The World According To Karl Quotes

God wants man to be His creature. Furthermore, He wants him to be His PARTNER. There is a causa Dei in the world. God wants light, not darkness. He wants cosmos, not chaos. He wants peace, not disorder. He wants man to administer and to receive justice rather than to inflict and to suffer injustice. He wants man to live according to the Spirit rather than according to the flesh. He wants man bound and pledged to Him rather than to any other authority. He wants man to live and not to die. Because He wills these things God is Lord, Shepherd, and Redeemer of man, who in His holiness and mercy meets His creature; who judges and forgives, rejects and receives, condemns and saves.

Tantae molis erat to unleash the 'eternal natural laws' of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between the workers and the conditions of their labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, and at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-labourers, into the free 'labouring poor', that artificial product of modern history. If money, according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla […], I went to […] check in with Los Madres: the black-draped mothers who paraded, every week, with pictures of their missing loved ones in the Plaza Mayo. (‘Todo mi familia!’ as one elderly lady kept telling me imploringly, as she flourished their photographs. ‘Todo mi familia!’) From these and from other relatives and friends I got a line of questioning to put to the general. I would be told by him, they forewarned me, that people ‘disappeared’ all the time, either because of traffic accidents and family quarrels or, in the dire civil-war circumstances of Argentina, because of the wish to drop out of a gang and the need to avoid one’s former associates. But this was a cover story. Most of those who disappeared were openly taken away in the unmarked Ford Falcon cars of the Buenos Aires military police. I should inquire of the general what precisely had happened to Claudia Inez Grumberg, a paraplegic who was unable to move on her own but who had last been seen in the hands of his ever-vigilant armed forces [….] I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush. I am gripping his hand in a much too unctuous manner and smiling as if genuinely delighted at the introduction. Aching to expunge this humiliation, I waited while he went almost pedantically through the predicted script, waving away the rumored but doubtless regrettable dematerializations that were said to be afflicting his fellow Argentines. And then I asked him about Senorita Grumberg. He replied that if what I had said was true, then I should remember that ‘terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas. Maybe that’s why she’s detained.’ I expressed astonishment at this reply and, evidently thinking that I hadn’t understood him the first time, Videla enlarged on the theme. ‘We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.’ Behind him, I could see one or two of his brighter staff officers looking at me with stark hostility as they realized that the general—El Presidente—had made a mistake by speaking so candidly. […] In response to a follow-up question, Videla crassly denied—‘rotondamente’: ‘roundly’ denied—holding Jacobo Timerman ‘as either a journalist or a Jew.’ While we were having this surreal exchange, here is what Timerman was being told by his taunting tormentors: Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space. […] We later discovered what happened to the majority of those who had been held and tortured in the secret prisons of the regime. According to a Navy captain named Adolfo Scilingo, who published a book of confessions, these broken victims were often destroyed as ‘evidence’ by being flown out way over the wastes of the South Atlantic and flung from airplanes into the freezing water below. Imagine the fun element when there’s the surprise bonus of a Jewish female prisoner in a wheelchair to be disposed of… we slide open the door and get ready to roll her and then it’s one, two, three… go!

What ‘relations of production’ in capitalist society represented for Karl Marx, ‘relations of definition’ represent for risk society. Both concern relations of domination (Beck 2002; Goldblatt 1996). Among the relations of definition are the rules, institutions and capabilities which specify how risks are to be identified in particular contexts (for example, within nation-states, but also in relations between them). They form at the legal, epistemological and cultural power matrix in which risk politics is organized (see chapters 9 and 10). Relations of definition power can accordingly be explored through four clusters of questions:

To the intellect all else, in comparison with what is correct, counts only as feeling, subjectivity, instinct. In this division, apart from the bright world of the intellect, there is only the irrational, in which is lumped together, according to the point of view, what is despised or desired. The impulse which pursues real truth by thought springs from the dissatisfaction with what is merely correct. The division, spoken of previously, paralyses this impulse; it causes man to oscillate between the dogmatism of the intellect that transcends its limits and, as it were, the rapture of the vital, the chance of the moment, life. The soul becomes impoverished in all the multiplicity of disparate experience. Then truth disappears from the field of vision and is replaced by a variety of opinions which are hung on the skeleton of a supposedly rational pattern. Truth is infinitely more than scientific correctness.

