Your fave Marx quote

[llantwit]

"I could dance with you until the cows came home.

On second thoughts I would rather dance with the cows until you came home".

I like it because it's not actually funny.

"peanuts"

Peanuts is *NEVER* funny, yet it's strangely compelling.
Fred Bassett on the other hand, is never funny or compelling in any way at all.

 

[Roadkill]

do you know, reading these quotes and others on the net, makes me realise how much Marx has to offer, makes me even more angry about the marxists who fetishise and abuse him/it.

Exactly. I've got enormous respect for Marx: I think he is one of the greatest thinkers of the last few centuries, one of the few people who has made a fundamental change in the way we understand the world.

Which makes the way some people treat him as some kind of god all the more depressing - almost as much so as the reight-wing ignoramuses who say 'Marx = Stalinism."

 

[In Bloom]

I'm with DC, on this, but surely when he wrote it it was a hymn to globalisation

No, it wasn't.
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature." - From The Communist Manifesto

What Marx appears to be saying is that faced with the amorality of global capital, man is forced to recognise the material realities of the world around him.

Though like you say, fetishising Marx is not a good thing. Still, that's one of my favourite quotes, partly because it's a classic example of the applicability of Marx's ideas today.

 

[Soul On Ice]

My favourite Marx quote was that seldom reported drunken conversation he had with Engels when he said "You know what Freddie? I'll bet that in the future there will be people who will take my writings oh so seriously. They will set up cultish groups and preach to people with a zeal and a fervour that will only seek to alienate those that they seek to persuade. They will claim to be democratic but they will will have a faith so strong that they will not tolerate any deviation from the official line. And you know what else Freddie? I really love you."

And with that he slumped off his seat to the floor.

As I said it's a seldom used quote but I'm pretty sure I read a reliable source that reported this

 

[tangerinedream]

Wherever you go
Whatever you do
I will be right here waiting for you
Whatever it takes
Or how my heart breaks
I will be right here waiting for you

.

 

[fishfingerer]

"A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five." - On the labour theory of value presumably.

 

[Haller]

From Groucho:
Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Ignorant twat.

 

[mk12]

"We cannot therefore cooperate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philosophical leaders"

 

[audiotech]

Fred, these boils are fucking killing me.

 

[nwnm]

"The workers of the world - they have no country..." <Commmunist manifesto>

 

[Kenny Vermouth]

"Marx was a cunt whose ideas led to the most deplorable suffering inflicted upon the largest number of people for the longest period of time in human history."

Kenny Vermouth, 2006

 

[Bernie Gunther]

We have seen how money is changed into capital; how through capital surplus-value is made, and from surplus-value more capital. But the accumulation of capital pre-supposes surplus-value; surplus-value pre-supposes capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of labour-power in the hands of producers of commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam Smith) preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point.

This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone-by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. <snip>

In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour-power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With this polarization of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The capitalist system pre-supposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labour. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage-labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.

source

 

[Roadkill]

Ignorant twat.

Care to expand on that?

 

[darren redparty]

"A frightful hobgoblin is stalking Europe. The hobgoblin of communism"

 

[Kenny Vermouth]

Exactly. I've got enormous respect for Marx: I think he is one of the greatest thinkers of the last few centuries, one of the few people who has made a fundamental change in the way we understand the world.

Which makes the way some people treat him as some kind of god all the more depressing - almost as much so as the reight-wing ignoramuses who say 'Marx = Stalinism."

You can't ignore the fact that Stalinism was Marxism applied. I can't respect anyone whose ideas were used to justify mass slaughter and misery.

 

[Roadkill]

You can't ignore the fact that Stalinism was Marxism applied. I can't respect anyone whose ideas were used to justify mass slaughter and misery.

Stalinism was practised by people who claimed to take their ideas from Marx, but since Marx never laid down any sort of prescriptive political programme then saying that it was 'marxism applied' is about as accurate as my saying the Spanish Inquisition was 'Christianity applied.'

Stalinism was no more 'Marxism applied' than the democratic parliamentary socialism that exist(ed) across much of Europe.

If you can't respect anyone whose ideas have been twisted into a justification for barbarism then you're left with a pretty small pool of 'respectable' thinkers, frankly. Think of all the awful things that have been done in the name of spreading the liberal ideas of people like Burke.

 

[In Bloom]

You can't ignore the fact that Stalinism was Marxism applied. I can't respect anyone whose ideas were used to justify mass slaughter and misery.

I take it you have the same contempt for Nietzsche?

 

[Hawkeye Pearce]

"Marx was a cunt whose ideas led to the most deplorable suffering inflicted upon the largest number of people for the longest period of time in human history."

Kenny Vermouth, 2006

How much of marx's writings have you read?

As has been mentioned above Marx said next to nothing about what the future communist soceity would actually look like. His work was focussed on providing a critique of capitalism. It is true that there are authoratarian elements to it and he was certainly an authoratarian in his political activities but to blame the writings of a man who died thirty odd years before the Russian revolution is frankly daft. You can no more blame Marx for that than you can blame the liberal thinkers of the 19th century for the crimes of colonialism or Jesus for the criminalities of the organised church. The crimes come when a party or state tried to turn the writings of Marx into their own religion, which is strange because Marx himself proclaimed once that he was "no marxist".

 

[Haller]

Care to expand on that?

I have no quibbles about taking the piss out of military justice as a concept, but military music is much too important to be dismissed in a one-liner. In America it helped give birth to jazz. In Britain, in the days before broadcasting, it was the only opportunity that the working-class got to hear the work of contemporary composers - there are reports of crowds of 50,000-plus people gathering in parks to listen to a military band playing Wagner, Dvorak and the like. This was a vital tradition which has now been lost, but whose memory should be cherished.

