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“A wave of spray from the ocean feels powerful, but it is only there for a moment, the sun dries the puddles and the water is gone. Then you feel maybe it never happened. That is how it was with us. The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.”

...in 1647 a meeting of all the judges of England was convened to establish that a heap of dung was a chattel, whereas dung spread on the ground was part of the realty.

“I have done nothing which was forbidden.”
“The forbidden is implied in the imperative.”
“It is not stated.”

One section of society here demands a tribute from the other for the very right to live on the earth, just as landed property in general involves the right of the proprietors to exploit the earth’s surface, the bowels of the earth, the air and thereby the maintenance and development of life.

But the credit system is no more emancipated from the monetary system as its basis than Protestantism is from the foundations of Catholicism.

As paper, the monetary existence of commodities has a purely social existence. It is faith that brings salvation. Faith in money value as the immanent spirit of commodities, faith in the mode of production and its predestined disposition, faith in the individual agents of production as mere personifications of self-vaporizing capital.

Any lingering feeling that legislation depended upon reason for its validity was, however, dispatched by the French Revolution and the consequent reaction against the rationalist view of law. By the nineteenth century it was a clear constitutional principle that Parliament was sovereign, and all its commands, however unreasonable, were legally binding.

The notion of justice working at different levels of generality had been expounded by Aristotle, and his word for the absolute justice which corrects general law in particular cases (epieikia) was adopted by sixteenth century writers in its English form: equity. “The nature of the equitable”, wrote Aristotle, “[is] a correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality”.

In point of fact, the vulgar economist does nothing more than translate the peculiar notions of the competition-enslaved capitalist into an ostensibly more theoretical and generalized language, and attempt to demonstrate the validity of these notions.

She loved those panels especially. Spiff’s flying saucer crossing alien skies, the little astronaut in his goggles under the saucer’s glass dome. Often it was funny, but also it was beautiful.

...in order to challenge capitalism, it is necessary to challenge not only the whole notion of rights, how people think about rights and how people think about property, but also the material processes whereby surpluses are both created and appropriated by capital.

After all, if capitalists can argue for the right to surplus-value on the grounds that they bring employment to laborers, why cannot laborers argue that they deserve surplus-value because without their efforts all the constant capital held by capitalists would be valueless?

Marx’s essential ideological objective is to pinpoint the duplicity that lies at the heart of the bourgeois conception of freedom (much like he questioned Proudhon’s appeal to bourgeois conceptions of justice). The contrast between George Bush’s rhetoric of liberty and freedom and the reality of Guantanamo Bay is exactly what we should expect.

He [Adam Smith] also put it forward in the still more popular form that the consumers must ultimately pay the producers for the entire value of the products. Right to the present, this remains one of the most well-loved platitudes, or rather eternal truths, of the so-called science of political economy.

To find value in a commodity by just looking at a commodity is like trying to find gravity in a stone. It only exists in relations between commodities and only gets expressed materially in the contradictory and problematic form of the money commodity.

Adam Smith confines himself to saying that one part of the means of production (the means of labour proper) serve in the labour process (which he wrongly expresses as ‘yield a profit to their master’) not by changing their natural form, but simply by being gradually worn out; whereas another part, the materials, are changed, and fulfill their function as a means of production precisely through their alteration.

War is simultaneously a violation of international law and international law in action.

[Preface- Engels] With the aid of this fact Marx investigated all the existing categories of economics, as Lavoisier had investigated all the existing categories of phlogistic chemistry with the aid of oxygen. In order to know what surplus-value was, he had to know what value was.

Particularly if one sees modern social ills as entirely compatible with legal ‘equality’ and hence ‘justice’, then it is precisely one’s concern for social justice that undermines one’s respect for law.

First, it is absurd to claim that because he does not see law surviving beyond capitalism, Pashukanis does not value justice. The equation of law and justice is ideological: law deals only with an abstract ‘justice’ between juridical subjects rather than concrete human agents, as Pashukanis makes clear.

The music was as formal as Job’s argument with God. Her dance was God’s reply.

It is not the worker who buys the means of production and subsistence, but the means of production that buy the worker to incorporate him into the means of production.

Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

the higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labour-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words the self-valorization of capital.

On the basis of capitalism, a system in which the worker does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the worker, the law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labour, undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus:

In this crappy life there are times when you think you are happy with the things you have done, even in a solitary cell, and there are times when you have doubts and you think you are unhappy. But then the time comes when you wonder what being happy really means. I pray to God you never come to ask that question. It’s really bad... Good night, son.

The truth is that I too am surprised that Sara, this character that I have created, has suddenly become so complicated. But I tell myself, “You are a nobody in this world. According to all the religious books, Eve managed to surprise all the angels and Satan, too.”

Plato’s Republic, in so far as the division of labour is treated in it as the formative principle of the state, is merely an Athenian idealization of the Egyptian caste-system, Egypt having served as the model of an industrial country to others of his contemporaries, e.g. Isocrates.

In every country where the capitalist mode of production prevails, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power until it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, for example, at the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the worker advances the use value of his labour-power to the capitalist (...) Everywhere the worker allows credit to the capitalist.