[quotes] The Body Keeps the Score - Bessel van der Kolk 2014

 

 

[quotes] Escape from Freedom - Erich Fromm 1941

 

 

[quotes] Hospicing Modernity - Vanessa Machado de Oliveira 2021

 

 

[quotes] A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics - Hadas Thier 2020

 

"At its core, capitalism was defined by Marx as a social relation of production. He meant that profits are not the result of good accounting or the inventive ideas of the superrich, but are instead the outcome of an exploitative relationship between two classes of people: bosses and workers."

"The division of society into haves and have-nots did not gently come to pass, and certainly not through the frugalness and intelligence of a small elite. It was the outcome of a violent upheaval, which forced large swaths of the population from their lands and traditional means of self-sufficiency. As we'll see, laws and coercive menas had to be employed to discipline a new class of laborers. Further, political revolutions discussed below placed a new capitalist elite at the helm of states, which could systematically repress the struggles of the dispossessed, advance markets and plunder abroad, and tend to other needs of the burgeoning elite. The violence, coercion, legislation, and upheavals necessary for the birth of this new system evince just how unnatural and vicious the road to capitalism was."

"As long as peasants and their families had some economic independence, obligation to serve their feudal lords was quite transparent - landowners and the state had to physically wrest a portion of the peasants' harvest through rent and taxes. Under the guise of freedom and democracy, the new landless wage laborers were 'free' to sell their labor-power to whomever they chose... or face starvation."

"To presume that markets and market signals can best determine all allocative decisions is to presume that everything can in principle be treated as a commodity. Commodification presumes the existence of property rights over process, things, and social relations that a price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract. The market is presumed to work as an appropriate guide - an ethic - for all human action."

"The bosses also get a big discount when they purchase labor-power. A good deal of unpaid work also contributes heavily toward its reproduction: for instance, childbirth, childcare, food preparation, laundry, and household cleaning, to name a few."

"Yet even if we limit ourselves more narrowly to paid labor that goes into producing your subsistence, if all things were fair and just, you would give over to your boss only the amount of time that it takes to reproduce the value of your labor-power."

"Using this definition, we see that wealth and poverty do not determine class, rather they are manifestations of it. The bosses are thus not defined by the degree of their extravagance. At the same time, society's poor do not represent an 'underclass' who, due to lack of employment or wealth, stand outside of society. Poverty is an integral part of the experience of the working class, and unemployment is just a stone's throw away for most workers."

"As a 2018 Oxfam report revealed, the richest forty-two people own the same combined wealth as the world's poorest 3.7 billion. In the US, the wealth of the three richest people equals that of the bottom half of the population. This gap grows by the day."

"For Marxists, understanding the system's propensity to break down is central to our analysis of capitalism, as well as the potential for its revolutionary overthrow. We've seen that at its best, a 'healthy' capitalist economy depends on exploitation, poverty, oppression, and environmental destruction in order to function."

"Understanding capitalist crisis is central to the theory and politics of revolutionary Marxism. The volatility and destruction brought upon by endemic, periodic crises make capitalism a fundamentally precarious system, and at the same time open the way toward class struggle and the potential for revolution."

"So, for instance, a 'surplus' of housing is part of what led to the recession that began in 2008. But this is not because there isn't a need for homes! It's just that people don't have the money to buy homes."

"Speculation can take off and snowball quickly because much of bourgeois economics rests on a delusional premise that markets will always expand."

"In the 1970s, what became known as the 'neoliberal revolution' overthrew much of the regulatory structures that were imposed on finance in the wake of the Great Depression. We'll discuss neoliberalism further later. This decade saw the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement and floating exchange rates, increased capital mobility, deregulation, and privatization of social benefits, such as pensions. Deregulation opened the door to an explosion of currency markets and a drive to 'securitize' everything... Neoliberalism has meant, in short, the financialization of everything."

"The ideology of neoliberalism thus served as a blueprint to attack the working class. Speedups, increased productivity, and declining wages transferred wealth from the bottom rungs of society to the top. Social costs were meanwhile passed on to working families through cuts to public services and welfare. The desired outcome of this restructuring was growing profitability for the ruling class alongside staggering inequality."

"But the twin features of neoliberalism - economic polarization and deregulation - gave rise to contradictions that would implode down the line: overaccumulation, mountains of debt, and soaring speculative bubbles. Rapid accumulation gave way to overproduction."

"In keeping with neoliberal principles, the US government rescued the financial system without violating the concept of private ownership of the system. In the wake of the crisis, when financial reform entered political discussion, banks and their lobbyists succeeded in dictating the terms of the debate, resulting in largely preserving the status quo."

"But thus far the ruling class has never found a crisis it wasn't able to get out of - by making the working class pay for it."

