Hey y'all! Say Hi to my delightful sister! @emilie_stims
She's new to the whole fediverse thing and a little overwhelmed. If you want to catch her interest, I recommend talking about birds, ren faire, singing, and folklore as some easy topics!
But do me a favor and let her know how friendly the fediverse is ❤
Saramago: We’re not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Saramago: We are marching against the law of the jungle that the United States and its acolytes old and new want to impose on the world... wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Saramago: From literature to ecology, from the escape velocity of galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from garbage disposal methods to traffic jams, everything is discussed in our world. But the democratic system, as if it were a given fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, we don’t discuss that. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Saramago: Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Saramago: Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Since the production and the circulation of commodities are the general pre-requisites of the capitalist mode of production, division of labour in manufacture demands, that division of labour in society at large should previously have attained a certain degree of development. Inversely, the former division reacts upon and develops and multiplies the latter. Simultaneously, with the differentiation of the instruments of labour, the industries that produce these instruments, become more and more differentiated. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Marwan Makhoul: In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bible: For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Robert Mugabe: The support and inspiration Comrade Enver Hoxha provided to the people of Zimbabwe during their struggle for liberation will be remembered forever. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
György Lukács: (T)he proletariat is the first oppressed class in history that has been capable of countering the oppressors’ philosophy with an independent and higher world-view of its own. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: Our view, which we have found confirmed by long practice, is that the correct tactic in propaganda is not to draw away a few individuals and members here and there from one's opponent, but to work on the great mass which still remains apathetic. The primitive force of a single individual whom we have ourselves attracted from the crude mass is worth more than ten Lassallean renegades, who always bring the seeds of their false tendencies into the Party with them. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
James Connolly: War is a relic of barbarism only possible because we are governed by a ruling class with barbaric ideas; the working class of all countries cannot hope to escape the horrors of war until, in all countries, that barbaric ruling class is thrown from power. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: In 1917 the chain of the imperialist world front proved to be weaker in Russia than in the other countries. It was there that the chain broke and provided an outlet for the proletarian revolution. Why? Because in Russia a great popular revolution was unfolding, and at its head marched the revolutionary proletariat, which had such an important ally as the vast mass of the peasantry, which was oppressed and exploited by the landlords. Because the revolution there was opposed by such a hideous representative of imperialism as tsarism, which lacked all moral prestige and was deservedly hated by the whole population. The chain proved to be weaker in Russia, although Russia was less developed in a capitalist sense than, say, France or Germany, Britain or America. Where will the chain break in the near future? Again, where it is weakest. It is not precluded that the chain may break, say, in India. Why? Because that country has a young, militant, revolutionary proletariat, which has such an ally as the national liberation movement -- an undoubtedly powerful and undoubtedly important ally. Because there the revolution is confronted by such a well-known foe as foreign imperialism, which has no moral credit and is deservedly hated by all the oppressed and exploited masses of India. It is also quite possible that the chain will break in Germany. Why? Because the factors which are operating, say, in India are beginning to operate in Germany as well, but, of course, the enormous difference in the level of development between India and Germany cannot but stamp its imprint on the progress and outcome of a revolution in Germany. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: It requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.(29) The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped masses of men, who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Neither is it enough that they are compelled to sell it voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature. The organisation of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital. The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the “natural laws of production,” i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves. It is otherwise during the historic genesis of capitalist production. The bourgeoisie, at its rise, wants and uses the power of the state to “regulate” wages, i.e., to force them within the limits suitable for surplus-value making, to lengthen the working-day and to keep the labourer himself in the normal degree of dependence. This is an essential element of the so-called primitive accumulation. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Shakespeare: We are oft to blame in this, - 'tis too much proved, - that with devotion's visage, and pious action we do sugar o'er the devil himself. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Enver Hoxha: I pledge before the flag and my pioneer comrades that I will always learn, work and live as a worthy son of the Party and the Homeland. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Theodore Roosevelt: When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty'. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Robert A. Heinlein: You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