No doubt you will be delighted to hear from an adept who has undertaken the operation of his H.G.A. in accord with our traditions. The operation began auspiciously with a chromatic display of psychosomatic symptoms, and progressed rapidly to acute psychosis. The operator has alternated satisfactorily between manic hysteria and depressing melancholy stupor on approximately 40 cycles, and satisfactory progress has been maintained in social ostracism, economic collapses and mental disassociation. These statements are mentioned not in any vainglorious spirit of conceit, but rather that they may serve as comfort and inspiration to other aspirants on the Path. Now I'm off to the wilds of Mexico for a period, also in pursuit of the elusive H.G.A. before winding up in the guard finally via the booby hotels, the graveyard, or—? If the final, you can tell all the little Practicuses that I wouldn't have missed it for anything. —No one. Once called 210

Darwin and Karl Marx didn't reveal the secret of the world. Of all the theories about creation, the one expounded in Genesis is the most intelligent. All this talk about primordial mists or the Big Bang is a wild absurdity. If someone found a watch on an island and said it had been made by itself or that it developed through evolution, he would be considered a lunatic. But according to modern science, the universe evolved all on its own. Is the universe less complicated than a watch?

According to Allan Bloom the whole world is divided between the followers of John Locke and Karl Marx-between liberalism and socialism.42 While the configuration of human ideological loyalties is surely more complex than this statement suggests, and despite the fact that this ideological cleavage has diminished considerably since 1989, it does point to an important truth about the contemporary political debate, namely, that its very parameters have been determined by this secularist religion, whose principal tenet is a belief in human autonomy. Because of this religion's impact, it is no longer doubted that human beings shape their world autonomously. Rather, the principal controversies revolve around the issue of who is the bearer of that autonomy, the individual or some form of community. Those who question autonomy altogether are effectively left out of the discussion.The fact that the world's principal collectivist ideology is in decline and individualism is (at least for now) in the ascendancy has not fundamentally altered this picture.

According to Hegel, both bourgeois society and the Christian state are unfavourable to the development of creative art. Two inferences may be drawn from this: either art must perish in order to save the 'Absolute State', or the latter must be abolished in order to permit a new con­dition of·the world, and a new renaissance of art. Hegel himself inclined to the first alternative. But with a slight change of emphasis the doctrine of the anti-aesthetic spirit of reality could readily assume a revolutionary character; and indeed Hegel's Aesthetik was thus interpreted by his radical followers whom Marx joined in 1837.

It is often asserted that, in view of the situation in quantum theory, object and subject can no longer be sharply separated. 1 To use Heitler’s words, the ‘separation of the world into an “objective outside reality”, and “us”, the self-conscious onlookers, can no longer be maintained. Object and subject become inseparable from each other’. 2 This, according to Bohr, is due to ‘the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behaviour of atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring instruments which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear’. 3 Heitler elaborates the point in some detail. ‘One may ask’, he writes, ‘if it is sufficient to carry out a measurement by a self-registering apparatus or whether the presence of an observer is required.’ And he arrives at the conclusion that the self-registering apparatus is insufficient, and that ‘the observer appears, as a necessary part of the whole structure, and in his full capacity as a conscious being’.

That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J. F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus2, ‘would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia’. Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries. For they soon found out that nothing could be applied with such ease to any problem whatsoever, and at the same time with such impressive (though only apparent) difficulty, and with such quick and sure but imposing success, nothing could be used as cheaply and with so little scientific training and knowledge, and nothing would give such a spectacular scientific air, as did Hegelian dialectics, the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’. Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer3 described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon. In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature4 as faithfully as possible; he writes: ‘§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition;—merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.’ There are some who still believe in Hegel’s sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence—the only intelligible one—of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: ‘The heating up of sounding bodies … is heat … together with sound.’ The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: ‘I have had too much to do … with mathematics … differential calculus, chemistry’, Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), ‘to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact … and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.’ This is a very fair characterization of Schelling’s method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.