"Mozambique, one of the poorest nations in the world, holds public debt equal to 70 percent of its GDP. Over 60 percent of it is owed to foreign institutions. The so-called 'emerging markets' became a popular investment destination for speculators searching for high-yield returns. They readily lapped up a record of $1.4 trillion wroth of debt from emerging markets' governments and companies. But when prices of commodities produced in the Global South fell, booming growth slowed, and speculators responded by pulling back investments and calling in debts."

"Profits cannot be created without the exploitation of labor at the point of production, even if large sums are traded and lost."

"We live in a society where every decision made by those with power is driven by how much money can be made. In a nutshell, 'exchange-value' rules over 'use-value'. Profits over human beings."

"Workers (sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically) have our hands on the gears of production. If we collectively withdraw our labor-power, along with it, we withdraw the means to turn a profit. Without profits, the system cannot survive."

[quotes] Adopted Territory - Eleana J. Kim 2010

 

"In their accounts the transnationally adopted child must be viewed as being fully embedded in and embodying cultural worlds and social relations, with values and meanings attaching to her as she passes across borders of nation and family. Otherwise, those prior histories and relationships risk being marginalized, erased, or devalued in her radical transformation from needy third world orphan to privileged first world citizen."

"As Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp note, 'Throughout history, state power has depended directly and indirectly on defining normative families and controlling populations.' In modernizing South Korea, control of the population was a key concern of the developmentalist state."

"This Janus-faced nature of the American military occupation - exploitative and humanitarian - has characterized the neo-colonial relationship between America and Korea since the 1950s. As Nancy Abelmann and John Lie write in describing the role of the United States in South Korea: "Through military and civilian contacts, the United States became at once an object of material longing and materialistic scorn, a heroic savior and a reactionary intruder."

"Adoption served as a way for the state to regulate its mixed-blood population through the management of bodies and sexuality and to simultaneously maintain good will with American citizens."

"This event and personal narratives of other U.S. veterans of the Korean War underscore how the generic humanity of the children allowed U.S. soldiers to redeem their own particular humanity as Americans whose acts of charity reinstated their personal and national moral exceptionalism in the context of a dehumanizing war."

"Whereas Koreans in the West often framed them as long-lost members of the Korean community and looked upon them with a mixture of guilt, pity, and probing curiosity, adoptive parents and adoption social workers seemed to impose a whitewashed version of adoption as a highly successful social experiment."

"They contrast their proactive parenting with that of the parents of adult Korean adoptees, and while there may be some truth to this comparison many adult adoptees feel that this attitude of enlightenment disguises a defensiveness among adoptive parents who may be comfortable with providing cultural heritage in the form of multiculturalist consumer practices but who are also deeply uncomfortable with issues of racial difference and their own white privilege."

"Adoptees see white parents' inability to grasp histories of racism and experiences of racialized minorities in the United States as a problem of white privilege, which also blinds them to the inevitability that their children will fit into the nation differently than they do."

"Many adoptees feel that the discourses of pluralism and color-blindness that may have encouraged and celebrated their parents' choices to raise a nonwhite child hampered their own identity formation because they were left isolated when faced with the realities of racial difference and discrimination."

"Unlike second-generation ethnic Americans for whom cultural awakenings or interest is often grounds for strengthening family ties and belonging, for transracial adoptees this assertion may instead be the grounds for greater individuation and differentiation from adoptive family."

"For critics of adoption, however, broader structural inequalities and political circumstances inform their own moral perspective, whether they see it as an imperfect system that is in dire need of reform or as an unconscionable practice grounded in colonial power relations and centuries of white privilege."

"Seeing Korean women date white men could be particularly galling to some male adoptees who realized that the heterosexual stratifications that have emasculated them in their adoptive countries were also mirrored and replicated in Korea. They thereby witness how neocolonial relationships with the United States have produced a sexual economy in Korea in which it seems that white men, no matter how physically unattractive or morally repugnant, possess greater social capital than do Korean men."

"The suicide not only brought the hidden histories of adoptees who, in Minhee's words, 'had less of a chance to survive' but also a recognition of the limits of cultural citizenship for adoptees in Korea - who, caught between nation-states and cultural locations, can die as foreigners in thier so-called motherland. It also demonstrated clearly how adoptee kinship fills in for the absence of genealogical ties to family and nation for adoptees in Korea."

"This rather flippant characterization depends upon a neoliberal logic of rational self-actualization that radically downplays the importance not only of state regulation but also of social relations and intimacy. For other adoptees, however, the ease with which this equation or 'huge trade' can be drawn, from needing to eat to wanting a 'fat-ass computer,' and from severed kinship ties and knowledge to a 'high-speed Internet connection,' points to some of the moral and ethical dangers in uncritical celebrations of transnational adoptees as exemplars of globalization."

