You're viewing a single thread.
To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvelous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theater; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice
— Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Sometimes I wish I could resurrect him just so he could see how amazingly he predicted the world to come, but then I think within 10 minutes of seeing how bad it's got he'd throw himself in front of a bus
There's a bus coming in 10 minutes? Ooh la la, now the feds you know you're in a fancy town.
TFW you miss the bus by 10 seconds and now you’re an hour late for work
TFW you miss the bus by 10 seconds and now you have to wait until the morning to throw yourself in front of the next one.
by then you could probably just drink yourself to death... or at least have a worthy attempt
Your town has any non-car transportation AT ALL? Hey everyone, get a load of Mr. Moneybags over here.
Sorry to burst your bubble, fancy lad, but Hexbear doesn’t take too kindly to the bourgeoisie. I don’t think this site is for you.