Literary works quite often ‘know’ things that the reader does not know, or does not know yet, or perhaps will never know.
We do not know whether Melville’s work is of universal interest because we have not reached the end of history yet, despite the best efforts of some of our political leaders.
If literature matters today, it is chiefly because it seems to many conventional critics one of the few remaining places where, in a divided, fragmented world, a sense of universal value may still be incarnate; and where, in a sordidly material world, a rare glimpse of transcendence can still be attained.
Poetry is concerned not just with the meaning of experience, but with the experience of meaning.
The interwovenness of our lives is the source of our solidarity. But it also lies at the root of our mutual harm.
But if we are not given his real name, then he does not have one.
Macbeth as a whole is awash with questions, sometimes questions responded to by another question, which helps to generate an atmosphere of uncertainty, anxiety and paranoid suspicion.
The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they’re winning. Then it moves in with its water hoses and paramilitary squads, and if these fail with its tanks.
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. It indicates that the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon that it is.
Revolution cannot be handed down to you by a tight-knit vanguard of conspirators. Nor, as Lenin insisted, can it be carried abroad and imposed at the point of a bayonet, as Stalin did in eastern Europe. You have to be actively involved in the making of it yourself, unlike the kind of artist who instructs his assistants to go off and pickle a shark in his name.
Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or a billionaire.
Most of the reforms we now regard as precious features of liberal society – universal suffrage, free universal education, freedom of the press, trade unions and so on – were won by popular struggle in the teeth of ferocious ruling-class resistance.
It is worth noting in this respect that the original proletariat was not the blue-collar male working class. It was lower-class women in ancient society. The word “proletariat” comes to us from the Latin word for “offspring,” meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs.
Capitalism, too, ws forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has survived long enough to forget about much of this horror.
Much of the media under capitalism avoid difficult, controversial or innovative work because it is bad for profits. Instead, they settle for banality, sensationalism and gut prejudice.
A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the Modern Age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazy notion that a single global system known as the free-market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills.
Marx was the first to identify the historical object known as capitalism – to show how it arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end. Rather as Newton discovered the invisible forces known as the laws of gravity, and Freud laid bare the workings of an invisible phenomenon known as the unconscious, so Marx unmasked our everyday life to reveal an imperceptible entity known as the capitalist mode of production.
Alienation, the ‘commodification’ of social life, a culture of greed, aggression, mindless hedonism and growing nihilism, the steady hemorrhage of meaning and value from human existence: it is hard to find an intelligent discussion of these questions that is not seriously indebted to the Marxist tradition.
An opinion is not to be respected simply because somebody holds it. More or less any obnoxious viewpoint one can think up is probably held by somebody somewhere. There are right-wing Afrikaners who believe that Nelson Mandela was evil.
Goodness in the form of innocence can render you a pray to others. In a predatory world, it is not always easy to distinguish virtue from guillibility. This is one reason why there is something quaint as well as imposing about the word ‘virtue’.
As the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, revolution is not a runaway train; it is the application of the emergency brake. It is capitalism which is out of control, driven as it is by the anarchy of market forces, and socialism which attempts to reassert some collective mastery over this rampaging beast.