"It was during the 1980s, in fact, when overseas adoption was actively encouraged by the state as a form of 'emigration' and tied to the state's population control project. This policy also construed oversea adoption as a form of 'civil diplomacy' prefiguring a surplus population of children as future bridge builders and eventually as productive supplies of Western knowledge and skills to further South Korea's economic development."

"Some adoptees now view adoption agencies as seeking to reproduce their own existence and legitimacy rather than uphold the best interests of the child in ways that resonate with the description of 'goal displacement' in South Korea adoptions offered by the social work scholar Rosemary Sarri and her colleagues. Goal displacement describes a condition in which 'organizations are under pressure to secure resources to maintain themselves.'"

"All these cases reveal how agencies focused less on family preservation than on processing children, often on the basis of minimal background investigation, to shuttle them quickly through the system to new parents overseas."

"The organization CCEJ, which was established in 1989 by some five hundred Korean lawyers, professors, and ministers under the leadership of Reverend So Kyong Sok, is widely regarded as the first civic organization in postauthoritarian South Korea."

"His masters thesis conceptualized a theology of birth mothers by drawing upon minjung and feminist theologies to argue that Korean birth mothers are part of the minjung, and as such they should be liberated from their guilt by reframing the relinquishment of their children from being an individual sin to one that is embedded in structures of inequality - namely those of capitalism and patriarchy."

"As this example suggests, the personal motivations of Koreans, especially those of Revereng Kim's generation, are entirely shaped by their membership in the Korean nation, local and national politics, and a moral vision for the future of the world, as well as of democracy in Korea..."

"What Dae-won articulated is similar to what Julia Paley in her study of social movements in postdictatorial Chile calls 'paradoxical participation,' in which the encouragement of civic participation actively recruits individuals into the neoliberal rollback of state services and thereby displaces state accountability onto self-regulating, 'responsibilized' subjects: 'Participation offered a sense of meaning to citizens at the same time as it limited avenues through which citizens could act.'"

"But under the 'clean break' paradigm instituted by international adoption law, being a good mother also required the full surrender of her child and taking on a lifetime of guilt and uncertainties."

"In this logic, the orphanage is, like the camp, a zone of indistinction in which children 'die' or are 'next to nothing,' and from which children must be 'rescued' in order to become full persons."

[quotes] The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity - David Graeber and David Wengrow 2021

 

"The political implications of the Hobbesian model need little elaboration. It is a foundational assumption of our economic system that humans are at base somewhat nasty and selfish creatures, basing their decisions on cynical, egoistic calculation rather than altruism or cooperation; in which case, the best we can hope for are more sophisticated internal and external controls on our supposedly innate drive towards accumulation and self-aggrandizement."

"Rousseau's story about how humankind descended into inequality form an original state of egalitarian innocence seems more optimistic, but nowadays it's mostly deployed to convince us that while the system we live under might be unjust, the most we can realistically aim for is a bit of modest tinkering."

"For obvious reasons, Hobbes's position tends to be favoured by those on the right of the political spectrum, and Rousseau's by those leaning left."

"The first thing to emphasize is that 'the origin of social inequality' is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchy were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve."

"The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human - that is, what rights could they be said to have 'naturally,' even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws?"

"[Native] Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were equally free to obey or disobey orders as they saw fit. The democratic governance of the Wendat and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, which so impressed later European readers, was an expression of the same principle: if no compulsion was allowed, then obviously such social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus."

"In conclusion, [Kandiaronk] swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest."

"[from Turgot:] We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex 'commercial civilization', in which the poverty and dispossession of some - however lamentable it may be - is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole."

"How is it that Europeans are able to turn wealth into power; turn a mere unequal distribution of material goods - which exists, at least to some degree, in any society - into the ability to tell others what to do, to employ them as servants, workmen, or grenadiers, or simply to feel that it was no concern of theirs if they were left dying in a feverish bundle on the street?"

"To Americans like Kandiaronk, there was no contradiction between individual liberty and communism - that's to say, communism in the sense we've been using it here, as a certain presumption of sharing, that people who aren't actual enemies can be expected to respond to one another's needs. In the American view, the freedom of the individual was assumed to be premised on a certain level of 'baseline communism', since, after all, people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything, other than whatever it takes to stay alive."

"The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property [...] there was a strong emphasis on ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one's direct control)."

"while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way."

"When we are capable of self-awareness, it's usually for very brief periods of time: the 'window of consciousness', during which we can hold a through or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we're talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end."

"There is every reason to believe that sceptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them... It's often people who are just slightly odd who become leaders; the truly odd can become spiritual figures, but, even more, they can and often to serve as a kind of reserve of potential talent and insight that can be called on in the event of a crisis or unprecedented turn of affairs."

"If there is a riddle here it's this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens - supposedly the wisest of apes - allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root?"

