the names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In their Communist Manifesto of 1848 Marx and Engels wrote that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Engels claimed that his friend had formulated a scientific theory that demonstrated the inevitable collapse of societies based on class distinctions. Although throughout history there had been sporadic attempts to realize the communist ideal, the first determined effort to this effect by using the full power of the state occurred in Russia between 1917 and 1991. The founder of this regime, Vladimir Lenin, saw a propertyless and egalitarian society emerging from the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would eliminate private property and pave the way for Communism.

In his address at Marx’s funeral Engels described “the law of human history” his friend is said to have discovered: that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have a shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion etc; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence . . . form[s] the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even ideas on religion of the people concerned have evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case. In short, economics is the foundation of organized life: all else is “superstructure.

I'm happy, I would say that I'm one of the happiest people I know but I've certainly had periods of profound sadness, depression and heartache and those are the kind of things that are interesting to me to write about.

In the last analysis, this stereotyped image of American culture as “sick” owed its existence to critics from the New Left.* America now displayed all the characteristics of a decadent modernity, or Zivilisation , as well as a decaying Faustian empire. Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Richard Barnet, and Richard Slotkin all explained that American culture glorified violence, imperialism, and genocide. It practiced a vicious form of capitalism and technological repression (described by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden), a bankrupt liberalism (scathingly criticized by Roberto Unger), a manipulative consumerism (laid bare by Christopher Lasch and William Leach), as well as racism and a hatred of all minorities and subordinate groups. Not only blacks but American Indians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Hispanics, and women suffered unendurable humiliations at the hands of mainstream American society.

We have to use instead of the weapon of criticism, the criticism of weapons.

One of the peculiarities of black magic, as mentioned earlier, is the inversion of names. Inversions in general so permeated Marx s whole manner of thinking that he used them throughout. He answered Proud- 26/ MARX&>SATAN hon's book The Philosophy of Misery with another book entitled The Misery of Philosophy He also wrote, "We have to use instead of the weapon of criticism, the criticism of weapons." 15

There is nothing in Marx, Lenin, or Mao that is or could be in contradiction to any set of phenomena in the physcial world.

Who is Friedrich Engels?” “He was Karl Marx’s inspiration for the Communist Manifesto. The early nineteenth century was a dark time for the workingman. The majority of the children born to working-class parents died before the age of five. So while Engels wrote about a political revolution, Dickens was writing about a different kind of revolution—a revolution of the heart. He was writing about the things he wrote about in his other books, the welfare of children and the need for social charity.

Time flies like an arrow . . . but fruit flies like a banana.” —Unknown  (often attributed to Groucho Marx)

I come from the lower orders, that is understood by all. Not the lowest; you’d have to go back to my grandfather for the lowest. He was a night-soil remover, did you know that, Sam? One shilling per stinking cesspit. Did you know that they set me to working with him when I was a boy? One summer I chucked it, ran to the countryside, hid in a hay mow. Farmer found me in the morning, took pity, let me stay. Let me work with him and his dogs, tending his sheep. It was bliss. I never loved anything like I loved them dogs. Then my father showed up and dragged me home. Why? He didn’t want me. “Never mind. You could say my father’s rise to running his own public house was nothing short of a miracle, really. And then I went and edged up a rung from him, didn’t I, when I became a constable. Promoted to detective. Then chief of detectives. Still and all, I got about as high as I could possibly go, given what I come from. And that ain’t particular high. Just ask Sir Richard Mayne, commissioner of the Metropolitan, if you’re unsure of that.” Llewellyn sighed deeply and shook his head. “You seem impatient, Mr. Llewellyn. Am I keeping you?” Field poured the last of the whiskey into his glass. “Now, forget my old man. Forget the night-soil remover. Start over. Say I come from a monkey. And so did you. And Commissioner Mayne—him, too.” He looked around the tavern. “And so did every bleeding body on the whole earth come from monkeys, and those monkeys come from God knows what—fish? Worms? Who benefits, Sam? Who gets hurt? Who likes it, and who don’t?” Llewellyn shrugged. “I’ll tell you who don’t like it: the merchants who run the bleeding empire don’t like it, not one bit. It puts every man on the same level as them, see? The rich, the poor, the light-skinned, and the dark. The bishops don’t like it, nor the lords, because if Mr. Darwin has his way, where’s the control? Who’s in charge, who’s on top and who’s not? Bad for business, Mr. Darwin’s notions are. But for blokes like me and you? Well, even a policeman can dream, can’t he? It’s not flattering, perhaps, having an orangutan as your forefather, but there’s a kind of hope in it, don’t you see? Last I checked, there weren’t no quality monkeys, nor were there lower-class ones.” “And?” “Crash, boom, Mr. Darwin brings it all down. Rule Britannia and the lot. Brings it down harder and more thorough than Mr. Marx ever dreamt in his darkest revolutionary dream.

I will always try To hold my head up to the sky If only just to let you know That straight from my heart I still miss you so.

