fuck yeah dialectics

Kurt Vonnegut on 'Rule Britannia': “The equation which links a strong defense posture to not being enslaved is laid down in that stirring fight song, much heard lately, ‘Rule Britannia’. I will sing the equation: ‘Rule Britannia; Britannia rule the waves’ That, of course, is a poetic demand for a Navy second to none. I now sing the next line, which explains why it is essential to have a Navy that good: ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’. It may surprise some of you to learn what an old equation that is. The Scottish poet who wrote it, James Thomson, died in 1748 – about one quarter of a century before there was such a country as the United States of America. Thomson promised Britons that they would never be slaves at a time when the enslavement of persons with inferior weaponry was a respectable industry. Plenty of people were going to be slaves, and it would serve them right, too – but Britons would not be among them. So that isn’t really a very nice song. It is about not being humiliated, which is all right. But it is also about humiliating others, which is not a moral thing to do. The humiliation of others should never be a national goal. There is one poet who should have been ashamed of himself”.

Everything the Communists told us about communism was a complete and utter lie. Unfortunately, everything the Communists told us about capitalism turned out to be true.

...in the United States... no strategy for socialism is particularly plausible... the crucial immediate question for the American Left is less 'how to make a revolution', but rather 'how to make the social conditions within which we can know how to make a revolution.'

Red Rosa Now has vanished too Is hid from View She told the poor What life is about And so the rich Have rubbed Her out

...it is our very HATE of the work that keeps us going. Speaking just for myself, I want REVENGE for all the years they've ALREADY TAKEN. They've extorted 3/4's of my waking hours, half my dreams, and have no doubt shaved 20 years off my lifetime thanks to hypertension, stress, etc. I WILL DIE OF WORK. Even if I can eventually make a living off the things I like - i.e., endless rants like this - instead of corporate uselessness, it's STILL ALL WRONG. I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO. I don't mind DOING it - what I mind is the fact that I'm not given a CHOICE.

Unemployment, economic crises, militarization, terrorist regimes — in a word, the whole condition of the masses — are not due, for example, to limited technological possibilities, as might have been the case in earlier periods, but to the circumstances of production which are no longer suitable to our time. The application of all intellectual and physical  means for the mastery of nature is hindered because in the prevailing circumstances these means are entrusted to special, mutually opposed interests. Production is not geared to the life of the whole community while heeding also the claims of individuals; it is geared to the power-backed claims of individuals while being concerned hardly at all with the life of the community. This is the inevitable result, in the present property system, of the principle that it is enough for individuals to look out for themselves.

Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying 'Faster! Faster!', though she had no breath left to say so. The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything . . . 'Well, in our country,', said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran for a long time as we've been doing.' 'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'

How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit - and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate - died of malnutrition - because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

We have known, we have had contact with a world (as children we partook of it), where a man condemned to poverty was at least secure in poverty. It was a kind of unspoken contract between man and fate, and before the onset of modern times fate had never reneged on this contract. It was understood that those who indulged in extravagance, in caprice, those who gambled, those who wished to escape poverty, risked everything. Since they   gambled, they could lose. But those who did not gamble could not lose. They could not have suspected that a time would come, that it was already here — and this, precisely, is modern times — when those who do not gamble lose all the  time, even more assuredly than those who do.

Gresford