"What are the mechanisms that cause human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbors?"

"the dominant view among anthropologists nowadays is that the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all."

"American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like - provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are free from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors - unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. Or to put the matter more technically: what the Hadza, Wendat or 'egalitarian people such as Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones. They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid - what contemporary European observers often referred to as 'communism' - was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy."

"As St Augustine put it, we rebelled against God, and God's judgment was to cause our own desires to rebel against our rational good sense; our punishment for original sin is the infinity of our new desires."

"In working the land, one 'mixes one's labour' with it; in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself. Lazy natives, according to Locke's disciples, didn't do that. They were not, Lockeans claimed, 'improving landlords' but simply made use of the land to satisfy their basic needs with the minimum effort. James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and 'if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or 'destroyed' like savage beasts.' In a similar way, the stereotype of the carefree, lazy native, coasting through a life free from material ambition, was deployed by thousands of European conquerors, plantation overseers and colonial officials in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania as a pretext for the use of bureaucratic terror to force local people into work: everything form outright enslavement to punitive tax regimes, corvee labour and debt peonage."

"To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that - quite unlike free societies - we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms. This is what the political scientist C.B. Macperson meant by 'possessive individualism'. Just as every man's home is his castle, so your right not be killed, tortured, or arbitrarily imprisoned rests on the idea that you own your own body, just as you own your chattels and possessions, and legally have the right to exclude others from your land, or house, or car, and so on."

"What makes the Roman Law conception of property - the basis of almost all legal systems today - unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will."

"Capitalism, on the other hand, involved constant reinvestment, turning one's wealth into an engine for creating ever more wealth, increasing production, expanding operations, and so forth. But imagine, Weber suggested, being the very first person in one's community to act this way. To do so would have meant defying all social expectations, to be utterly despised by almost all your neighbours - who would, increasingly, also become your employees."

"Salmon-fishing and acorn-gathering simply have very different practical affordances, which over the long term might be expected to produce very different sorts of societies: one warlike and prone to raiding (and after you have made off with the food, it's not much of a leap to begin carrying off prisoners as well), the other essentially peaceful. Northwest societies, then, were warlike because they simply didn't have the option of relying on a war-proof staple food."

"We are introducing them as a way to illustrate how the process by which cultures define themselves against one another is always, at root, political, since it involves self-conscious arguments about the proper way to live. Revealingly, the arguments appear to have been most intense precisely in this border zone between anthropological 'culture areas'."

"Perhaps Marx put it best: we make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing."

"Theirs [the Neolithic] was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature, to increase, the likelihood, of securing a favourable outcome. Their 'laboratory' was the real world of plants and animals, whose innate tendencies they exploited through close observation and experimentation. This Neolithic mode of cultivation, was, moreover, highly successful."

"The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one's existence to the logistical rigours of agriculture; and retain food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death. It is just this sort of ecological flexibility that tends to be excluded from conventional narratives of world history, which present the planting of a single seed as a point of no return."

"there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighborhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of time, in our heads. Much of social theory can be seen as an attempt to square these two dimensions of our experience."

"households cannot simply schedule their daily labour in line with their own needs. They also have to consider their obligations to other households, which in turn have their own obligations to other, different households, and so on. Factoring in that some tasks - such as moving flocks to highland pastures, or the demands of milking, shearing and guarding herds - may require the combined efforts of ten different households, and that households have to balance the scheduling of numerous different sorts of commitment, we begin to get a sense of the complexities involved."

"Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains."

"perhaps the first to attempt a systematic definition was a German philosopher named Rudolf von Ihering, who, in the late nineteenth century, proposed that a state should be defined as any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory... On this definition, a government is a 'state' if it lays claim to a certain stretch of land and insists that, within its borders, it is the only institution whose agents can kill people, beat them up, cut off parts of their body or lock them in cages; or, as von Ihering emphasized, that can decide who else has the right to do so on its behalf."

"We have already talked about fundamental, even primary, forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey; the freedom to reorganize social relations. Can we speak similarly about elementary forms of domination?"

"As we've seen, this obsession with property rights as the basis of society, and a foundation of social power, is a peculiarly Western phenomenon - indeed, if 'the West' has any real meaning, it would probably refer to that legal and intellectual tradition which conceives society in those terms."

"In other words, 'landed property' is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state's monopoly of violence within a territory."

"We would like to suggest that these three principles - call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma - are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree."

"What really concerns us about these three principles is that each has become the basis for institutions now seen as foundational to the modern state. In the case of control over violence, this is obvious. Modern states are 'sovereign': they hold the power once held by kings, which in practice translates to von Ihering's monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within their territory... In modern states, the very same kind of power is multiplied a thousand times because it is combined with the second principle: bureaucracy... administrative organizations are always based not just on control of information, but also on 'official secrets' of one sort or another... the danger, is offset by a third principle: democracy. Modern states are democratic, or at least it's generally felt that they should be."

