Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 85

Ernst Jünger: “Art can help the overcoming of fear. Such is also the task of architecture which, like art, transcends mere necessity. If it fails to do so, and becomes totally subordinated to pure pragmatism and economy, in the best cases with aesthetic superfluities, fear will necessarily increase"
Ernst Jünger. Annäherungen.

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"Is it possible to downgrade the living standards of rich countries and prop up the poor ones to even slightly reduce global inequality? One may well doubt this, especially considering that for most of humanity, it is the quality of life in the developed countries that really matters,  not the tyranny of averages. Everyone in the world dreams of a Lexus, not a Zaporozhets."

—Egor Kholmogorov, 'Socialism Not Dead - Paradoxes of an Unsolved Problem' (April 2016)

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Brilliant essay by Eugene McCarraher :

"....‘disenchantment’ is more of a fable, a mythology that conceals the persistence of enchantment in ‘secular’ disguise.

Money is what anthropologists might call the mana of capitalism: the spirit that inhabits all material things...

Commodity fetishism is the equivalent, in capitalism, of the Roman Catholic sacramental system: where the latter conveys divine power and grace through material objects and rituals, the former channels the power of money through the pecuniary transubstantiation of objects.

Simone Weil...offered an explanation for the continuing failure of Marxism...Because it envisioned socialism as the dialectical culmination of capitalism, Marxism, in her words, represented ‘the highest spiritual expression of bourgeois society’.

Weil observed that, like the industrial bourgeoisie and both its religious and secular ideologues, Marx and his followers subscribed to a disenchanted conception of matter....one that rejected out of hand any possibility that matter could convey any spiritual import or power to historical action.

‘The true knowledge of social mechanics,’ she wrote in Oppression and Liberty  involved a conviction that ‘there exist certain material conditions for the supernatural operation of the divine that is present on earth’.

In other words, because matter was capable of conveying the supernatural, she saw Marx’s disenchanted materialism as, in a sense, not materialist enough.

By reducing the world to inanimate stuff that could be understood and manipulated only by experts, ‘disenchantment’ or ‘objective consciousness’ served the interests of business and professional elites – ‘the technocracy’, in Roszak’s shorthand. It allowed them to establish what he called a deadly ‘monopoly of the sacramental powers’. ‘

Disenchantment’ disempowered the people...

https://aeon.co/essays/capitalism-is-modernitys-most-beguiling-dangerous-enchantment?fbclid=IwAR2YjXydT8sFDrLfP4GDRodIbyoceGAFHC-i1oXiVPt6jXtyuqLq_Li4Ksw

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