Anti Wall Art
102 creative works found
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Pug puppy commanding a Soviet tank painted with hearts :)
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I wanted 1942 to serve as an experiment, questioning what stereotype if any surrounded the ‘skinhead.’ Within days I received comments of ‘racist’ and ‘Nazi’ signifying prejudice against a shaven head, when in modern day society diversity is usually praised and encouraged. The origin of the term ‘skinhead’ is not rooted in racism, the term being corrupted in the 1970’s by the neo-nazi movement. The term actually stems from the Jamaican skinheads such as Bunny Wailer, who populated Reggae in the1960’s, some decade previous. By 1968/69, the ‘skinhead’ wasn’t just a hairstyle but a way of life. To these working class people, cleanliness, stylish clothes and good music were dominant. The increasing popularity of Ska music, a branch of reggae bred the skinhead in their straight jeans, large boots, white shirts, braces and nylon or leather jackets and were regularly seen at Judge Dread gigs. Doc Marten, Ben Sherman, and Vespa scooters were typical designers of the ‘skinhead’ movement, which dwindled in the mid 70’s. This is around the time the neo-nazi movement became prominent, as the ‘mod generation’ became divided and those racist, political hating, violent youths were the new face, the new stereotype. They popularised themselves throughout the 80’s and 90’s with bands such as ‘Skrewdriver’ and were akin to increased violence on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. The number of ‘skinheads’ in Britain today is in decline, as in essence the skinhead is a youth organisation for the youth. Thus upon reaching full maturity, starting a family and encompassing different values the need to be in such a group no longer exists and without the experience and knowledge of older members their ‘skinhead’ values are degenerate. This is why I felt my experiment was necessary. Would the youth of day, born after the domination of the neo-nazi still be aware of their values and the attributes, which contribute to their stereotype? The answer lies within you the spectator. Consider what you first felt upon viewing 1942. Did it bring back fond memories of dancing to reggae, Bob Marley and the ‘Chelsea haircut’ or did it make you envisage violent racists? Movements begin, grow and they pass. The real reason the ‘Mods’ shaved their head was to avoid lice, for hygiene. Surely the time close cut hair symbolising a racist has passed. This was a series i took a while back for a project i was doing on fashion and surrealism I must have took around 30 or so photographs to get the best images at different stages. / to take these shots i used a canon 20d propped up on a tripod with a self timer.
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During a relatively peaceful 2002 protest against the World Bank in Washington, D.C., anti-war demonstrators began to change the situational climate of the march. Tensions between protesters and police, who were expecting a violent demonstration, began to rise. Police began to arrest everyone that they managed to surround inside Pershing Park, guilty, as well as innocent bystanders alike. In relative anticipation of the police’s reaction, this young man wrote the telephone numbers of civil defense lawyers on his arms before the demonstrations even began.
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Cog sincerely wants to believe that a greater being cares about her personally
by IncognitaUS$4.28–US$114.00
Studly frequently comments (to himself, naturally) that this simply reflects Cog’s belief that she IS the centre of the universe. He can’t imagine why she would need an imaginary friend when she has him.
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‘Atticus – ’ said Jem bleakly. ‘How could they do it, how could they?’ ‘I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it – seems that only children weep. Good night.’ / “Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird” Open to interpretation – I’d love to hear what you think, and see if i got across the point i was trying to.. / The reference photo was taken by frixen on DeviantART (www.frixen.deviantart.com)
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My third attempt to destroy the tobacco industry. This should be the knockout blow :)
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“Across the Universe” Copyright 2007 Alice McMahon White, with design assistance from Teagan White, soft pastel on Kitty Wallis sanded paper, 84×36” This is the final work for my “White Album” series. I’m feeling sad already… “Across the Universe” was in the works long before I ever heard about the recent movie release. It was inspired by my trip with Teagan to DC in March 17, 2007, last St. Patrick’s Day. So, back in March, we were armed with cameras instead of protest signs, and were just trying to stay awake after all night on the bus, and also trying to stay warm in the high icy winds. But the two of us have been planning this work inspired by our experience since then. Truly a cooperative work, my girl gladly designed the protest sign, and planned her outfit, picking up activism buttons and the MAKE LOVE NOT WAR t-shirt, even painting her own jeans. And just two weeks ago, she was a stoic and excellent model for my reference photos. The daisy in her hand is a nod to a shy young woman we met in DC. She never said a word, but passed out single yellow daisies to marchers all day. The rainbow is a symbol for St. Pat’s Day, spring, peace stretching across the planet, light coming after the rain, and also for gay rights, as shown on one of the buttons on her jacket. The rainbow is reflected in the puddles at her feet, “pools of sorrow/waves of joy”. No blood for oil… My intention was to handwrite actual words from many different Beatles song lyrics in the rainbow, subtle, so you could barely see them, and yes, the puddles need work, but I simply ran out of time. Show needed to get hung. DO see the movie “Across…” my favorite in a long time, and it’s not just because I like the Beatles! Wishing for WORLD PEACE in 2008! Happy New Year dear friends! Thanks for your support this past year. I’m humbled by your great kindness to me. Hugs and much love! ~ Alice
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this was created to highlight racism that goes on even between children. I witnessed a Romanian boy just moved in to our street being picked on and being called “paki” the other day. I blame it on their parents personally, but, that’s just my opinion. The same parents take their kids to Spain, Europe, the west Indies, on holidays! utter lunacy, utter hypocracy. I am Greek, born in England and live in Ireland, my friend said ” you are not like those other foreigners” the other day I AM, and I am proud of who I am.
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papier maché/pollyfilla/string/acrylic on wood For commissioned work you can contact Cathy at cathy@cathysavels.com and please visit cathy savels
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I create my art with a lot of passion for nature. This piece without the text, is in my portfolio titled “Nature’s Wrath” I thought it was fitting for this challange. When the challange was put out to HELP, I couldn’t think of a better way to share my work!! This piece was inspired by Kathleen’s Group Collaboration challenge and Challenge Café. In support of putting and END to WHALING in our world’s oceans!!! I feel that this is such a small contribution to this worthy and much NEEDED cause!!!! But it is a START!! Every voice added is IMPORTANT!!! Please help me, by joining me!!! Let our voices be their voices!! Let’s put an END to Whaling!!! Let’s stop their cries!! 100% of the profits from the sale of this print will go to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
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One of my graphic design briefs from last year. I never posted any of my graphics works here. there are a few posted on eternities-end.deviantart.com and my site will be up soon with the rest… just a teaser (oh… right. It’s a smoking kills awarenenss campaign… in case it wasn’t obvious enough. Skull… smoke… me… dying)
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During a relatively peaceful 2002 protest against the World Bank in Washington, D.C., anti-war demonstrators began to change the situational climate of the march. Tensions between protesters and police, who were expecting a violent demonstration, started to rise. Police began to arrest everyone that they managed to surround inside Pershing Park, guilty, as well as innocent bystanders alike. These demonstrators were pulled from the crowd, handcuffed and thrown on an awaiting Metro bus. No one was read their rights as bystanders looked on in horror.
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This is for all those who have lost loved ones and no longer see the joy in Valentine’s day. stock credits: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/28834576/ yeah.. XD that’s a heart in the jar, its kinda hard to see..
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Taken in a convenience store in Goulds, Newfoundland. / Title is from a lovely tune by Cat Stevens. ..................................... / Click here to add me to your watch list. / .....................................
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just thought this was cool, well i am an archer hehe / / Many thanks to Brian Becket for finding the true identity of this wonderful badge
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the whaling thats going on today makes me feel sick. in this day and age there are so many things going on that you can’t even imagine. we try not to look. how could someone do these horrible acts and not see? well, i see. i see the suffering. i see the pain. i see the whales crying. i see red.
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If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? -Shakespeare Every year sealers bludgeon seals with clubs and “hakapiks” (clubs with a metal hook on the end), drag conscious seals across the ice floes with boat hooks, and toss dead and dying animals into heaps and leave their carcasses to rot because there is no market for their meat. Seals are also shot, but bludgeoning is preferred, because pelt buyers deduct money for every bullet hole in a seal’s skin. Veterinarians who studied a past hunt concluded that the hunters failed to comply with Canada’s basic animal welfare standards and that 42 percent of the seals appeared to have been skinned alive. Despite Canada’s ‘new and improved’ methods being implemented this year, sealers are still slaughtering these pups in the same way they have for previous years. It’s unconscionable. For more information, please visit any of the following websites for first-hand accounts and ways you can help save the seals. Sea Shepherd HSUS Canadian Seal Hunt Anti-Sealing Coalition If you would like to get more involved, please join us here on Red Bubble in the Voices for Animals group. The more supporters we have, the louder our collective voice will be!! All proceeds will be donated to Sea Shepherd.
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THE RETURN OF KARL MARX [2008] ____ Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a 19th century philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. Often called the father of communism, Marx was both a scholar and a political activist. He addressed a wide range of political as well as social issues, and is known for, amongst other things, his analysis of history. His approach is indicated by the opening line of the Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Marx believed that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, will produce internal tensions which will lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, capitalism itself will be displaced by communism, a classless society which emerges after a transitional period in which the state would be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. On the one hand, Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socioeconomic change. On this model, it is the structural contradictions within capitalism which necessitate its end, giving way to communism: “ The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. ” / — (The Communist Manifesto)[4] On the other hand, Marx argued that socioeconomic change occurred through organized revolutionary action. On this model, capitalism will end through the organized actions of an international working class: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” (from The German Ideology) While Marx was a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to exert a major influence on workers’ movements shortly after his death. This influence was given added impetus by the victory of the Marxist Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. The relation of Marx to “Marxism” is a point of controversy. Marxism remains influential and controversial in academic and political circles. !Karl Heinrich Marx was born the third of seven children of a Jewish family in Trier, in the Kingdom of Prussia’s Province of the Lower Rhine. His father, Heinrich (1777–1838), who had descended from a long line of rabbis, converted to Christianity, despite his many deistic tendencies and his admiration of such Enlightenment figures as Voltaire and Rousseau. Marx’s father was actually born Herschel Mordechai, but when the Prussian authorities would not allow him to continue practicing law as a Jew, he joined the official denomination of the Prussian state, Lutheranism, which accorded him advantages, as one of a small minority of Lutherans in a predominantly Roman Catholic region. His mother was Henrietta (née Pressburg; 1788–1863); his siblings were Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise (m. Juta), Emilie and Caroline. Education Marx was educated at home until the age of thirteen. After graduating from the Trier Gymnasium, Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of seventeen to study law, where he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as a result. Marx was interested in studying philosophy and literature, but his father would not allow it because he did not believe that his son would be able to comfortably support himself in the future as a scholar. The following year, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. During this period, Marx wrote many poems and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from his liberal, deistic father, such as “the Deity,” but also absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the Young Hegelians who were prominent in Berlin at the time. Marx earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, but he had to submit his dissertation to the University of Jena as he was warned that his reputation among the faculty as a Young Hegelian radical would lead to a poor reception in Berlin. The Left, or Young Hegelians, consisted of a group of philosophers and journalists circling around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer opposing their teacher Hegel. Despite their criticism of Hegel’s metaphysical assumptions, they made use of Hegel’s dialectical method, separated from its theological content, as a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. Some members of this circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy. One of them, Max Stirner, turned critically against both Feuerbach and Bauer in his book “Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum” (1845, The Ego and Its Own), calling these atheists “pious people” for their reification of abstract concepts. Marx, at that time a follower of Feuerbach, was deeply impressed by the work and abandoned Feuerbachian materialism and accomplished what recent authors have denoted as an “epistemological break.” He developed the basic concept of historical materialism against Stirner in his book “Die Deutsche Ideologie” (1846, The German Ideology), which he did not publish. Another link to the Young Hegelians was Moses Hess, with