Ernesto Laclau: Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory

“Men who, since childhood, have had their backs to the entrance of a cave, cannot see the outside world. On the wall inside the cave a re projected the shadows of other men, and by linking the voices of these men to their shadows, the inhabitants of the c ave conclude that the first derive from the second. One of the prisoners, however, manages to escape and perceives the true origin of the voices. Finally he merges from the cave and sees the light of day. At first the sun blinds him, but then he becomes accustomed to it and the vision he gains enables him to understand the falsehood in which he had been living.” (from the Introduction)

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David Harvey: The New Imperialism

“On the one hand, these fast-moving events made it very difficult to devise a set of lectures on the topic of’the new imperialism’. But, on the other hand, the very nature of these events and the threats they posed economically, politically, and militarily to global security made some sort of in-depth analysis imperative. I therefore determined to try as best I could to penetrate beneath the surface flux to divine some of the deeper currents in the making of the world’s historical geography that might shed some light on why we have arrived at such a dangerous and difficult conjuncture.” (Preface)

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Aesthetics and Politics (Theodor Adorno, et al.)

“It is not only political history which those who ignore are condemned to repeat. A host of recent ‘post-Marxisms’ document the truth of the assertion that attempts to ‘go beyond’ Marxism typically end by reinventing older pre-Marxist positions (from the recurrent neo-Kantian revivals, to the most recent ‘Nietzschean’ returns through Hume and Hobbes all the way back to the Pre-Socratics). Even within Marxism itself, the terms of the problems, if not their solutions, are numbered in advance, and the older controversies – Marx versus Bakunin, Lenin versus Luxemburg, the national question, the agrarian question, the dictatorship of the proletariat – rise up to haunt those who thought we could now go on to something else and leave the past behind us.” (from Fredric Jameson’s “Reflections in Conclusion”)

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