This is not a hypothetical example. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx reached brilliant economic insights. Based on these insights he predicted an increasingly violent conflict between the proletariat and the capitalists, ending with the inevitable victory of the former and the collapse of the capitalist system. Marx was certain that the revolution would start in countries that spearheaded the Industrial Revolution – such as Britain, France and the USA – and spread to the rest of the world. Marx forgot that capitalists know how to read. At first only a handful of disciples took Marx seriously and read his writings. But as these socialist firebrands gained adherents and power, the capitalists became alarmed. They too perused Das Kapital, adopting many of the tools and insights of Marxist analysis. In the twentieth century everybody from street urchins to presidents embraced a Marxist approach to economics and history. Even diehard capitalists who vehemently resisted the Marxist prognosis still made use of the Marxist diagnosis. When the CIA analysed the situation in Vietnam or Chile in the 1960s, it divided society into classes. When Nixon or Thatcher looked at the globe, they asked themselves who controls the vital means of production. From 1989 to 1991 George Bush oversaw the demise of the Evil Empire of communism, only to be defeated in the 1992 elections by Bill Clinton. Clinton’s winning campaign strategy was summarised in the motto: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Marx could not have said it better. As people adopted the Marxist diagnosis, they changed their behaviour accordingly. Capitalists in countries such as Britain and France strove to better the lot of the workers, strengthen their national consciousness and integrate them into the political system. Consequently when workers began voting in elections and Labour gained power in one country after another, the capitalists could still sleep soundly in their beds. As a result, Marx’s predictions came to naught. Communist revolutions never engulfed the leading industrial powers such as Britain, France and the USA, and the dictatorship of the proletariat was consigned to the dustbin of history. This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

Is there a meaning in history? I do not wish to enter here into the problem of the meaning of ‘meaning’; I take it for granted that most people know with sufficient clarity what they mean when they speak of the ‘meaning of history’ or of the ‘meaning or purpose of life’10. And in this sense, in the sense in which the question of the meaning of history is asked, I answer: History has no meaning. In order to give reasons for this opinion, I must first say something about that ‘history’ which people have in mind when they ask whether it has meaning. So far, I have myself spoken about ‘history’ as if it did not need any explanation. That is no longer possible; for I wish to make it clear that ‘history’ in the sense in which most people speak of it simply does not exist; and this is at least one reason why I say that it has no meaning. How do most people come to use the term ‘history’? (I mean ‘history’ in the sense in which we say of a book that it is about the history of Europe—not in the sense in which we say that it is a history of Europe.) They learn about it in school and at the University. They read books about it. They see what is treated in the books under the name ‘history of the world’ or ‘the history of mankind’, and they get used to looking upon it as a more or less definite series of facts. And these facts constitute, they believe, the history of mankind. But we have already seen that the realm of facts is infinitely rich, and that there must be selection. According to our interests, we could, for instance, write about the history of art; or of language; or of feeding habits; or of typhus fever (see Zinsser’s Rats, Lice, and History). Certainly, none of these is the history of mankind (nor all of them taken together). What people have in mind when they speak of the history of mankind is, rather, the history of the Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman empires, and so on, down to our own day. In other words: They speak about the history of mankind, but what they mean, and what they have learned about in school, is the history of political power. There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including, it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as its heroes.

However, it is my skill at impersonating emotions that is where my brilliance lies. You see, I know that you want to believe everything I say and do. It is a very human trait. The need to believe. That is why Karl Marx declared that religion is the opium of the masses. I am your opium. Utterly addictive. You want to believe in me. You therefore make it easy for me to feign how I feel. I watch and I learn and I copy. Since you are desperate to believe you do not analyse my mimicry to any great degree and accordingly I get away with it. I create a false environment. This world is one where I promise you the earth (but never deliver) and if you try and challenge me about my promises I will pretend I never said them. You cannot prove it can you? Thus I maintain control by causing you to be anxious. Everything I do with you is false. The way I drew you in, the façade I maintain, the games I play. They are all designed to create something, which is not real purely to serve my purposes. Some of you eventually realise this, although only when it is too far late. For others, you never grasp that I am the great pretender and thus you consign yourself to a lifetime of despair and misery.

silence.” At the same time, his death is “the deepest and most personal act of his life.” It is the hour of his glorification, the reason he came into the world. All of his life Jesus was obedient to the will of his Father. This submissive obedience to God has, as Rahner puts it, a “certain mystical sense” about it that defies our usual categories. By his obedience, Jesus absorbs “that which is totally foreign to him, the sinfulness of the world,” and transforms it into the power of God’s love. The obedience of Jesus is “the silent Yes” to his excruciating death, intensified by his sense of abandonment. According to Rahner, the death of Jesus was not only an act of acceptance of suffering but also a loving “Yes” to “the incomprehensibility of God.” It is only through love that human beings can express their essence and escape the prison of selfishness.