"People have an unfortunate tendency to see the successful prosecution of arbitrary violence as in some sense divine, or at least to identify it with some kind of transcendental power."

"When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a 'patrimonial system': that is, one in which all the kings' subjects are imagined as members of the royal household, at least to the degree that they are all working to care for the king."

"Families who found themselves unable to command such resources had to obtain beer and loaves elsewhere, creating networks of obligation and debt. Hence important class distinctions and dependencies did, in fact, begin to emerge, as a sizeable sector of Egypt's population found itself deprived of the means to care independently for ancestors."

"Indeed, if we are trying to understand the appeal of monarchy as a form of government - and it cannot be denied that for much of recorded human history it was a very popular one - then likely it has something to do with its ability to mobilize sentiments of a caring nature and abject terror at the same time."

"Between households, responsibilities came down to a principle of reciprocity: records were kept and at the end of each year all outstanding credits and debts were to be cancelled out. This is where the 'village bureaucracy' comes in. To do that meant units of work had to be measured in a way which allowed clear resolution to the inevitable arguments that crop up in such situations - about who did what for whom, and who owed what to whom... Of course, the danger of such accounting procedures is that they can be turned to other purposes: the precise system of equivalence that underlies them has the potential to give almost any social arrangements, even those founded on arbitrary violence, an air of even-handedness and equity."

"Both money and administration are based on similar principles of impersonal equivalence. What we wish to emphasize at this point is how frequently the most violence inequalities seem to arise, in the first instance, from such fictions of legal equality. All citizens of a city, or all worshippers of its god, or all subjects of its king were considered ultimately the same - at least in that one specific way. The same laws, the same rights, the same responsibilities applied to all of them, whether as individual or, in later and more patriarchal times, as families under the aegis of paterfamilias."

"What's important here is the fact that this equality could be viewed as making people (as well as things) interchangeable, which in turn allowed rulers, and their henchmen, to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects' unique situations. This is what gives the word 'bureaucracy' such a distasteful association almost everywhere today."

"[we noted] how the English word 'free' ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning 'friend' - since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises. The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, [the freedom to create or transform social relationships...] One might ask, how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom, or permanent slavery? It happens, we'd suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable - in a nutshell, bureaucratized."

"As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of maths and violence."

"Jaspers called this the Axial Age, a term since expanded by others to include the period that saw the birth of all today's world religions, stretching from the Persian prophet Zoroaster (c.800BC) to the coming of Islam (c.AD 600)."

"As a result, the social sciences were conceived and organized around two core questions: (1) waht had gone wrong with the project of Enlightenment, with the unity of scientific and moral progress, and with schemes for the improvement of human society? And: (2) why is is that well-meaning attempts to fix society's problems so often end up making things even worse?"

"The British Empire, for instance, maintained a system of indirect rule in various parts of Africa, India, and the Middle East where local institutions like royal courts, earth shrines, associations of clan elders, men's houses and the like were maintained in place, indeed fixed by legislation. Major political change - forming a political party, say, or leading a prophetic movement - was in turn entirely illegal, and anyone who tried to do such things was likely to be put in prison. This obviously made it easier to describe the people anthropologists studied as having a way of life that was timeless and unchanging."

"Social science has been largely a study of the ways in which human beings are not free: the way that our actions and understandings might be said to be determined by forces outside our control. Any account which appears to show human beings collectively shaping their own destiny, or even expressing freedom for its own sake, will likely be written off as illusory, awaiting 'real' scientific explanation; or if none is forthcoming, as outside the scope of social theory entirely."

"If something did go terribly wrong in human history - and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did - then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history."

"The Roman Law conception of natural freedom is essentially based on the power of the individual (by implication, a male head of household) to dispose of his property as he sees fit. In Roman Law property isn't even exactly a right, since rights are negotiated with others and involve mutual obligations; it's simply power - the blunt reality that someone in possession of a thing can do anything he wants with it, except that which is limited 'by force or law'.

"Time and again we found ourselves confronted with writing which simply assumes that the larger and more densely populated the social group, the more 'complex' the system needed to keep it organized. Complexity, in turn, is still often used as a synonym for hierarchy. Hierarchy, in turn, is used as a euphemism for chains or command, which mean that as soon as large numbers of people decide to live in one place or join a common project, they must necessarily abandon the second freedom - to refuse orders - and replace it with legal mechanisms for, say, beating or locking up those who don't do as they're told. As we've seen, none of these assumptions are theoretically essential, and history tends not to bear them out."

[quotes] They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom - Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri 2022

 

"Revolution, they believed, required first and foremost a level of consciousness, not just strategies for fighting or protesting. They raised people's consciousness through holding teach-ins and putting on cultural events."

"'if you uproot an olive tree, we'll plant one hundred instead!'"

"If I was successful in life but my success didn't help Palestine, then it wasn't truly a success. They planted this seed in us while we were very young, but even if they didn't, everything I had witnessed from a young age would have been enough to make the liberation of Palestine the main goal of my life."

"While I believe that it's the right of all colonized, occupied, and oppressed people to stand up to their oppressors, I've always been convinced that staying alive and conveying our message through unarmed resistance is more powerful and strategic than our dying. I can't serve the Palestinian cause if I'm dead."

"'Thank you for your tears,' I began. 'But I don't want your sadness. Nor do I want your money. Please save that for the people in your own country who need it."

"The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States was one of the worst things to happen to the Palestinian people in recent years."

"'I want to teach you all a course on international law and international humanitarian law, so you truly benefit from your time here by learning your rights and expanding your political consciousness.'"

"My time in her classroom is one of the many reasons I've never viewed this chapter of my life as a loss. In prison, I learned the virtue of patience, something I had always struggled with before. And in prison, instead of putting my own comfort and desires first, I learned how to be in a group and always fight for the interest of the collective."

"By their examples, Khalida and Khalto Yasmeen had taught me how to be a strong woman who advocated for herself and spoke truth to power. They had helped me understand the critical role women play in our society and in our struggle for liberation. Women make up half of society, and they raise the whole of it."

[quotes] How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire - Andreas Malm 2021

 

"The fact that [Gandhi] can emerge as an icon of the climate movement - not to mention 'our scientist of the human spirit' - attests to the dept of the regression in political consciousness between the twentieth and the twenty-first century."

"The civil rights movement won the Act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power."

"The insistence on sweeping militancy under the rug of civility - now dominant not only in the climate movement, but in most Anglo-American thinking and theorising about social movements - is itself a symptom of one of the deepest gaps between the present and all that happened from the Haitian Revolution to the poll tax riots: the demise of revolutionary politics. It barely exists any longer as a living praxis in powerful movements or as a foil against which their demands can be set. From the years around 1789 to those around 1989, revolutionary politics maintained actuality and dynamic potentiality, but since the 1980s it has been defamed, antiquated, unlearned and turned unreal."

"'Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.' as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist."

"the [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] understood oil as a material base for the hostile trinity - US imperialism, Israeli colonialism, Arab reaction - and sabotage as a way to 'strike at the ligaments of empire.'"

"There is a very tight correlation between income and wealth on the one hand and CO2 emissions on the other. It has been demonstrated from Canada to China: a diminutive share of the population accounts for a wildly outsized portion of the gas released. To be rich in the world today is to come out on top in the distribution of the 'unequal ability to pollute', as Dario Kenner names it in his Carbon Inequality."

"'Can we really equate', [Agarwal and Narain] asked, 'the carbon dioxide contributions of gas guzzling automobiles in Europe and North America or, for that matter, anywhere in the Third World with the methane emissions of draught cattle and rice fields of subsistence farmers in West Bengal or Thailand? Do these people not have a right to live? A quantum of methane from a ruminant or paddy might have the same radiative forcing as a quantum of CO2 from an SUV... but the moral substances are like chalk and cheese."

"The rich could claim ignorance in 1913. Not so now. A group of American and British criminologists have consequently argued that conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels ought to be classified as a crime. It is aggravated by the circumstance, secondly, that the main source of luxury emissions - the hypermobility of the rich, their inordinate flying and yachting and driving - is what frees them from having to bother with the consequences, as they can always shift to safer locations. To be super-rich and hypermobile above 400ppm is to dump lethal hazards on others and get away from them in one master stroke."

"On the standard view, which also seems to be King's, an inanimate object can undergo violence by virtue of being property - standing in a relation, that is, to a human being, who can claim to be indirectly hurt when it is hurt... But this indirectness is also what sets property destruction apart, for one cannot equate the treatment of people with the treatment of the things they own... There is, however, one exception, one type of property destruction that approaches killing and maiming, namely that which hits material conditions for subsistence: poisoning someone's groundwater, burning down a family's last remaining grove of olive trees or, for that matter, firebombing a paddy field in an Indian peasant village because it emits methane would come close to a stab in the heart."

"The tolerance for subaltern violence stands in inverse relation to the consequent suffusion of a social formation with violence - the American allergy, in other words, is a pathology."

"Look at it which way you will, from the angle of investment, production or consumption, it is the rich that drive the emergency, and a climate movement that does not want to eat the rich, with all the hunger of those who struggle to put food on the table, will never hit home. A movement that refuses to make the distinctions between classes and colliding interests will end up on the wrong side of the tracks."

"There is no way a movement can ever get its hands on fossil fuel combustion. 'No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches or in direct actions,' the energy is beyond reach, because people 'do not help produce it. They only consume.'"

"'The fight is, definitely, not yet lost - in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less.' If fatalists think that mitigation is meaningful only at a time when damage is yet to be done, they have misunderstood the basics of both climate science and movement."

"Climate fatalism is for the jaded and the deflated; it is a 'bourgeois luxury', in the plain language of one Swedish critic."

[quotes] The One-Straw Revolution - Masanobu Fukuoka 1978

 

"Once the farmer has determined that a plot of land should grow rice or vegetables and has cast the seed, he must assume responsibility for maintaining that plot. To disrupt nature and then abandon her is harmful and irresponsible."

"Mr. Fukuoka believes that natural farming proceeds from the spiritual health of the individual. He considers the healing of the land and the purification of the human spirit to be one process, and he proposes a way of life and a way of farming in which this process can take place."

"I could only think of this concept of non-usefulness as being of great benefit to the world, and particularly the present world which is moving so rapidly in the opposite direction."

"Formal schooling has no intrinsic value, but becomes necessary when humanity creates a condition in which one must become 'educated' to get along."

"It is the same with the scientist. He pores over books night and day, straining his eyes and becoming nearsighted, and if you wonder what on earth he has been working on all that time - it is to become the inventor of eyeglasses to correct nearsightedness."

"Nature does not change, although the way of viewing nature invariably changes from age to age. No matter the age, natural farming exists forever as the wellspring of agriculture."

"Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create. Doctors should first determine at the fundamental level what it is that human beings depend on for life."

"Farming out of season is becoming more and more popular all the time. To have mandarin oranges just one month earlier, the people in the city seem happy enough to pay for the farmer's extra investment in labor and equipment. But if you ask how important it is for human beings to have this fruit a month earlier, the truth is that it is not important at all, and money is not the only price paid for such indulgence."

"If a high price is charged for natural food, it means that the merchant is taking excessive profits. Furthermore, if natural foods are expensive, they become luxury foods and only rich people are able to afford them."

"In general, commercial agriculture is an unstable proposition. The farmer would do much better by growing the food he needs without thinking about making money. If you plant one grain of rice, it becomes more than one thousand grains. One row of turnips makes enough pickles for the entire winter. If you follow this line of thought, you will have enough to eat, more than enough, without struggling. But if you decide to try to make money instead, you get on board the profit wagon, and it runs away with you."

"It seems to me that the greater one's desires, the more one has to work to satisfy them."

"Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced."

"If we do have a food crisis it will not be caused by the insufficiency of nature's productive power, but by the extravagance of human desire."

"We have been born and are living on the earth to face directly the reality of living."

"I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think this is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time."

"Pure natural farming, by contrast, is the no-stroke school. It goes nowhere and seeks no victory."

"If you expect a bright world on the other side of the tunnel, the darkness of the tunnel lasts all the longer. When you no longer want to eat something tasty, you can taste the real flavor of whatever you are eating. It is easy to lay out the simple foods of a natural diet on the dining table, but those who can truly enjoy such a feast are few."

"Just playing or doing nothing at all, children are happy. A discriminating adult, on the other hand, decides what will make him happy, and when these conditions are met he feels satisfied. Foods taste good to him not necessarily because they have nature's subtle flavors and are nourishing to the body, but because his taste has been conditioned to the idea that they taste good."

"It is said that there is no creature as wise as the human being. By applying this wisdom, people have become the only animals capable of nuclear war."

"'Why do you have to develop? If economic growth rises from 5% to 10%, is happiness going to double? What's wrong with a growth rate of 0%? Isn't this a rather stable kind of economics? Could there be anything better than living simply and taking it easy?"

"There is nowhere better than this world. Years ago I realized that we human beings are good just as we are and I set out to enjoy my life."

[quotes] Carceral Capitalism - Jackie Wang 2018

 

"Prisons and law enforcement may actually grow when the ideology of small government is hegemonic because the maintenance of law and order is considered the proper (morally authorized) domain of government. For Bernard E. Harcourt, neoliberal penality is rooted in 'the assumption of government legitimacy and competence in the penal arena and, on the other hand, the presumption that the government should not play a role elsewhere.'"

"Thus, as growth in the 'real' economy remains low, in our perverted debt economy, falsely categorizing borrowers as delinquent has become a financial opportunity in itself."

"All of this to say that a vast number of humans - whether they are laborers or soldiers - may become superfluous, though they my still be needed (for now at least) as users and consumers."

"This antagonistic relationship to production also redefines how the People's War is waged: rather than seizing the means of production, Jackson emphasized the destruction of the protective and productive forces."

"Law itself is a construction designed specifically to manage 'poor, desperate people like me.'"

"Will these credit instruments and the 'discipline of the free market' reduce our lives to the acquisition of 'marketable skills' and make it impossible to explore, wander, create, invent, learn (as opposed to 'acquiring skills'), relax, form non-instrumentalized social bonds, loaf, and daydream? Without a revolution or a social movement to overturn or counter the direction of the debt economy and techno-capitalism, we might be catapulted into a future where our lives are disciplined and determined by our dependency on credit."

"But what exactly is primitive accumulation? It entails the creation of a labor market and a system of private property achieved through the violent process of dispossessing people of their land and ways of life so that they can be converted into workers for capitalists. In order to turn peasants, small craftsmen, and others into workers who have nothing to sell but their labor power, these people must first be alienated from their means of subsistence."

"1) Capitalism is inherently expansionary, as it seeks to realize an ever-increasing amount of surplus value; 2) There is no reason why surplus value need be realized within the formal capitalist sphere when realization can be secured through violence, state force, colonization, militarism, war, the use of international credit to promote the interests of the hegemonies, the expropriation of indigenous land, predatory tariffs and taxes, hyper-exploitation, and the pilfering of the public purse."

"Harvey agrees with Luxemburg's claim that capitalism has a dual character: one sphere is governed by freedom of contract and the rule of law while the other is dominated by political violence and looting carried out by hegemonic capitalist nations. The looting component of the accumulation process is often carried out through the international credit system, which Harvey notes is the linchpin of late capitalism."

"To accept risk scores as an index of personal competency is to embrace a liberal politics of personal agency, where those who work hard to maintain good credit get what they deserve."

"The idea that people have a moral obligation to make good on their promise to pay their debts is partly tied to the idea that freedom means personally bearing the risks of your actions and decisions."

"A generation - financiers, abolitionists, actuaries, jurists, preachers, legislators, corporate executives, philosophers, social scientists - developed a vision of freedom that linked the liberal ideal of self-ownership to the personal assumption of 'risk.'" - Freaks of Fortune, Jonathan Levy

"the credit system is legitimized by the moral framework that shapes our understanding of debt - whereby the creditor is framed as benevolent while the struggling debtors are viewed as lazy or irresponsible for defaulting on their loans. However, as lending practices become more predatory, this moral framework is at risk of unraveling."

"The financialization of municipalities, the loss of key tax revenue streams, deindustrialization, and capital flight are the causes of the fiscal crisis - not reckless public spending. The situation has led to the development of socially deleterious methods of revenue extraction that target vulnerable populations, particularly poor black Americans."

"However, I want to emphasize that the state is no ordinary borrower; it is a borrower endowed with the legal power to loot the public to pay back its creditors."

"... a municipality's financial standing (or its credit-worthiness) is partly tied to its ability to remain solvent by using the police power and court system to extract revenue from citizens."

"The kapitalistate framework also posits that two primary functions of the state in a capitalist society are to facilitate the accumulation process and to legitimize capitalism."

"Foucault asserts that biopolitical forms of power target the 'aleatory,' unpredictable, and potentially destabilizing elements of a population for the sake of keeping the whole population in balance."

"Foucault puts it bluntly when he says, 'In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable... Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State.'" - Society Must be Defended

"It's as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: 'Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.' That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day - the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state."

"For Gilmore, the problem 'is not to figure out how to determine or prove the innocence of certain individuals or certain classes of people, but to attack the general system through which criminalization proceeds.'"

"The media construction of urban ghettos and prisons as 'alternate universes' marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of 'void' zones that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. Whatever happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an 'injustice' does not register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms."

"Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize."

"Surviving gendered violence does not make the survivor incapable of perpetuating other forms of violence... That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors, but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and remaining cognizant of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts."

"I see this rejection of collective forms of organizing - and the unwillingness to think beyond the individual as the foundational political unit - as part of a historical shift from queer liberation to queer perfomativity that coincides with the advent of neoliberalism and the 'Care of the Self'- style 'politics' of choice."

"Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats. White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjection of bodies onto which they project hostile feelings, allowing them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual violence."

"The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the state as 'criminals.'"

"When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that require passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead black boy to make its point."

"But what if - instead of reacting to these charges with counterarguments that persuasively demonstrate that the abolitionist position is the only sensible position - we instead strategically use these charges themselves as points of departure to show how the prison itself is a problem for thought that can only be unthought using a mode of thinking that does not capitulate to the realism of the Present?"

"When we act in accordance with the prophetic dream, the dream comes to directly constitute reality."

"Our bodies are not closed loops. We hold each other and keep each other in time by marching, singing, embracing, breathing. We synchronize our tempos so we can find a rhythm through which the urge to live can be expressed, collectively. And in this way, we set the world into motion. In this way, poets become the timekeepers of the revolution."