Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 67

With the shift towards the tertiary economy (services, cultural goods), culture is less and less a specific sphere exempted from the market, but its central component. What this short circuit between market and culture entails is the waning of the old modernist avant-garde logic of provocation, of shocking the establishment. Today, more and more, the cultural-economic apparatus itself, in order to reproduce itself in competitive market conditions, has not only to tolerate but directly to provoke stronger and stronger shocking effects and products… Here again, as in the domain of sexuality, perversion is no longer subversive: such shocking excesses are part of the system itself, the system feeds on them in order to reproduce itself. Perhaps this is one possible definition of postmodern as opposed to modernist art: in postmodernism, the transgressive excess loses its shock value and is fully integrated into the established artistic market.

- Slavoj Žižek

..............................

Great Soviet Encyclopedia concerning the family:

As a result of socialist transformations, family relations are freed from the social forces of the old society, including proprietary law, the influence of the church, and class, estate, and national prejudices. All forms of discrimination against women are eliminated. At the same time, there is a systematic expansion in the network of social institutions designed to aid the family in childrearing and in managing the household. The rising prosperity and cultural level of the population lead to the formation of the socialist family.

Marxism-Leninism refutes the bourgeois and anarchist assertions that the socialization of the means of production in socialist and communist society is necessarily accompanied by the “socialization” of women and children and the destruction of the family. In reality, the communist ideal of relations between the sexes is “civil marriage with love”

- V. I. Lenin, Soch., 5th ed., vol. 49, p. 56

................................

................................

This ideology, like a cuckoo, has filled a void that once nested class struggle and scientific socialism. Unfortunately, its academic endorsement has created similar issues for our movement as did the previous state sanctioning of Trotskyism or the ‘New Left’, with whom it shares many similarities. However, unlike its predecessors it need not pay even lip service to the class struggle. It has nevertheless imbued a new generation of university-going ‘radicals’ with a faux progressive ideology quite alien to, and extremely chauvinistic towards, the lower strata of the workers.

And thus, the grandiloquent self-professed intellectuals, who find themselves in ever smaller lefty circles, are greeted with open arms by the trots, revisionists and ‘left’ social democrats who no longer have the taste for class struggle. After all, what better distraction and division for proletarians could the bourgeoisie find for them than an ideology with all the aesthetic of revolutionary politics, but little to no class content, and which is often downright hostile to the proletariat in rhetoric?

- CPGB-ML Red Youth

............................

............................

The entity of family represents a divine tradition, but the enemies of humanity, i.e. the international and Zionist capitalists’ movement, have decided to destroy the institution of family throughout the world. Therefore, efforts should be made for protecting and strengthening the pillars of family entity in the society.

- Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei , Feb 26, 2019

..............................

..............................

If you are a Socialist it means you are by default a Patriot. You may not love your current government, you may not love the media contained within your country. But without question, as evident by your desire for the Socialist mode of production, you know you would benefit greatly should your fellow countrymen benefit.

You understand the nature of cooperation and collective prosperity. You understand how history is a continuum of causation reflected on the previous moment to produce the next moment. You understand that humanity deserves better than it is treating itself now, and on that pretext you love your country and the people in it. Even if you don't directly realise it. Conservatives don't own patriotism, they aren't even patriots. Don't let your opposition to the conservative identity deny you your right to openly love humanity despite the villainy they are manipulated to perpetrate.

- Meagan Pickard

...........................

...........................