Philosophies turned away from the world were not to Hahn’s taste. According to him, however, they could still be found in the systems of German idealism—and how could it be otherwise? The Germans are known, after all, as the nation of thinkers and poets. But a new day is slowly breaking, and the liberation is coming from the same land that gave birth to political liberation—namely, England: the English, after all, are known as the nation of shopkeepers. And it is surely no accident that one and the same nation gave the world both democracy, on the one hand, and the rebirth of a philosophy turned toward the world, on the other; nor is it an accident that the same land that saw the beheading of a king also witnessed the execution of metaphysics. Yet the weapons of a philosophy that is turned toward the world are not the executioner’s sword and axe—it is not as bloodthirsty a beast as that—though its weapons are sharp enough. And today I want to talk about one of these weapons—namely, Occam’s razor.

If money, according to Augier, "comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek," capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

The ‘great transformation’ that the Austro-Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi had predicted in 1944, even before the end of the Second World War, basically came into being. Polanyi argued that the idea of a self-regulating market—as would later be propagated again by neoliberalism—was bound to remain a ‘stark utopia’.2 If such a utopia were to be realized, this would mean as a final consequence the total dislodgement of the economy from society. According to Polanyi, a society subjugated to the market in this way could not exist without dissolving its own substance—in other words, human beings and nature.

Two of the ten planks of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” literally are the creation and operation of a private central bank, and a graduated income tax---both ILLEGAL in our country according to the U.S. Constitution.

Some critics acidly observed that people throughout the ages have always believed they were living in particularly crucial times. There is some truth to this criticism, because human history is indeed continuously decisive, for in humanity’s march through time every step determines the future of our species. But only the cynic would sneer at the idea that some steps, some historical periods, are more decisive than others—not only in the shaping of a particular race or nation, but for humanity as a whole. Possibly one such decisive historical threshold was what the German philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers styled the “axial age”—the period between 800–500 B.C.E. when “thought turned back upon thought”: the epoch of Confucius, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Zoroaster, Heraclitus, Plato, and Socrates.1 In the West, this development gradually led to what can only be described as the enthronement and autarchy of cold reason and the consequent suppression of nonrational modes of consciousness. As many contemporary thinkers have shown, this inflation of ratio lies at the root of today’s moral and spiritual bankruptcy, and its disastrous effects can be witnessed all around us (and in us, if we care to look). What is perhaps most disheartening is that this lopsided orientation to life is now being thrust upon the “underdeveloped” world, which merely magnifies the existing threat to our planet’s ecology and to the survival of countless life forms, not least our own human species. When we take stock of the folly of humankind we begin to realize the extent of the global problems induced, in the last analysis, by hypertrophied (egocentric) reason. We may also be impressed with the traditional Hindu explanation of the particular spirit of our era. For, according to the computations of the Hindu pundits, we are well into the “dawn phase” of the kali-yuga, or “dark age.” Like so many premodern mythologies, Hinduism views the evolution of humanity as a cyclical process of progressive moral degeneration from an original state of purity and spiritual wholeness. The

