/lit/ - Literature

Intrinsically, it
is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social
antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these
laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevita
ble results. The
7
Preface to the First German Edition (Marx 1867)
country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its
own future.
But apart from this. Where capitalist production is fully naturalised among the Germans (for
instance, in the factories proper) th
e condition of things is much worse than in England, because
the counterpoise of the Factory Acts is wanting. In all other spheres, we, like all the rest of
Continental Western Europe, suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but
also
from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, a whole series of
inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production,
with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the
living, but from the dead.
Le mort saisit le vif!
[The dead holds the living in his grasp.
– formula
of French common law]
The social statistics of Germany and the rest of Continental Western Europe are, in comparison
with those
of England, wretchedly compiled. But they raise the veil just enough to let us catch a
glimpse of the Medusa head behind it. We should be appalled at the state of things at home, if, as
in England, our governments and parliaments appointed periodically commissions of inquiry into
economic conditions; if these commissions were armed with the same plenary powers to get at
the truth

>>8594550
Apparently neither have you

>>8594556
muh debt

>>8575799
>the people who are having the most sex on college campuses are going to commit suicide

uh......lol

>>8569547