“Before us, art relied on memory, an anxious re-evocation of an Object lost (happiness, love, a landscape), and hence was nostalgic, static, charged with suffering and distance. With Futurism, instead, art is turning into art-action, which is to say, into will, optimism, aggression, possession, penetration, delight, brutal reality within art (example: onomatopoiea; —example: noise-tuners = motors), geometrical splendor of forces, projections forward. Thus, art is becoming Presence, new Object, new reality created with the abstract elements of the universe. The hands of the passéist artist used to suffer for the sake of the lost Object; our hand will twitch for the new Object to be created. That is why the new Object (the plastic complex) has miraculously appeared in your hands.” — F.T. Marinetti
Art: Benedetta Cappa, Cime arse di solitudine, 1936Museo dell’Aeronautica “Gianni Caproni”, Trento

"The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance." Guy Debord

A society that both fears and longs for death. The consequences of a species alienated from itself

Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder. And the Beholder is an asshole

The Pursuit of Happiness being a virtue under capitalism while simultaneously being its cardinal sin is not proof that happiness cannot be attained. it is proof that the Pursuit of Happiness is the right for the Petty Bourgeoisie and Bourgeoisie, while for the Worker it is a delirious dream that is ruthlessly curbed.

"To exploit living labour, capital must destroy dead labour which is still useful. Loving to suck warm young blood, it kills corpses" Amadeo Bordiga

“the bourgeois World is but an agglomeration of private Property-owners, isolated from each other, without true community.” — Aleksander Kojeve

“The Bourgeois is neither Slave nor Master; he is - being the Slave of Capital - his own Slave. It is from himself, therefore, that he must free himself.” — Aleksander Kojeve

“The opium of the people in the present world is perhaps not so much religion as it is accepted boredom. Such a world is at the mercy, it must be known, of those who provide at least the semblance of an escape from boredom. Human life aspires to the passions, and again encounters its exigencies.” — Georges Bataille
Art: via our friend Nietzschean Marxist /@/drugNietzschean on twitter

“This Slave without a Master, this Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner.” — Aleksander Kojeve
Art: Bursting Shell by Christopher Nevinson

“We must destroy the Spectacle itself, the whole apparatus of the commodity society... We must abolish the pseudo-needs and false desires which the system manufactures daily in order to preserve its power.” — Guy Debord
Artwork: Study for “In the Hold” by David Bomberg

𝘝𝘭𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘳 𝘔𝘢𝘺𝘢𝘬𝘰𝘷𝘴𝘬𝘺 [#constructivism]
cover of the magazine "𝘜𝘚𝘚𝘙 𝘜𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯" designed by Alexandr Rodchenko, Moscow, RSFSR, 1940

"The two expressions, “stunted growth of their own human essence as a result of exhausting exertion” and “being driven to mechanical labour”, are the second “necessary consequence” of the first result of the relapse into savagery. These two expressions are a “necessary consequence of the fact that the rentiers allow their own essence to decay”, and are known in vulgar parlance, we learn, once more to our horror, as “proletarians”." Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

"There is nothing astonishing in wanting to know the ineffable through discourse, one's discourse is led to the impossible, for all knowledge is applied to an object of knowledge which does not apply to it, destroys itself."

Proclus

“Not until he has recognized and organized his own energies as social energies (and we shall presently see the exact meaning of these terms), i.e., when the political form and power (the state) no longer exist outside him, above him—not until then is human (as distinguished from political) emancipation achieved. The road leading to freedom is full of obstacles and accidents, especially the political emancipations that are mistaken for true liberations.” — Henri Lefebvre

"Such are all great historical men, whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit. ... World historical men - the Heroes of an epoch - must be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds, their words are the best of that time. Great men have formed purposes to satisfy themselves, not others." — Hegel

"That Vienna was dressed in official mourning did not prevent the masses of the urban poor being quite indifferent to the news of the death of the heir to the Habsburg throne. But immediately the press got to work on public opinion. In the events of the present war, it is hard to find sufficiently graphic words to describe the truly villainous role played by the press all over Europe and around the world. In this orgy of baseness, the Austro-Hungarian black and yellow press, not over-blessed with knowledge or talent, indisputably occupies not the last place. Since the assassination in Sarajevo, on a command from the unseen Centre – the diplomatic cauldron where the destiny of peoples is decided – hacks of all political shades mobilised as many lies as has been seen since the creation of the world." Leon Trotsky

𝘜𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘭𝘦𝘥 [#constructivism]
propaganda textile, RSFSR, 1920s-1930s

"It is not possible to understand the present time if one does not know what kind of reversal has occurred particularly in the last third of the 19th century. Someone still of the 14th century, speaking of the ideal of races, of the ideal of nations, spoke out of developing qualities of human development.

"But someone who nowadays speaks of the ideal of races and nations and belonging to a clan, speaks of decaying impulses of humanity. [...] nothing will humanity bring itself more into decay, than if the ideals of races, nations and blood were to continue. 

"Nothing will be a greater hindrance for the further development of mankind than the conservation of the ideals held by earlier centuries, preserved [...] in declarations about the ideals based on nations. The true ideals for the future must be, not what is based on 'blood', but what we find solely in the spiritual world."

Rudolf Steiner