Many contemporary Yoga practitioners, especially those in Western countries, look upon āsana as a tool for achieving physical fitness and flexibility. The yogic postures have certainly demonstrated their physiological benefits in millions of cases. They improve musculoskeletal flexibility, strength, resilience, endurance, cardiovascular and respiratory efficiency, endocrine and gastrointestinal functioning, immunity, sleep, eye-hand coordination, balance. Experiments also have shown various psychological benefits, including improvement of somatic awareness, attention, memory, learning, and mood. The regular practice of postures also decreases anxiety, depression, and aggression.1 All these effects are clearly beneficial and highly desirable. Yet, the traditional purpose of āsana is something far more radical, namely to assist the Hatha-Yoga practitioner in the creation of an “adamantine body” (vajra-deha) or “divine body” (divya-deha). This is a transubstantiated body that is immortal and completely under the control of the adept’s will (which is merged with the Divine Will). It is an energy body that, depending on the adept’s wish, is either visible or invisible to the human eye. In this body, the liberated master can carry out benevolent activities with the least possible obstruction. ĀSANA AS A TOOL OF NONDUAL EXPERIENCE2 The transubstantiated body of the truly accomplished Hatha-Yoga master is, realistically speaking, out of reach for most of us—not because we are not in principle capable of realizing it but because only very few have the determination and stamina to even pursue this yogic ideal. Does this mean we have to settle for the more pedestrian benefits of posture practice? I believe there is another side to āsana, which, while not representing the ultimate possibility of our human potential, is yet a significant and necessary accomplishment on the yogic path. That is to cultivate and experience āsana as an instrument for tasting nonduality (advaita). Almost all Yoga authorities subscribe to a nondualistic metaphysics according to which Reality is singular and the world of multiplicity is either altogether false (mithyā) or merely a lower expression of that ultimate Singularity. Typically, Yoga practitioners assume that the experience of nonduality is bound to the state of ecstasy (samādhi) and that this state is hard to come by and is likely to escape them at least in this lifetime. But this belief is ill founded. In fact, it is counterproductive and should be regarded as an obstacle (vighna) on the path to enlightenment. While we might not have an experience of ecstasy, we can have an experience of nonduality. The ecstatic state is simply a special version of the nondual experience. As Karl Baier, a German professor of psychology and practitioner of Iyengar Yoga, has shown, posture practice can be an efficient means of nondual experience in which we overcome the most obvious and painful duality of body and mind.

The expressionist view is that our talents, our gifts, and perhaps our upbringing, and thus "our whole personality", determine what we do. The result is good or bad, according to whether or not we are gifted and interesting personalities. In opposition to this I suggest that everything depends upon the give-and-take between ourselves and our task, our work, our problems, our world 3; upon the repercussions upon us of this world; upon the feedback, which can be amplified by our criticism of what we've done. It's through the attempt to see objectively the work we have done -that's to see it critically- and to do it better, through the interaction between our actions and their objective results, that we can transcend our talents, and ourselves. As with our children, so with our theories, and ultimately with all the work we do: our products become independent of their makers. We may gain more knowledge from our children or from our theories than we ever imparted to them. This is how we can lift ourselves out of the morass of our ignorance; and we can all contribute to world 3. If I am right in my conjecture that we grow, and become ourselves, only in interaction with world 3, then the fact that we can all contribute to this world, if only a little, can give comfort to everyone; and especially to one who feels that in struggling with ideas he has found more happiness than he could ever deserve.

Whether on the level of no analysis or with analysis, it is never justified that mind exists whereas form does not exist. Under analysis, when form has been found not to exist, mind cannot exist either, because the two are established in mutual dependence. Without analysis, according to common worldly consensus, both are equally said to exist.

All in all, The Sutra of the Teaching ofAksayamati lists eight criteria that distinguish expedient and definitive meaning: i) The expedient meaning assists entry onto the path, while the definitive meaning guides disciples to engage in the fruition. a) The expedient meaning deals with the seeming, while the definitive meaning deals with the ultimate. 3) The expedient meaning teaches about afflicted phenomena, and the definitive meaning teaches about purified phenomena. 4) The expedient meaning teaches how to engage in proper actions, and the definitive meaning shows how karma and afflictions become exhausted. S) The expedient meaning causes weariness with cyclic existence, while the definitive meaning demonstrates that cyclic existence and nirvana are undifferentiable. 6) The expedient meaning teaches a variety of terms and definitions, whereas the definitive meaning teaches the profound, true reality that is difficult to see and realize. 7) The expedient meaning gives detailed explanations in accordance with worldly conduct, while the definitive meaning focuses on concise and pithy instructions for cultivating meditative concentration. 8) The expedient meaning teaches about sentient beings, persons, a self, and so on, while the definitive meaning teaches about the three doors to complete liberation, nonapplication, nonorigination, nonarising, nonentity, identitylessness, and such.