 

[kyser_soze]

Umm, martial music and military bands playing Wagner are two VERY different things Haller. Martial music IS shite.

And military music helped give birth to jazz? Maybe as an adjunct to the technical expertise required of European classical music, but it was the fusion of black gospel, early blues and the European tradition that were the main progenitors of Jazz.

 

[Divisive Cotton]

Umm, martial music and military bands playing Wagner are two VERY different things Haller. Martial music IS shite.

And military music helped give birth to jazz? Maybe as an adjunct to the technical expertise required of European classical music, but it was the fusion of black gospel, early blues and the European tradition that were the main progenitors of Jazz.

It's like the Terry Wogan school of music history

 

[Fruitloop]

African choral singing and the lutheran hymnal wasn't it?

 

[Roadkill]

I have no quibbles about taking the piss out of military justice as a concept, but military music is much too important to be dismissed in a one-liner. In America it helped give birth to jazz. In Britain, in the days before broadcasting, it was the only opportunity that the working-class got to hear the work of contemporary composers - there are reports of crowds of 50,000-plus people gathering in parks to listen to a military band playing Wagner, Dvorak and the like. This was a vital tradition which has now been lost, but whose memory should be cherished.

I think groucho's quote was referring to martial music...

 

[kyser_soze]

It's like the Terry Wogan school of music history

To be sure.

 

[Haller]

And military music helped give birth to jazz? Maybe as an adjunct to the technical expertise required of European classical music, but it was the fusion of black gospel, early blues and the European tradition that were the main progenitors of Jazz.

The instrumentation of the jazz band as it emerged in the 1920s - the combination of brass,woodwind and percussion - was shaped by the military band. Ex-Forces musicians took what had been primarily a piano-based sound and expanded the instrumentation.

 

[Haller]

I think groucho's quote was referring to martial music...

The quote on here was about military music. I don't know how you want to separate that from martial music.

But music written specifically for the military band is itself a valid form of music. Check out the march repertoire of Leo Stanley or Sousa - this is good stuff.

 

[Combustible]

This is strangely apt to modern parliamentary systems

Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic." In this menace and this attack it rightly discerned the secret of socialism, whose import and tendency it judges more correctly than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself; the latter can, accordingly, not comprehend why the bourgeoisie callously hardens its heart against it, whether it sentimentally bewails the sufferings of mankind, or in Christian spirit prophesies the millennium and universal brotherly love, or in humanistic style twaddles about mind, education, and freedom, or in doctrinaire fashion invents a system for the conciliation and welfare of all classes. What the bourgeoisie did not grasp, however, was the logical conclusion that its own parliamentary regime, its political rule in general, was now also bound to meet with the general verdict of condemnation as being socialistic. As long as the rule of the bourgeois class had not been completely organized, as long as it had not acquired its pure political expression, the antagonism of the other classes likewise could not appear in its pure form, and where it did appear could not take the dangerous turn that transforms every struggle against the state power into a struggle against capital. If in every stirring of life in society it saw "tranquillity" imperiled, how could it want to maintain at the head of society a regime of unrest, its own regime, the parliamentary regime, this regime that, according to the expression of one of its spokesmen, lives in struggle and by struggle? The parliamentary regime lives by discussion, how shall it forbid discussion? Every interest, every social institution, is here transformed into general ideas, debated as ideas; how shall any interest, any institution, sustain itself above thought and impose itself as an article of faith? The struggle of the orators on the platform evokes the struggle of the scribblers of the press; the debating club in parliament is necessarily supplemented by debating clubs in the salons and the bistros; the representatives, who constantly appeal to public opinion, give public opinion the right to speak its real mind in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great majorities outside parliament not want to decide? When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?

Thus by now stigmatizing as "socialistic" what it had previously extolled as "liberal," the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule; that to restore tranquillity in the country its bourgeois parliament must, first of all, be given its quietus; that to preserve its social power intact its political power must be broken; that the individual bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and to enjoy undisturbed property, family, religion, and order only on condition that their class be condemned along with the other classes to like political nullity; that in order to save its purse it must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles

Another short bit of the Communist Manifesto makes far more sense now then it did in 1848. You had naked colonialism and imperialism then but only much later you really saw the complete dictation of the whole world's economic system.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

 

[fishfingerer]

You can't ignore the fact that Stalinism was Marxism applied. I can't respect anyone whose ideas were used to justify mass slaughter and misery.

Marxism was a direct influence on economists like Keynes and the development of social democracy and welfare states which most people, except for the most fuckwitted tory scum of course, would credit with a phenomenal rise in living standards and opportunities.

 

[treelover]

You forgot New Labour who are in the process of dismantling the welfare state!

Marxism was a direct influence on economists like Keynes and the development of social democracy and welfare states which most people, except for the most fuckwitted tory scum of course, would credit with a phenomenal rise in living standards and opportunities.
Reply With Quote

 

[kyser_soze]

Marxism was a direct influence on economists like Keynes and the development of social democracy and welfare states

Well lets just say here that a bloke called Thomas Paine was probably the first European to come up with ideas for a Welfare state and pensions paid for out of taxation etc, not to mention relgious organisations like the Chartists and Quakers...indeed, Marx might have found modern welfare systems suspect as all they do is prevent class consciouness from forming by taking the worst edges off capitalism.

Indeed, it has been argued on here before that the only reason that the various welfare systems in Europe exist only on the basis that Capital realised as a class that a refusal to allow such a concession after WW1, the Great Depression and WW2 would have led to socialism/communism being a far stronger force than it was post-WW2. You could also argue that Capital also realised that it needed a workforce that was better educated and nourished etc as well...