whom Marx eventually disagreed, yet to whom he owed many of his insights into the relationship between state, society and religion. Towards the end of October 1843, Marx arrived in Paris, France. There, on August 28, 1844, at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais he began the most important friendship of his life, and one of the most important in history – he met Friedrich Engels. Engels had come to Paris specifically to see Marx, whom he had met only briefly at the office of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842.He came to show Marx what would turn out to be perhaps Engels’ greatest work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Paris at this time was the home and headquarters to armies of German, British, Polish, and Italian revolutionaries. Marx, for his part, had come to Paris to work with Arnold Ruge, another revolutionary from Germany, on the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher . After the failure of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx, living on the Rue Vaneau, wrote for the most radical of all German newspapers in Paris, indeed in Europe, the Vorwärts, established and run by the secret society called League of the Just. Marx’s topics were generally on the Jewish question and Hegel. When not writing, Marx studied the history of the French Revolution and read Proudhon.[9] He also spent considerable time studying a side of life he had never been acquainted with before – a large urban proletariat. “ [Hitherto exposed mainly to university towns…] Marx’s sudden espousal of the proletarian cause can be directly attributed (as can that of other early German communists such as Weitling10) to his first hand contacts with socialist intellectuals [and books] in France. He re-evaluated his relationship with the Young Hegelians, and as a reply to Bauer’s atheism wrote On the Jewish Question. This essay was mostly a critique of current notions of civil and human rights and political emancipation, which also included several critical references to Judaism as well as Christianity from a standpoint of social emancipation. Engels, a committed communist, kindled Marx’s interest in the situation of the working class and guided Marx’s interest in economics. Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which remained unpublished until the 1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production. In January 1845, after the Vorwärts expressed its hearty approval regarding the assassination attempt on the life of Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, Marx, among many others, were ordered to leave Paris. He and Engels moved on to Brussels, Belgium. Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated on his idea of historical materialism, particularly in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), the basic thesis of which was that “the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production.” Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one—industrial capitalism—and its replacement by communism. This was the first major work of what scholars consider to be his later phase, abandoning the Feuerbach-influenced humanism of his earlier work. Next, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a response to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty and a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels’ most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, as the manifesto of the Communist League, a small group of European communists who had come to be influenced by Marx and Engels. Later that year, Europe experienced tremendous revolutionary upheaval. Marx was arrested and expelled from Belgium; in the meantime a radical movement had seized power from King Louis-Philippe in France, and invited Marx to return to Paris, where he witnessed the revolutionary June Days Uprising first hand. When this collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and started the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (“New Rhenish Newspaper”). During its existence he was put on trial twice, on February 7, 1849 because of a press misdemeanor, and on the 8th charged with incitement to armed rebellion. Both times he was acquitted. The paper was soon suppressed and Marx returned to Paris, but was forced out again. This time he sought refuge in London. London Marx moved to London in May 1849, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. He briefly worked as correspondent for the New York Tribune in 1851.[12] In 1855, the Marx family suffered a blow with the death of their son, Edgar, from tuberculosis.[13] Meanwhile, Marx’s major work on political economy made slow progress. By 1857 he had produced a gigantic 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market. This work however was not published until 1941, under the title Grundrisse. In the early 1860s he worked on composing three large volumes, the Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo. This work, that was published posthumously under the editorship of Karl Kautsky is often seen as the Fourth book of Capital, and constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of economic thought. In 1867, well behind schedule, the first volume of Capital was published, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production. Here, Marx elaborated his labor theory of value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III remained mere manuscripts upon which Marx continued to work for the rest of his life and were published posthumously by Engels. In 1859, Marx was able to publish Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious economic work. In his journalistic work of this period, Marx championed the Union cause in the American Civil War. One reason why Marx was so slow to publish Capital was that he was devoting his time and energy to the First International, to whose General Council he was elected at its inception in 1864. He was particularly active in preparing for the annual Congresses of the International and leading the struggle against the anarchist wing led by Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International. The most important political event during the existence of the International was the