First, Cultural Marxism and Classical Marxism are two different things. Karl Marx was an economist. Classical Marxism is an economic system. You have the bourgeoisie and the proletariat along with the familiar phrase, “From each according to his ability to each according to his need.” The goal was to produce the uprising of the masses to overthrow capitalism. Marx saw capitalism as oppressing the masses. He also saw religion as the opiate of the masses that allowed them to be oppressed by capitalism. He was rabidly atheistic. Most Christians would not identify with Marxism. That in part is why it is difficult to talk about Cultural Marxism. So we must mark the difference between the two.

According to the Treaty of Versailles, the post World War I German Navy was only permitted to have six light cruisers. One of these was the Emden, with a length of over 508 feet and a draft of 17 feet 5 inches. She was launched on January 7, 1925 and commissioned over nine months later on October 15, 1925. The light cruiser had a standard displacement of 5,400 tons, and was the only ship ever constructed in her class. She was built by the Reichsmarine shipbuilding company in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. As a new ship the Emden became the German Navy’s training ship and conducted several world cruises to train future naval officers. In September of 1934, Kapitan Karl Dönitz, the future commander of the German Navy, the Kriegsmarine, took command of the ship and remained her master until the following year. The Emden visited Cape Town in December of 1934 and was there for the Christmas celebration at the Cape Town German Club, described on page 30 of “Suppressed I Rise.” It was then that Adeline danced with the renowned Captain Dönitz, who would later replace the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, as the head of state in Germany. The cruiser Emden was severely damaged by British bombers in February of 1945. On May 3, 1945, the Germans scuttled the ship, to prevent her from being captured by the Allies. Ultimately in 1949, the ship was taken for scrap. Her bow ornament is still on display at the popular Deutsches Museum in Munich.

According to some modern writers (see, for example, G. H. Estabrooks, Man: The Mechanical Misfit, 1941), man made the decisive mistake when he became civilized, and especially when he began to help the weak; before this, he was an almost perfect man-beast; but civilization, with its artificial methods of protecting the weak, leads to degeneration, and therefore must ultimately destroy itself. In reply to such arguments, we should, I think, first admit that man is likely to disappear one day from this world; but we should add that this is also true of even the most perfect beasts, to say nothing of those which are only ‘almost perfect’. The theory that the human race might live a little longer if it had not made the fatal mistake of helping the weak is most questionable; but even if it were true—is mere length of survival of the race really all we want? Or is the almost perfect man-beast so eminently valuable that we should prefer a prolongation of his existence (he did exist for quite a long time, anyway) to our experiment of helping the weak?

Marxism claims to be more than a science. It does more than make a historical prophecy. It claims to be the basis for practical political action. It criticizes existing society, and it asserts that it can lead the way to a better world. But according to Marx’s own theory, we cannot at will alter the economic reality by, for example, legal reforms. Politics can do no more than ‘shorten and lessen the birth-pangs’.23 This, I think, is an extremely poor political programme, and its poverty is a consequence of the third-rate place which it attributes to political power in the hierarchy of powers. For according to Marx, the real power lies in the evolution of machinery; next in importance is the system of economic class-relationships; and the least important influence is that of politics. A directly opposite view is implied in the position we have reached in our analysis. It considers political power as fundamental. Political power, from this point of view, can control economic power. This means an immense extension of the field of political activities. We can ask what we wish to achieve and how to achieve it. We can, for instance, develop a rational political programme for the protection of the economically weak. We can make laws to limit exploitation. We can limit the working day; but we can do much more. By law, we can insure the workers (or better still, all citizens) against disability, unemployment, and old age. In this way we can make impossible such forms of exploitation as are based upon the helpless economic position of a worker who must yield to anything in order not to starve. And when we are able by law to guarantee a livelihood to everybody willing to work, and there is no reason why we should not achieve that, then the protection of the freedom of the citizen from economic fear and economic intimidation will approach completeness. From this point of view, political power is the key to economic protection. Political power and its control is everything. Economic power must not be permitted to dominate political power; if necessary, it must be fought and brought under control by political power.