The landowners and the bourgeois keep the people in ignorance. They encourage religious superstitions, and with the help of the popes, priests and rabbis they smother all revolutionary instinct. That's why we call religion the opium of the masses.
— Agnieszka Holland, Salomon Perel jung, Marco Hofschneider, imdb.com
America has grown by expansion in a practical vacuum; the pioneers of the West had to overcome terrific natural obstacles, but negligible human resistance. The Russia of today had to conquer not only natural but human difficulties: she had to break up the rotten system of the Czars and to assimilate…
Marx made theory... Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization... And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.
All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.
It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 yea…
Think of the difference between, say, Horatio in Hamlet and a character such as Daniel Doyce in Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Both carry around with them a characteristic obsession of their age – Horatio is obsessed with humanist philosophy; Doyce is obsessed with patenting his invention. There can be no…
More than 200 years ago, the radical journalist John Thelwall warned the men who built the English factories that they had created a new and dangerous form of democracy: ‘Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate di…
With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost. But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the m…
In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a ‘general intellect’ – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagine…