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Quote by David Graeber

“Marx and Engels, in their giddy enthusiasm for the industrial revolutions of their day, [...] were wrong to predict that market competition would compel factory owners to-go on with mechanization anyway. If it didn't happen, it can only be because market competition is not, in fact, as essential to the nature of capitalism as they had assumed. If nothing else, the current form of capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take the form of internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large semi-monopolistic enterprises, would presumably have come as a complete surprise to them.”

Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Work

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

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Author

David Graeber

David Graeber is an American anthropologist known for his research on economic anthropology, anarchism, and critical theory. His work explores the issues of economic relationships and power structures in modern society. more

“Every chemical compound, according to Engels, comes into existence only at a certain time in the development of the universe when the conditions are appropriate for it; and when it does come into existence it manifests this by entering into its characteristic relations. Neither carbon compounds or proteins are ideal forms, but are themselves witnesses of the conditions on a cooling planet. It is here that occurs his celebrated remark that life is the mode of existence of proteins.”

Communism Biology Marxism Marx Biochemistry Engels Dialectical Materialism

Book:Marx and science

Source: Marx and science

“In the same year as the original Disaster article, Meredeth Turshen attacked the paradigm of clinical medicine as excessively preoccupied with how the individual body reacts to disease, missing the bigger picture of class and other collectivities. She cited Engels’s descriptions of how polluted air, poorly ventilated houses, overcrowded slums and omnipresent sewage predisposed the workers of Manchester to become ill. She could have also quoted Rosa Luxemburg: ‘The doctors can trace the fatal infection in the intestines of the poisoned victims as long as they look through their microscopes; but the real germ which caused the death of the people in the asylum is called – capitalist society, in its purest culture.’ Since the 1970s, critical epidemiology has agreed with critical vulnerability theory on emphasising the social over the natural: disease and disaster as produced through processes internal to society.”

Capitalism Socialism Covid Engels Luxemburg Critical Epidemiology Critical Vulnerability Theory

Book:Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

Source: Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”

Materialism Marxism Marx Engels

Book:Selected Works, Vol 1

Source: Selected Works, Vol 1