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Why Marx Was Right QUOTES

Why Marx Was Right QUOTES

61 " Quem quiser saber aquilo que homens e mulheres creem precisa dar uma olhada no que eles fazem, não no que dizem "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

62 " Without the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, owned by Friedrich Engels’s textile-manufacturing father, the chronically impoverished Marx might well have not survived to pen polemics against textile manufacturers. Something "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

63 " ... apenas o capitalismo é capaz de desenvolver as forças produtivas até o ponto em que, sob uma administração política diferente, o excedente por elas gerado possa ser usado para prover o bastante para todos. Para ter o socialismo, primeiro é preciso ter capitalismo... "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

64 " ... se não houvesse exploração, não haveria a expansão significativa das forças produtivas, e, se tal expansão não existisse, não haveria base material para o socialismo "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

65 " Marx chega a afirmar que nenhuma classe social nova assume até que as forças produtivas tenham sido desenvolvidas tanto quanto possível pela classe anterior "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

66 " O Manifesto comunista, afinal, propõe-se a ser um item de propaganda política, e como tal é cheio de floreios retóricos "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

67 " Não que a construção do socialismo não possa começar em situações de privação, mas, sem recursos materiais, a tendência será a de que ele seja deturpado e vire a caricatura monstruosa de socialismo conhecida como stalinismo "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

68 " Para se tornar socialista, é preciso estar razoavelmente bem de vida, tanto no sentido literal quanto no sentido metafórico do termo "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

69 " ... observar que alguns são miseráveis enquanto outros são prósperos é mais ou menos como afirmar que o mundo contém ao mesmo tempo detetives e criminosos. E é verdade, mas isso encobre o fato de que existem detetives porque existem criminosos... "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

70 " When this reciprocity of self and Nature breaks down, we are left with the world of meaningless matter of capitalism, in which Nature is just pliable stuff to be cuffed into whatever shape we fancy. Civilisation becomes one vast cosmetic surgery. At the same time, the self is divorced from Nature, its own body and the bodies of others. Marx believes that even our physical senses have become 'commodified' under capitalism, as the body, converted into a mere abstract instrument of production, is unable to savour its own sensuous life. Only through communism could we come to feel our own bodies again. Only then, he argues, can we move beyond a brutally instrumental reason and take delight in the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the world. "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

71 " [Capitalism's] newly pugnacious posture, like most forms of aggression, sprang from deep anxiety. If the system became manic, it was because it was latently depressed. What drove this reorganisation above all was the sudden fade-out of the postwar boom. "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

72 " [Democracy] had to be local, popular and spread across all the institutions of civil society. It had to extend to economic as well as political life. The state Marx approved of was the rule of citizens over themselves, not of a minority over a majority. "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

73 " Revolutions are usually a long time in the brewing, and may take centuries to achieve their goals. The middle classes of Europe did not abolish feudalism overnight. Seizing political power is a short-term affair; transforming the customs, institutions and habits of feeling of a society takes a great deal longer. You can socialise industry by government decree, but legislation alone cannot produce men and women who feel and behave different from their grandparents. That involves a lengthy process of education and cultural change. "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

74 " Marx's aim was to close this gap between state and society, politics and everyday life, by dissolving the former into the latter. And this is what he called democracy. Men and women had to reclaim in their daily lives the powers that the state had appropriated from them. Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it. "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

75 " By bringing workers physically together for its own self-interested purposes, capitalism created the conditions in which they could organise themselves politically, which was not quite what the system's rulers had in mind. Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism. Those who dwell in the slums of the world's megacities are not organised at the point of production, but there is no reason to suppose that this is the only place where the wretched of the earth can conspire to transform their situation. Like the classical proletariat, they exist as a collective, have the strongest possible interest in the passing of the present world order, and have nothing to lose but their chains. "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

76 " Marxism has often been accused of being a mirror image of its political opponents. Just as capitalism reduces humanity to Economic Man, so does its great antagonist. Capitalism makes a deity of material production, and Marx does just the same. But this is to misunderstand Marx's notion of production. Most of the production that goes on, he insists, is not true production at all. In his view, men and women only genuinely produce when they do so freely and for its own sake. Only under communism will this be fully possible; but meanwhile we can gain a foretaste of such creativity in the specialized form of production we know as art... Art is an image of nonalienated labour. It is how Marx liked to think of his own writings... "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right

77 " Human labour has rarely been of a fulfilling kind. For one thing, it has always been coerced in one way or another, even if the coercion in question is simply the need not to starve. For another thing, it has been carried on in class society, and thus not as an end in itself but as a means to the power and profit of others. For Marx, as for his mentor Aristotle, the good life consists of activities engaged in for their own sake. The best things are done just for the hell of it. We do them simply because they belong to our fulfillment as the kind of animals we are, not out of duty, custom, sentiment, authority, material necessity, social utility or fear of the Almighty. "

― Terry Eagleton , Why Marx Was Right