Paris Commune of 1871 when the citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and held the city for two months. On the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, The Civil War in France, an enthusiastic defense of the Commune. During the last decade of his life, Marx’s health declined and he was incapable of the sustained effort that had characterized his previous work. He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia. In Germany, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, he opposed the tendency of his followers Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) and August Bebel (1840–1913) to compromise with the state socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a united socialist party. In his correspondence with Vera Zasulich, Marx contemplated the possibility of Russia’s bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on the basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village Mir. Family life / / Marx in 1882Karl Marx was married to Jenny von Westphalen, the educated daughter of a Prussian baron. Karl Marx’s engagement to her was kept secret at first, and for several years was opposed by both the Marxes and Westphalens. Despite the objections, the two were married on June 19, 1843 in Kreuznacher Pauluskirche, Bad Kreuznach. During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty and constant fear of creditors in a three room flat on Dean Street in the Soho quarter of London. Marx and Jenny already had four children and three more were to follow. Of these only three survived to adulthood. Marx’s major source of income at this time was Engels, who was drawing a steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Inheritances from one of Jenny’s uncles and her mother who died in 1856 allowed the family to move to somewhat more salubrious lodgings at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town a new suburb on the then-outskirts of London. Marx generally lived a hand-to-mouth existence, forever at the limits of his resources, although this did extend to some spending on relatively bourgeois luxuries, which he felt were necessities for his wife and children given their social status and the mores of the time. There is a disputed rumour that Marx was the father of Frederick Demuth, the son of Marx’s housekeeper, Lenchen Demuth. It has been suggested that this rumour lacks any direct corroboration. Marx’s children by his wife were: Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet; 1844–1883); Jenny Laura (m. Lafargue; 1845–1911); Edgar (1847–1855); Henry Edward Guy (“Guido”; 1849–1850); Jenny Eveline Frances (“Franziska”; 1851–1852); Jenny Julia Eleanor (1855–1898); and one more who died before being named (July 1857). / Karl Marx’s Tomb at Highgate Cemetery London / Death and legacy / Following the death of his wife Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last fifteen months of his life. It eventually brought on the bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London on March 14, 1883. He died a stateless person and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, on 17 March 1883. The messages carved on Marx’s tombstone are: “WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE”, the final line of The Communist Manifesto, and Engels’ version of the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: “ THE PHILOSOPHERS HAVE ONLY / INTERPRETED THE WORLD IN VARIOUS WAYS – THE POINT HOWEVER IS TO CHANGE IT”—Karl Marx The tombstone was a monument built in 1954 by the Communist Party of Great Britain with a portrait bust by Laurence Bradshaw; Marx’s original tomb had been humbly adorned.[17] In 1970, there was an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the monument, with a homemade bomb.18 Several of Marx’s closest friends spoke at his funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and Friedrich Engels. Engels’ speech included the words: “ On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep — but forever.” In addition to Engels and Liebknecht, Marx’s daughter Eleanor and Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue, Marx’s two French socialist sons-in-law, also attended his funeral. Liebknecht, a founder and leader of the German Social-Democratic Party, gave a speech in German, and Longuet, a prominent figure in the French working-class movement, gave a short statement in French. Two telegrams from workers’ parties in France and Spain were also read out. Together with Engels’ speech, this was the entire programme of the funeral. Also attending the funeral was Friedrich Lessner, who had been sentenced to three years in prison at the Cologne communist trial of 1852; G. Lochner, who was described by Engels as “an old member of the Communist League” and Carl Schorlemmer, a professor of chemistry in Manchester, a member of the Royal Society, but also an old communist associate of Marx and Engels. Three others attended the funeral — Ray Lankester, Sir John Noe and Leonard Church — making eleven in all. Marx’s daughter Eleanor became a socialist like her father and helped edit his works. Marx’s thought / / A Karl Marx monument in the German city Chemnitz, formerly the East German city Karl-Marx-Stadt (Karl Marx City).The American Marx scholar Hal Draper once remarked, “there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike.” The legacy of Marx’s thought is bitterly contested between numerous tendencies who claim to be Marx’s most accurate interpreters, including Marxist-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and libertarian Marxism. Philosophy Main articles: On the Jewish Question and The Poverty of Philosophy / Marx’s philosophy hinges on his view of human nature. Along with the Hegelian dialectic, Marx inherited a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting “nature” with “history.” Sometimes they use the phrase “existence precedes consciousness.” In either case, a person is determined by where and when the person is — social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the main features of human nature is adaptability. Nevertheless, Marxian thought rests on the fundamental assumption that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation “labour” and the capacity to transform nature “labour power.” For Marx, this is a natural capacity for physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the active role of human consciousness: “ A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. ” / — (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1) Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially determined and change over time. Marx’s analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means / forces of production, literally those things such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of production, in other words, the social and technical relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict. Marx understood the “social relations of production” to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or classes. As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict. Conflict between social classes being something which is inherent in all human history: “ The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. ” / — (The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1) Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labor power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one’s own labor — one’s capacity to transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one’s own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market. Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels’ point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. For example, although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labor-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx’s understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface20 to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “ Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. ” / — (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function in terms of political and economic inequality. Moreover, he provides an analysis of the ideological functions of religion: to reveal “an inverted consciousness of the world.” He continues: “It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms, once [religion,] the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked”. For Marx, this unholy self-estrangement, the “loss of man,” is complete for the sphere of the proletariat. His final conclusion is that for Germany, general human emancipation is only possible as a suspension of private property by the proletariat. Political economy Memorial to Karl Marx in Moscow. The inscription reads “Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!” (Proletarians of all countries unite!)Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity — when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power are “proletarians”. The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a “capitalist” or “bourgeois”. The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists. Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one market and sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference between these two markets. According to Marx, capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx observed that in practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the difference “surplus value” and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour, the difference between what it costs to keep workers alive and what they can produce. The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of production. But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx understood that during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy. Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution would be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without violence. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat – a period where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor – must be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his “Critique of the Gotha Program”, “between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” While he allowed for the possibility of peaceful transition in some countries with strong democratic institutional structures (e.g. Britain, the US and the Netherlands), he suggested that in other countries with strong centralized state-oriented traditions, like France and Germany, the “lever of our revolution must be force.” Marx and antisemitism Some commentators have maintained that Marx’ On The Jewish Question was an antisemitic work, and that he made use of antisemitic epithets in his published and private writings. According to Edward H. Flannery, Marx was an antisemite who considered Jews worshippers of mammon, the very soul of the corrupt capitalism he fought. According to several other scholars, for Marx Jews were the embodiment of capitalism and the creators of all its evils. In their view, Marx’s equation of Judaism with capitalism, together with his pronouncements on Jews, strongly influenced socialist movements and shaped their attitudes and policies toward the Jews. In those scholar’s opinion, Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question’ influenced National Socialist, as well as Soviet and Arab anti-Semites Hyam Maccoby has argued that Marx’s early anti-Semitism is shown in his 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question.” Marx wrote: “ Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.” According to Leon Boim, professor at Tel-Aviv University: It would appear unlikely to find in any single work such an accumulation of all the anti-Semitic stereotypes, from those used in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion through the Nazi vocabulary and up to the Soviet anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli slogans. According to Marx, Judaism corrupted the entire human kind. All the evil and wickedness of the Christian world – materialism and selfishness, the worship of money and private property – originated from Judaism. Moreover, in his opinion, Jews polluted and corrupted the Christian world because of their natural greed, their being exploiters, money being their god, because they were the embodiment of huckstering, because their religion was full of scorn towards theory, art and human history. True, this was written in his youth, before the final crystallization