e-schatology:

Serenity is merely a kind of armistice between irreconcilable impulses.

At some stage early in every Marxist textbook of political economy it is stressed that “capital” is not a thing, but a social relation, and an antagonistic social relation at that. But frequently, after this proclamation is made, the accumulation of capital is substantively treated as the accumulation of things, of machinery, buildings, raw materials, and so forth that are usually grouped under the rubric “constant capital”. This is fundamentally incorrect from a Marxist point of view: capital accumulation must be understood as the reproduction of capitalist social relations on an ever-expanding scale through the conversion of surplus value into new constant and variable capital.

Pitch-black winter nights live in my bones.

When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours?

If, then, the capitalistic employment of machinery, on the one hand, supplies new and powerful motives to an excessive lengthening of the working-day, and radically changes, as well the methods of labour, as also the character of the social working organism, in such a manner as to break down all opposition to this tendency, on the other hand it produces, partly by opening out to the capitalist new strata of the working-class, previously inaccessible to him, partly by setting free the labourers it supplants, a surplus working population, which is compelled to submit to the dictation of capital. Hence that remarkable phenomenon in the history of modern industry, that machinery sweeps away every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working-day. Hence, too, the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital.