Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 41

"The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards."

Sir William Francis Butler (1889)

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“There is no greater condemnation of capitalism than its inability to provide adequate housing for those who produce its wealth — the working class.”

“The ruling class explanation relies on blaming the victims, arguing that people experiencing homelessness are in some way individually incompetent.“

“The housing market would collapse if shelter was plentiful and affordable for everyone. ...the interlocking processes of deregulation and financialization turn homes from a living space into real estate — a commodity, manipulated by investors, banks and even some local governments. This occurs because there is no right to adequate housing in our Constitution or in federal law. If housing was a right and not a commodity, then shelter would be taken out of the private market.”

“Actually, the fear of homelessness helps capitalism maintain its power.”
Solidarity

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The Marshall Plan functioned, for the most part, as a collective credit card with the aim to make Western Europe a client of American industry and thus bound to the United States. From the economic point of view, the Marshall Plan allowed American industry to run at full capacity. It succeeded in making the Western part of Germany and Europe dependent on the United States, and [it succeeded] in integrating this part of the world into the new global economic system. For Europe, the Marshall Plan marked the beginning of the process of “Americanization”, or as they say in the Third World, “Coca-Colonization.”

Jacques R. Pauwels - Le mythe de la bonne guerre.

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"Liberalism, then, drives the attempt to displace the heterosexual norm.... But liberalism includes capitalism: in the end, liberalism defines people as simply property-owners, narcissistic self-owners, choosers and consumers....

And there is, naturally, money to be made out of all this. Husbands, wives, children and adolescents (this last an invention of the market) are more effective and exploitable consumers when they are isolated.

Fluctuating identities and fluid preferences, including as to sexual orientation, consume still more, more often and more variously in terms of products and services."

John Milbank

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