The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.
People don’t talk to each other. You’re alone with your television set or internet. But you can’t have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call “secondary organizations,” places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don’t do it alone.
The government has a defect: it’s potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they’re pure tyrannies.
The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.
Latin America, for the first time in 500 years, is moving towards a degree of independence.
The labor movement had been pretty much killed in the 1920s, almost destroyed. It revived in the 1930s and made a huge difference. By the late 1930s the business world was already trying to find ways to beat it back.
The anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.
Regulate the banks, get money out of elections; raise the minimum wage, environmental issues. They’re all very important and the Occupy movement made a difference. It shifted not only the discourse but to some extent, action on these issues.
The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.
Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature.
We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.
State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.
Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.
Technology is usually fairly neutral. It’s like a hammer, which can be used to build a house or to destroy someone’s home. The hammer doesn’t care. It is almost always up to us to determine whether the technology is good or bad.
Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.
It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.
Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market.
The point of advertising is to destroy markets.
We live in this world, not another one that we’d prefer, and sometimes it’s necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.
The press is owned by wealthy men who only want certain things to reach the public.