David > David's Quotes

“Like every living organism, the capitalist system reacts to "shocks" by creating ad hoc antibodies. This does not signify that it is immortal: no living organism is that. But it does show the mistake made by some analysts who take the agents of a survival which is real for the ferments of a death which is not.”
― Arghiri Emmanuel

“In reality, the part played by fascism was determined by one factor: the condition of the market system.

During the period 1917-23 governments occasionally sought fascist help to restore law and order: no more was needed to set the market system going. Fascism remained undeveloped.

In the period 1924-29, when the restoration of the market system seemed ensured, fascism faded out as a political force altogether.

After 1930 market economy was in a general crisis. Within a few years fascism was a world power.”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

“Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re­create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, busi­ness enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand.

Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifi­cally accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational "evidence" disprove it.”
― Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

“My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that? Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“The fascist solution of the impasse reached by liberal capitalism can be described as a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions, both in the industrial and the political realm. ... The appearance of such a movement in the industrial countries of the globe, and even in a number of only slightly industrialized ones, should never have been ascribed to local causes, national mentalities, or historical backgrounds as was so consistently done by contemporaries. Fascism had as little to do with the Great War as with the Versailles Treaty, with Junker militarism as with the Italian temperament. The movement appeared in defeated countries like Bulgaria and in victorious ones like Jugoslavia, in countries of Northern temperament like Finland and Norway and of Southern temperament like Italy and Spain, in countries of Aryan race like England, Ireland or Belgium and non-Aryan race like Japan, Hungary, or Palestine, in countries of Catholic traditions like Portugal and in Protestant ones like Holland, in soldierly communities like Prussia and civilian ones like Austria, in old cultures like France and new ones like the United States and the Latin-American countries. In fact, there was no type of background -- of religious, cultural, or national tradition -- that made a country immune to fascism, once the conditions for its emergence were given.”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

“When virtually the whole of a society, including supposedly thoughtful, educated, intelligent persons, commits itself to belief in propositions that collapse into absurdity upon the slightest exami­nation, the reason is not hallucination or delusion or even simple hypocrisy; rather, it is ideology. And ideology is impossible for anyone to analyze rationally who remains trapped on its terrain. That is why race still proves so hard for historians to deal with historically, rather than in terms of metaphysics, religion, or socio-(that is, pseudo-) biology.

Nothing so well illustrates that impossibility as the convic­tion among otherwise sensible scholars that race "explains" historical phenomena; specifically, that it explains why people of African descent have been set apart for treatment different from that accorded to others. But race is just the name assigned to the phenomenon, which it no more explains than judicial review "explains" why the United States Supreme Court can declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, or than Civil War "explains" why Americans fought each other between 1861 and 1865.”
― Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

“Moreover, there was a striking lack of relationship between [fascism's] material and numerical strength and its political effectiveness. The very term "movement" was misleading since it implied some kind of enrolment or personal participation of large numbers. If anything was characteristic of fascism, it was its independence of such popular manifestations. Though usually aiming at a mass following, its potential strength was reckoned not by the numbers of its adherents but by the influence of the persons in high position whose good will the fascist leaders possessed, and whose influence in the community could be counted upon to shelter them from the consequences of an abortive revolt, thus taking the risks out of revolution.”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

“Much of American domestic policy, and almost all of US foreign policy, is determined by elites who are only somewhat constrained by voter preferences and decisions. What seemed remarkable and worthy of sociological inquiry was not Bush's own personal stupidity or viciousness but the lack, until late in his presidency, of a credible challenge to his policies from any significant power base.
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The small achievements of popular forces in post-hegemonic Britain and the Netherlands illustrate the highly limited parameters of reform and redistribution unless and until those reactions create or revivify political organizations that can challenge elites.”
― Richard Lachmann, First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers

“Bill Warren is right. The mere arrival of foreign capital in a country does not ‘block’ anything. It enslaves or develops the country just as much as any other capital, neither more nor less. Consequently, if it should happen that capital from New York were to flow into Calcutta as it flows into San Francisco, we should have no reason to suppose that Calcutta would not one day be, for better or worse, the equal of San Francisco. Unfortunately—and this is where Bill Warren’s mistake begins—(a) capital has never flowed into Calcutta; (b) under present conditions it seems improbable, if not impossible, that it will flow into Calcutta in the future; indeed (c) Calcutta is not underdeveloped because it has been invaded by foreign capital but, on the contrary, because it has been starved of this capital.”
― Arghiri Emmanuel

“I believe this quasi-religious attitude explains the repeated misunderstandings and deficiencies of revolutionary Marxism in the face of all the major events that have accompanied decolonization—such as the secessions of Katanga and Rhodesia, the Biafra war, and even the Algerian war and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Marxists seem to circle round and round these problems without knowing from which angle to tackle them. Innumerable ‘mini-theories’ are produced that contradict one another; words are refuted by other words; and no current doctrine of imperialism is accepted by more than a small group, even within the great ‘left-wing’ parties themselves on those occasions when reflection is encouraged, allowed or simply tolerated. This confusion becomes unbearable when the inadequacy of the old concepts is recognized and people try to save them with a multitude of deductive developments instead of firmly replacing them by new ones.”
― Arghiri Emmanuel

“At the present time, it is of course still impossible to foresee to any precise degree just what sections of the field of history will be illuminated and just how much light will be cast by a materialist investigation which would proceed from a more concrete study of the capitalist curve and the interrelationship between the latter and all the aspects of social life. Conquests that may be attained on this road can be determined only as the result of such an investigation itself, which must be more systematic, more orderly than those historical materialist excursions hitherto undertaken. In any case, such an approach to modern history promises to enrich the theory of historical materialism with conquests far more precious than the extremely dubious speculative juggling with the concepts and terms of the materialist method that has, under the pens of some of our Marxists, transplanted the methods of formalism into the domain of the materialist dialectic, and has led to reducing the task to rendering definitions and classifications more precise and to splitting empty abstractions into four equally empty parts; it has, in short, adulterated Marxism by means of the indecently elegant mannerisms of Kantian epigones. It is a silly thing indeed endlessly to sharpen and resharpen an instrument to chip away Marxist steel, when the task is to apply the instrument in working over the raw material!”
― Leon Trotsky

“Biologically and economically, the doctrine of the harmony of interests was only tenable if you left out of account the interest of the weak who must be driven to the wall, or called in the next world to redress the balance of the present.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations

“Expanding prosperity contributed to the popularity of the doctrine of the harmony of interests in three different ways. It attenuated competition for markets among producers, since fresh markets were constantly becoming available; it postponed the class issue, with its insistence on the primary importance of equitable distribution, by extending to members of the less prosperous classes some share in the general prosperity; and by creating a sense of confidence in present and future well-being, it encouraged men to believe that the world was ordered on so rational a plan as the natural harmony of interests. It was the continual widening of the field of demand which, for half a century, made capitalism operate as if it were a liberal utopia.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations

“The trade unionist tends to regard the intellectual as a utopian theorist lacking experience in the practical problems of the movement. The intellectual condemns the trade union leader as a bureaucrat. The recurrent conflicts between factions within the Bolshevik party in Soviet Russia were in part, at any rate, explicable as conflicts between the "party intellectuals", represented by Bukharin, Kamanev, Radek and Trotsky, and the "party machine" represented by Lenin, Sverdlov and Stalin.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations

“Protectionism, such as what U.S. president Donald Trump was attempting, amounts in effect under these circumstances (that is, in the absence of any significant expansion of state expenditure financed either by a fiscal deficit or by taxes on capitalists) to an export of unemployment to other countries. It can work only if the other countries do not retaliate.

If they do, then it gives rise to a competitive “beggar-thy-neighbor” policy that only worsens the crisis by creating further uncertainties and reducing investments further.”
― Utsa Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present

“My picture of the transition to war grows in part out of the sense that, on the Nazi side, the war itself was to a high degree a war of plunder and destruction; a war, that is, in which the means (military conquest) and the ends ("living space") became totally muddled up with each other on account of the Third Reich's need to live from hand to mouth in its social and economic policies after 1939. Ends became frantically telescoped into means in a manner which could only be self-destructive of the system as a whole, and which marked the actual lived experience of the vast majority of the populations subjected to Nazi rule.

There was a straight line from the so-called "temporary shortage of farmhands" to the enslavement and killing of millions of foreign labourers and prisoners of war after 1939 a straight line from the bottle-necks of 1938/9 to the crude plunder of the occupied territories; a straight line from the "guns-and-butter" policies of the 1930s to the only partial mobilization of German resources for war before 1944 and to the export of the worst sacrifices on to the backs of conquered peoples.”
― Timothy W. Mason

“Modern historical research in East Germany is still conducted in the light of Dmitrov's definition of fascism as 'the openly terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialistic elements of Finance-Capital'. No doubt this definition had a function and a degree of plausibility in 1935, but today, in view of the later development of Nazi Germany, it can have only very limited use as a starting point for an investigation, and can certainly not be regarded as an answer to the problem of the relationship between politics and economics under National Socialism.”
― Timothy W. Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class

“Discrimination against minority rights was not primarily the work of reactionaries and conservatives. On the contrary, in eastern Europe it was above all the work of modernizing liberals who were trying to create a national community through the actions of the state. For them, the state had to show that its power was above “everyone and everything,” and to override its opponents whether these be the Church, brigands, communists or ethnic minorities. Thus it was entirely consistent for the Romanian Liberal Minister of Education, Constantin Angelescu, to criticize not only minorities but also the Church and provincial administrators in his desire to build up a centralized school system, since “the interests of the State, the interests of the Romanian people, stand above individual interests, be they those of the communities . . . The Romanian State that is ours, all of ours, must be strengthened and . . . this State can only be strengthened by . . . letting the State mold the souls of all its citizens.”

Because democracy was about the creation of national communities, it was generally anti-Semitic, or at least more ready to allow anti-Semitism to shape policy—through separate electoral colleges, for example, or entry quotas into the universities and civil-service posts—than old-fashioned royalists had been. In Hungary a 1920 law marked out Jews as a separate race rather than as “Hungarians of the Mosaic faith”; had the country been more democratic, it would probably have been more anti-Semitic still. “All citizens in Poland irrespective of creed and nationality must enjoy equal rights,” the Polish Peasant Party announced in 1935, adding the rider that “the Jews, however, as has been proved, cannot be assimilated and are a consciously alien nation within Poland.” Similar views were evident in Slovakia and Romania. And this was not just an east European problem: such sentiments were on the rise in once ultra-assimilationist France as well, and eventually led to the notorious clause in Vichy’s draft constitution describing the Jews as “a race that conducts itself as a distinct community that resists assimilation.”
― Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century

“The radical nature of the primacy of politics under National Socialism, however, was rooted in the specific historical disintegration of bourgeois German society (1929-33), of German capitalism (1936-8), and of international politics in the 1930s. The immense political scope of the National Socialist government was not based on the confidence of a politically and economically homogeneous society; on the contrary, it was a result precisely of the disintegration of society. The coincidence of this with the collapse of the international order in the 1930s enabled the National Socialist state to achieve a degree of independence of society which is unparalleled in history.”
― Timothy W. Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class

“The typical difference that Lenin underscores between the old and the new capitalism does in fact exist, but it bears no necessary causal relation to either competition or monopoly capitalism but is easier to explain in terms of differences between early and late phases of capital accumulation in any given capitalist country at a given stage in the evolution of its technology.”
― Henryk Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crises

“Yet, in most of the world, US power was hegemonic more than coercive. The United States’ offer to serve as policeman of the world has been accepted by a majority of the world since 1945, and by almost the entire world after 1991. Many countries look to the US military’s command of the commons (the world’s airspace and seas as well as outer space) to ensure global order and to protect them from nearby regional powers that, in the absence of American military dominance, could dominate or invade their neighbors. Thus, communist Vietnam, after decades of fighting and millions of deaths to free itself from US domination, eagerly signed up for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and is considering allowing the United States to base warships at Cam Ranh Bay to deflect Chinese power—and of course each and every Eastern European country begged for admission to NATO and the EU, just as Western European governments positioned themselves after World War II within a geopolitical and economic structure designed and controlled by the United States in return for protection from the USSR. American aid through the Marshall Plan came after the recipient governments had already cast their lot with the United States.”
― Richard Lachmann, First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers

“It should be a matter of honour on the Left to write at least as well, without redundancy or clutter, as its adversaries.”
― Perry Anderson

“British colonial investments in Africa did not generally yield ‘superprofits’ in the form of higher- than-average returns, but coercive labour market regulation (including the widespread use of ‘native reserves’) did secure a ready supply of inexpensive labour that undergirded the profitability of British capital.”
― Zak Cope, The Oxford Handbook of Economic Imperialism

“Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.”
― Perry Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas

“Vulgar economy actually does no more than interpret, systematise and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations. It should not astonish us, then, that vulgar economy feels particularly at home in the estranged outward appearances of economic relations in which these prima facie absurd and perfect contradictions appear and that these relations seem the more self-evident the more their internal relationships are concealed from it, although they are understandable to the popular mind. But all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3

“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“Talking about one's stories is a little too much like nailing a dog to the floor -- you can get it to stay put that way but it doesn't do much for the dog.”
― Brian Evenson, Altmann's Tongue: Stories and a Novella

“Long dismissed as ideological representatives of the dominant powers, liberal economists have never experienced the pessimism of many modern Marxists regarding economic development of the periphery. It has come as something of a shock to Marxian writers that the empirical evidence on economic growth in the periphery since the Second World War has borne out much of the liberal case. Those countries which adopted strategies of export-oriented growth have achieved the most spectacular performance, while countries favouring self-sufficiency have done relatively poorly. Countries which have resisted distorting market prices have out-performed the heavily interventionist backward economies, which have in varying degrees emulated the Soviet model and and replaced economic mechanisms with direct controls and administrative allocation.”
― Michael Charles Howard, A History of Marxian Economics Volume II, 1929-1990

“Marxism-Leninism as a theory of hierarchical organization and engineered change can be applied to countries like Angola or Mozambique with a low degree of social conflict and class consciousness without much difficulty. The dictatorship of the proletariat may make little sense in any African country, but a vanguard party is an admirable instrument of rule in new nation-states in need of a centralizing institution.”
― David Ottaway, Afrocommunism

“To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, economic history is a deaf man answering questions no economist has put to him.”
― Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes