"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Saturday, April 13, 2013

BBC Class Survey: Old Wine in New Bottles

Surplus product: who produces it, how they extract it
EXTRACT: Yes, no doubt, the Great British class survey contains elements of truth - pointing towards various divisions and societal developments that do exist in some shape or form. It would be a very odd sociological survey that completely ignored reality. But for us the real question when examining any society past or present is a relatively straightforward one - who exactly extracts the surplus labour from whom and how?

Looking at contemporary Britain, the crucial and deciding determinate for Marxists is the antagonistic relationship - and social dynamic - between two main classes, the working class and the bourgeoisie (capitalist ruling class). We do not think of this strictly in terms of numbers or sociological categories, but rather in what actually characterises and drives a particular society - in this case, the exploitative capital-labour relation. An antagonism that cuts across all other societal divisions and every field of human production and consumption, from the economy to culture, politics, sexuality, sport, etc.
Posted by at 1:11 pm

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