If you want, not to construct a theory, but to ascertain the condition in which man is actually placed, you will not ask yourself how it happens that the world is known, but how, in fact, man knows the world; and you will have to acknowledge the existence both of a world which lies beyond mind and of a mind which, far from passively reflecting the

For the degeneration of the workers’ movement has led the theorists to represent the class struggle as a duel, or a game between actively conscious partners, and each social or political event as a manoeuvre by one of these partners—a conception that has no more to do with materialism than has Greek mythology.

when undertakings on the verge of bankruptcy, having sacked a host of workmen and working at a third or a quarter of their productive capacity, preserve almost intact a managerial staff composed of a few directors drawing fat fees and clerks who are ill-paid,

He was not at all concerned with seeing clearly into his own thought, but solely with maintaining intact the philosophical traditions on which the Party lived. Such a method of thought is not that of a free man.

In the subordination of society to the individual lies the definition of true democracy and that of socialism as well.

One can certainly say that already the capitalist system, strictly speaking, no longer exists. There is no longer, strictly speaking, a labour market.

All oppressive societies give birth to a false conception of the relationship between man and nature, from the mere fact that it is only the downtrodden who are in direct contact with nature,

Finally, it is from this conception that the idea itself of the proletarian revolution must be drawn; for the very essence of the capitalist system consists, as Marx forcibly showed, of a “reversal of the relationship between subject and object”, a reversal brought about by the subordination of subject to object, of “the worker to the material

The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labour which characterizes the society we are aiming at.