of his socialist outlook; however, as stated by Silberner, Marx expressed his anti-Jewish feelings in numerous remarks such as “dirty Jews” or, when he wrote of Polish Jews that “they multiply like lice,” not to speak of his abovementioned remarks concerning Lassalle which were uttered much later. Jonathan Sacks has written that virtually all major enlightenment philosophers were antisemitic, including Voltaire, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. At the time Marx wrote “On the Jewish Question”, the word “antisemitism” had not yet been coined or developed a racial component, and there was little awareness of the depths of European prejudice against Jews. Marx was thus simply expressing, in Sacks’s view, the commonplace thinking of his era. Maccoby has suggested that Marx was embarrassed by his Jewish background, noting “that anyone who uses Jews as the yardstick of evil is being antisemitic”. Moreover, Maccoby claims that in later years, Marx’s anti-Semitism was mostly limited to private letters and conversations because of strong public identification with anti-Semitism by his political enemies both on the left (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin) and on the right (aristocracy and the Church). Bernard Lewis found many instances of anti-Semitic language in Marx’s later work. In contrast, David McLellan and Francis Wheen have argued that “On the Jewish Question” must be understood in terms of Marx’s debates with Bruno Bauer over the nature of political emancipation in Germany. Wheen asserts: “Those critics who see this as a foretaste of Mein Kampf overlook one essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defence of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians.” According to McLellan, Marx used the word “Judentum” in its colloquial sense of “commerce” to argue that Germans suffer, and must be emancipated from, capitalism. The second half of Marx’s essay, McLellan concludes, should be read as “an extended pun at Bauer’s expense.” Hal Draper has argued that Marx was influenced by the writing of Jewish critic Moses Hess, and that “On the Jewish Question” should be read alongside similar work by Hess: It is well known that the language of Marx’s Part II of On the Jewish Question followed the view of the Jews’ role given in an essay On the Money System just written by none other than Hess, and just read by Marx. A special case, near if not in the Young Hegelian tendency, was Moses Hess: conscientiously Jewish himself, Hess had been brought up in an orthodox household and later became the progenitor of Zionism. Hess’s thesis was that present-day society was a “huckster world”, a “social animal-world”, in which people become fully developed “egoists”, beasts of prey and bloodsuckers. “The Jews”, wrote the father of Zionism, “who in the natural history of the social animal-world had the world-historic mission of developing the beast of prey out of humanity have now finally completed their mission’s work.” It was in the “Judeo-Christian huckster world” that “the mystery of the blood of Christ, like the mystery of the ancient Jewish blood-worship, finally appears quite unmasked as the mystery of the beast of prey.” There is more verbiage, going back to the “blood-cult” of ancient Judaism as the prototype of modern society, and on to a condemnation of priests as the “hyenas of the social animal-world” who are as bad as the other animal-people by virtue of their “common quality as beasts of prey, as bloodsuckers, as Jews, as financial wolves”. Earlier in 1843 Hess had published an important article on The Philosophy of Action, which only incidentally remarked that “The Christian God is an imitation of the Jewish Moloch-Jehovah, to whom the first-born were sacrificed to ‘propitiate’ him, and whom the juste-milieu age of Jewry bought off with money …” Hess intended no special anti-Jewish animus in any of this stuff, compared to which Marx’s approach is complimentary and drily economic. Note that Judaism is criticized as part of the Judeo-Christian complex, and not in order to praise Christianity – this being the same pattern as Voltaire’s; although Hess saw no contradiction between his own continued Jewish faith and loyalties and his opinion, expounded in his writings, that Christianity was the more advanced, modern and “pure” religion – all in the Feuerbachian groove. ! / http://images-3.redbubble.com/img/art/size:large/view:main/468125-4-long-lives-uncle-ho.jpg!
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Jelly beans are like Human Beings: more colors, more flavors. Stop Racism!
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anti-cupid was created by madame eliza. madame eliza fell completely in love with cupid, and though he explained that his duty was far more important than his own romance, she still couldn’t cope with his rejection… so in a fit of revenge, she created anti-cupid, to undo all the love that cupid created… regretfully, she was the 1st to receive anti-cupid’s arrow, and since, has never fallen back into love… the only cure is cupid’s arrow, but he’s punishing her for being selfish…
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18×24” acrylic painting on canvas. inspired by Year Zero NIN by track The Good Soldier. / ART IS RESISTANCE! writing on painting reads: / Mission is Greed / Result is Death Lyrics to the Good Soldier as follows: Gunfire in the street / Where we used to meet / Echoes at a beat / And the bass goes “bomb” / Right over my head / Step over the dead / Remember what you said You know the part about life / Is just a waking dream / Well I know what you mean / But that ain’t how it seems right here, right now How can this be real? / I can barely feel / Anymore I am trying to see / I am trying to believe / This is not where I should be / I am trying to believe Blood hardens in the sand / Cold metal in my hand / Hope you understand the way that things are gonna be / There’s nowhere left to hide / ‘Cause God is on our side / I keep telling myself I am trying to see / I am trying to believe / This is not where I should be / I am trying to believe
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Apec, Sydney 2007
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