ecraw

He had the intellectual’s vice; he was futile. The fellow knew too much and it confused him. He had to resort to a lot of tricks to kindle his own enthusiasm, to make up his mind.

• Journey to the End of the Night pp.67

Horses are lucky. They go through war, like us, but they’re not asked to approve of it or to seek to believe in it. In this business they are unfortunate but free. Enthusiasm, alas, was our dirty prerogative, reserved for us!

- journey to the end of the night pp.33

The old politicians in the Global North are desperately seeking to overcome the gap between the need for transnational capital for continued neoliberal globalization and a growing desire of the electorate to return to the capitalist nation-based welfare state. -Torkil Lauesen pp.356

There is political crisis because the bourgeoisie is divided between those who wish to resume neoliberal globalization -change everything to keep everything the same— and paleo-conservative factions who want to return to a nation-based accumulation of capital, authoritarian rule, and warfare to secure the lion's share of the global spoils.

The split

It is again the wonderful irony of history: China alone is still to be conquered for capitalist production, and in so doing at long last the latter makes its own existence at home impossible. -Engles, letter to Kautsky 1894

In Western discourse, it is claimed that democracy and liberal market capitalism are linked together as conjoined twins. However, liberal capitalism thrives when linked with fascism, as we have seen in Nazi Ger-many, Franco's Spain, and Pinoche's Chile.

If the development of liberal democracy is linked to something, then it is linked to colonialism.

On one side, capitalists hate the state as it interferes with the economic dispositions of capital; however, on the other side, capital needs the state to mitigate its contradictions and administer is expansion. pp. 281

If the transnational companies wanted access to chinas labor force and infrastructure, then China demanded access to the technology and science behind production. pp.271

“Their state of mind [IWW] could only be explained by referring to it, as was earlier suggested, to its major relationships” - Parker, The Casual Laborer, pp.103