In capitalism, as I have noted, productive workers add more value to the commodities produced in and sold by the enterprise than the value of their wages paid by the capitalist who hired them. That additional value or surplus is appropriated by the capitalists. They distribute portions of that surplus to a variety of others (and to themselves) to support activities they believe are needed to keep the capitalist enterprise in business. This particular way of organizing the production and distribution of the surplus is capitalism. What, then, is socialism? If socialism is to be a distinct economic system, then it must clearly differentiate itself from capitalism in terms of how surplus is produced and distributed. Marx’s critique of capitalism offers a clue as to the defining characteristic of socialism in his suggestive references to “associated workers” and other images of workers having replaced capitalists as directors of productive enterprises. The

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to kill, and a time to heal.” —Partial excerpts from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, King James Bible “Time flies like an arrow . . . but fruit flies like a banana.” —Unknown  (often attributed to Groucho Marx)

There were many key figures from the Frankfurt School: Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, the Soviet spy Richard Sorge, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, and others. The school began in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. It is also sometimes called Goethe University, fittingly and frighteningly enough. Karl Marx would have been proud. The Frankfurt School in the 1930s would pick up and relocate to the United States, as its members (most if not all of them Jews) fled Hitler’s atrocious Final Solution.584

So our age is characterized by a curious mixture. On the one hand, we have the high priests of science, such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who exhibit a kind of old-fashioned, 19th-century naiveté about the ability of science and reason to track down the truth disinterestedly. On the other hand, under the tutelage of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, we have become masters of suspicion, assuming that any search for so-called “truth” is really a power grab.

Such risk aversion breeds its own failure. So deeply rooted is gentrification that Richard Florida has now modified his widely acclaimed thesis about the rise of the creative classes. Cities are becoming too successful for their own good. Until recently, he believed they would be the engine rooms of the new economy, embracing the diversity necessary to attract talent. That has certainly happened. Gay pride parades seem to get larger every year. A thousand multicultural flowers are blooming. Yet in squeezing out income diversity, the new urban economies are also shutting off the scope for serendipity. The West’s global cities are like tropical islands surrounded by oceans of resentment. Florida’s latest book is called The New Urban Crisis. Rather than being shaped by those who live there full-time, the characters of our biggest cities are increasingly driven by the global super-rich as a place to park their money. Many of the creative classes are being edged out. Urban downtowns have turned into ‘deadened trophy districts’. New York’s once-bohemian SoHo is now better known for its high-end boutiques than its artists’ studios. SoHo could nowadays be found in any big city in the world. ‘Superstar cities and tech hubs will become so expensive that they will turn into gilded and gated communities,’ Florida predicts.51 ‘Their innovative and creative sparks will eventually fade.’ Karl Marx was wrong: it is the rich who are losing their nation, not the proletariat. The gap between global cities and their national anchors is already a metaphor for our times. By contrast, the rise of the robot economy has only half lodged itself in our expectations. It is easy to dismiss some of Silicon Valley’s wilder talk as the stuff of science-fiction movies. But the gap between sci-fi and reality is closing.

Marxism, the theoretical foundation of Communism, carried within it the seeds of its own destruction, such as Marx and Engels had wrongly attributed to capitalism. It rested on a faulty philosophy of history as well as an unrealistic psychological doctrine.

Such glaring trends are precisely what Marx understood by the conditions of possibility for capitalism being outstripped by history. As expressed in his iconic Preface, at some point in history the forces of production (existing technologies and related production and energy accouterment) will come into conflict with relations of production (existing social relations of ownership and work) to initiate a period of social and economic tumult until humanity hopefully manages to socioeconomically reconfigure its world.

The historical antecedent of neoclassical economics is what Marx referred to as “classical” political economy. Classical theorists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo were very much mouthpieces for the ascendant bourgeois class. This is not to say that their explorations of the political economy of the day did not produce important knowledge upon which critics like Marx built. After all, it was only after Smith and Ricardo that Marx began referring to “vulgar” economics. The problem resided in their bourgeois class blind faith that pursuit of abstract mercantile wealth in impersonal markets was somehow the “natural” way of organizing human material affairs. With bourgeois tinted glasses coloring their vision, so to speak, classical political economy began to read all human history in bourgeois terms.

The second half of the nineteenth century brought two new forms of historical theory which are methodologically oriented toward positivism but undoubtedly include also elements of the absolutistic ideology of Hegel. The so-called materialistic conception of history conceived by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regards as the cause of all historical events the defects of the social conditions in which men live and which they strive to improve. In contrast to this, a more naturalistic movement, which is based upon Darwin and founded upon the modern theory of heredity, asserts that all history consists of the struggle and interplay of the different, essentially unchanging human races. A favorite antithesis in connection with these ideas is whether single "great men" or national groups "make" history, i.e., are the actual bearers of the historical development. In the same way one could ask in physics whether physical phenomena depend more upon electric or upon magnetic forces, or one could build up a theory according to which, e.g., the causes of all events are mechanical (as the philosopher Wilhelm Wundt did in 1866).