Kim Jong-il: The first philosophy of the working class was created by Marx. His philosophy is a critical inheritance and development of preceding philosophies. By discarding what was unscientific and reactionary in the preceding materialism and dialectics and by inheriting and developing a reasonable core, Marx created dialectical materialism. By applying it to social history, he clarified historical materialism. He directed his main efforts to critically examining the existing philosophical theories so as to free the working class, which was making a fresh appearance on the historical stage, from the outdated and reactionary outlook on the world. He gave scientific answers to the questions of correlation between matter and consciousness and between being and thinking, which until then had yet to be resolved despite repeated debates; on this basis he developed his philosophical theory. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Kim Jong-il: Social democracy, as an ideological trend of rightist opportunism, appeared long ago. Opportunist ideologies of all hues including social democracy are reactionary trends of thought which the imperialists and reactionaries made use of in earlier times to destroy the communist movement and the working-class movement from within. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: The opposite of competition is monopoly. Monopoly was the war-cry of the Mercantilists; competition the battle-cry of the liberal economists. It is easy to see that this antithesis is again a quite hollow antithesis. Every competitor cannot but desire to have the monopoly, be he worker, capitalist or landowner. Each smaller group of competitors cannot but desire to have the monopoly for itself against all others. Competition is based on self-interest, and self-interest in turn breeds monopoly. In short, competition passes over into monopoly. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Martin Wolf: Corporations are not rule-takers but rather rule-makers. They play games whose rules they have a big role in creating, via politics. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their fate and forget their original content. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: Chief Factors Limiting Access to Facts: 1) Artificial censorship 2) Limitations of social contact 3) Comparatively meager time in a day for paying attention to public affairs. 4) Distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages 5) Difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world 6) Fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another? wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: Only the consciousness of a purpose that is greater than any man can seed and fortify the souls of men. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: As you go further away from experience, you go higher into generalization or subtlety. As you go up in the balloon you throw more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you have reached the top with some phrase like the Rights of Humanity or the World Made Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: The significant revolution of modern times is not industrial or economic or political, but the revolution which is taking place in the art of creating consent among the governed. Within the life of the new generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political premise. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: We learn to understand why our addled minds seize so little with precision, why they are caught up and tossed about in a kind of tarantella by headlines and catch-words, why so often they cannot tell things apart or discern identity in apparent differences. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: We have learned to call this propaganda. A group of men, who can prevent independent access to the event, arrange the news of it to suit their purpose. That the purpose was in this case patriotic does not affect the argument at all. They used their power to make the Allied publics see affairs as they desired them to be seen. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: From the point of view of science and practical politics, one of the chief symptoms of every real revolution is the unusually rapid, sudden, and abrupt increase in the number of "ordinary citizens" who begin to participate actively, independently and effectively in political life and in the organisation of the state. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Ralph McGehee: Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lyndon B. Johnson: If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Alain Badiou: Of course, they are a handful, the bourgeois imperialists, but the subjective effect of their force lies in the divided people. There is not just the law of Capital, or the cops. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William Morris: It has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself - a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Frantz Fanon: Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Kwame Nkrumah: The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too easily written as the history of its dominant class. ... Our history needs to be written as the history of our society, not as the story of European adventures. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George L. Jackson: The U.S. has established itself as the mortal enemy of all people’s government, all scientific-socialist mobilization of consciousness everywhere on the globe, all anti-imperialist activity on earth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
James Connolly: When questions of "class" interests are eliminated from public controversy a victory is thereby gained for the possessing, conservative class, whose only hope of security lies in such elimination. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Oliver Cox: The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World: The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
