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Why such historians imagine that a collection of sixteenth-century Spanish friars, petty aristocrats and soldiers were likely to know anything about democratic procedure (much less, be impressed by it) is unclear, because educated opinion in Europe was almost uniformly anti-democratic at the time. If anyone was learning something new from the encounter [with indigenous Tlaxcalteca people], it was surely the Spaniards.
Already, capitalist petro-modernity builds a certain quantum of acceptable death into its predicates: at the very least, the 8.7 million killed by fossil fuels each year according to Harvard University are considered a price worth paying for the stupendous advantages of fossil capital.
[The state is] not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents us from seeing political practice as it is.
Most supreme court opinions exclude precisely those facts about the surrounding context about the case that permit the court to engage in a lot of the of propaganda that it engages in.
To a first approximation, all species are insects.
As you’ll know, one of the most widely mocked themes of Marxism has been that of the withering away of the state… Well, today we are seeing a wholly pathological phenomenon, a capitalist process of the withering away of states. It is a fundamental phenomenon today, even if it is masked by the subsistence, which will probably continue for a lengthy historical period, of state poles of substantial power. But in truth, the general logic of globalised capitalism is to have no direct or intrinsic relation to the subsistence of national states, because its deployment today is transnational. The multinational character of large companies came to light during the sixties. But since that time, these large companies have become transnational monsters of an entirely other nature.
The average oppressed medieval serf still worked less than a modern nine-to-five office or factory wotker, and the hazelnut gatherers and cattle herders who dragged great slabs to build Stonehenge almost certainly worked, on average, less than that.
Scholarship does not always advance. Sometimes it slips backwards.
It’s possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.
As a student, I had mistakenly thought that physics was driven mostly by mathematics and logical reasoning. Einstein’s conviction was that principles are the driving force behind new discoveries, while mathematics is necessary to make physics precise, to inform the clarification of the principles, to explain and clarify our characterizations of how we conceptualize phenomena, and to make predictions. In short, math is not enough; it is a tool. The important question is how does one come up with new principles?
We should remember that [Deleuze] used to say that when the philosopher hears the words 'democratic debate', he turns and runs.
Let us agree that by ʻdialecticʼ, following Hegel, we should understand that the essence of all difference is the third term that marks the gap between two others.