Midterm Review Questions

Final Review Questions: (Fall '01)
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Please identify the following quotes and be prepared to discuss essential theoretical concepts contained in these quotes against the background of the philosophical and political framework of their authors.

1. With some over-simplification, one might thus say that 'classes' are stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods; whereas 'status groups' are stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special 'styles of life.'
   
2. The nature, content, and demand of the query "why equality?" can be understood and examined only by relating it to the central question "equality of what?"
   
3. Rather than raising consciousness, Black feminist thought affirms, rearticulates, and provides a vehicle for expressing in public a consciousness that quite often already exists. More important, this rearticulated consciousness aims to empower African-American women and stimulate resistance.
   
4. Thus the psychoanalysts never give us more than and inauthentic picture, and for the inauthentic there can hardly be found any other criterion than normality. Their statement of the feminine destiny is absolutely to the point in this connection. In the sense in which the psychoanalysts understand the term, "to identify oneself" with the mother or with the father is to alienate oneself in a model, it is to prefer a foreign image to the spontaneous manifestation of one's own existence, it is to play at being. Woman is shown to us as enticed by two modes of alienation. Evidently to play at being a man will be for her a source of frustration; but to play at being a woman is also a delusion: to be a woman would mean to be the object, the Other---and the Other nevertheless remains subject in the midst of her resignation.
   
5. The American's conception of the teacher who faces him is: he sells me his knowledge and his methods for my father's money, just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage.
   
6. One of the greatest weaknesses of immanentist philosophies in general consists precisely in the fact that they have not been able to create an ideological unity between the bottom and the top, between the "simple" and the intellectuals.
   
7. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it.
   
8. If, however, only half a working day is necessary in order to keep one worker alive one whole day, then the surplus value of the product is self-evident, because the capitalist has paid the price of only half a working day but has obtained a whole day objectified in the product; thus has exchanged nothing for the second half of the work day.
   
9. The presence of Black women's collective wisdom challenges two prevailing interpretations of the consciousness of oppressed groups. One approach claims that subordinate groups identify with the powerful and have no valid independent interpretation of their own oppression. The second assumes the oppressed are less human than their rulers, and are therefore less capable of interpreting their own experiences. Both approaches see any independent consciousness expressed by African-American women and other oppressed groups as being either not of our own making or inferior to that of dominant groups. More importantly, both explanations suggest that the alleged lack of political activism on the part of oppressed groups stems from our flawed consciousness of our own subordination.
   
10. While organic agriculture is a low-input, low-cost option, and hence an option for the poor, it is often presented as a "luxury of the rich." This is not true. The cheapness of industrially produced food and expensiveness of organic foods does not reflect their cost of production but the heavy subsidies given to industrial agriculture.
    
11. In proving woman' inferiority, the antifeminists then began to draw not only upon religion, philosophy, and theology, as before, but also upon science-biology, experimental psychology, etc. At most they were willing to grant "equality in difference" to the other sex. That profitable formula is most significant: it is precisely like the "equal but separate" formula of the Jim Crow laws aimed at the North American Negroes. As is well known, this so-called equalitarian segregation has resulted only in the most extreme discrimination. The similarity just noted is in no way due to chance, for whether it is a race, a caste, a class, or a sex that is reduced to a position of inferiority, the methods of justification are the same. "The eternal feminine" corresponds to "the black soul" and to the "Jewish character.
    
12. For the formation of the authority-oriented character it is especially decisive that he children should learn, under pressure from the father, not to trace every failure back to its social causes but to remain at the level of the individual and to hypostatize the failure in religious terms as sin or in naturalistic terms as deficient natural endowment. The bad conscience that is developed in the family absorbs more energies than can be counted, which might otherwise be directed against the social circumstances that play a role in the individual's failure. The outcome of such paternal education is men who without ado seek the fault in themselves.
    
13. This means working to produce elites of intellectuals of a new type which arise directly out of the masses, but remain in contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in the corset.
    
14. Capability is primarily a reflection of the freedom to achieve valuable functionings. It concentrated directly on freedom as such rather than on the means to achieve freedom, and it identifies the real alternatives we have … capability may be relevant even for the level of well-being achieved, and not only for the freedom to achieve well-being.
    
15. All forms of exploitation resemble one another. The all seek the source of their necessity in some edict of a Biblical nature. All forms of exploitation are identical because all of them are applied against the same "object": man.
    
16. The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
    
17. Mad cows are symbols of a worldview that perceives no difference between machines and living beings, between herbivores and carnivores, or between the Sindhi and Sahiwal and the Jersey and the Holstein. Sacred cows are a metaphor of ecological civilization. Mad cows are a metaphor of and anti-ecological, industrial civilization.
    
18. But it is important to recognize ... the fact that demanding equality in one space - no matter how hallowed by tradition - can lead one to be anti-egalitarian in some other space, the comparative importance of which in the overall assessment has to be critically assessed.
    
19. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces.
    
20. When the proletariat wins victory, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it wins victory only by abolishing itself and its opposite.
    
21. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.
    
22. Yet this highly efficient food system, based on multiple uses of cattle, has been dismantled in the name of efficiency and development. The Green Revolution shifted agriculture's fertilizer base from renewable organic outputs to non-renewable chemical ones, making both cattle and women's work with cattle dispensable in the production of food grain. The White Revolution, aping the West's wasteful animal husbandry and dairy practices, is destroying the world's most evolved dairy culture and displacing women from their role in the dairy-processing industry.
    
23. With the exception of a few misfits within the closed environment, we can say that every neurosis, every abnormal manifestation, every affective erethism in an Antillean is the product of his cultural situation.
    
24. A human mass does not "distinguish" itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organizing itself; and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is without organizers and leaders.
    
25. One outcome of Black women's efforts to negotiate work, family, and motherhood is the emergence of Black mother-child families as a growing global phenomenon. Situating mother-child families in the context of the global political economy highlights the significance of advanced capitalism for understanding mother-child families in a transnational context In particular, important connections characterize the stage of capitalist development encountered by any group of people and the patterns of family organization that emerge within that group. Massive global economic restructuring since World War II suggests that shifting patterns of industrial development, their accompanying race- and gender- segmented labor markets, and associated outcomes such as migration, urbanization and ghettoization all affect families.
    
26. Yes, European civilization and its best representatives are responsible for colonial racism.
    
27. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek (mythology) is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs?
    
28. Woman has to learn that exchanges-it is a fundamental law of political economy---are based on the value the merchandise offered has for the buyer, and not for the seller: she has been deceived in being persuaded that her worth is priceless. The truth is that for men she is an amusement, a pleasure, company, an inessential boon; he is for her the meaning, the justification of her existence. The exchange, therefore, is not of two items of equal value.
    
29. Whereas the genuine place of "classes" is within the economic order, the place of "status group" is within the social order, that is, the sphere of the distribution of "honor." From within these spheres, classes and status groups influence one another and they influence the legal order and are in turn influenced by it. But "parties" live in a house of "power."
    
30. It can argued that poverty is not a matter of low well-being, but of the inability to pursue well-being precisely because of the lack of economic means … Perhaps the most important point to note is that the adequacy of the economic means cannot be judged independently of the actual possibilities of "converting" incomes and resources into capability to function.
    
31. The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals.
    
32. Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed-in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind.
    
33. This new struggle for a free India is appropriately beginning at India's social and environmental margins---from the coasts, led by women, traditional fishworkers, the landless, and small peasants.
    
34. If we are interested in the freedom of choice, then we have to look at the choices that the person does in fact have, and we must not assume that the same results would be obtained by looking at the resources that he or she commends.
    
35. This then is the reason why woman has a double and deceptive visage: she is all that man desires and all that he does not attain. She is the good mediatrix between Nature and man; and she is the temptation of unconquered Nature, counter to all goodness. She incarnates all moral values, from good to evil, and their opposites; she is the substance of action and whatever is an obstacle to it, she is man's grasp in the world and his frustration; as such she is the source and origin of all man's reflection on his existence and of whatever expression he is able to give to it; and yet she works to divert him from himself, to make him sink down in silence and in death. She is servant and companion, but he expects her also to be his audience and critic and to confirm him in his sense of being; but she opposes him with her indifference, even with her mockery and laughter. He projects upon her what he desires and what he fears, what he loves and what he hates.
    
36. The binary fundamental to heterosexism, namely, that dividing alleged normal sexuality from its deviant other dovetails with binaries that underlie other systems of oppression. The important binaries introduced in Chapter 3's discussion of Black women's objectification-white/black, male/female, reason/emotion, and mind/body-now become joined by a series of sexual binaries: Madonna/whore, real woman/dyke, real man/faggot, and stud sissy. These sexual binaries in turn receive justification via medical theories (normal/sick), religious beliefs (saved/ sinner), and state regulation (legal/illegal).
    
37. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its complexly developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
    
38. With these routinizations, rules in some form always come to govern. The prince or the hierocrat no longer rules by virtue of purely personal qualities, but by virtue of acquired or inherited qualities, or because he has been legitimated by an act of charismatic election. The process of routinization, and thus traditionalization has set in.
    
39. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.
    
40. It may be more useful to assess Black women's activism less by the ideological content of individual Black women's belief systems---whether they hold conservative, reformist, progressive, or radical ideologies based on some predetermined criteria---and more by Black women's collective actions within everyday life that challenge domination in these multifaceted domains. Foe example, a Black mother who may be unable to articulate her political ideology but who on a daily basis contests school policies harmful to her children may be more an "activist" than the most highly educated Black feminist who, while she can manipulate feminist, nationalist, postmodern, and other ideologies, produces no tangible political changes in anyone's life but her own.
    
41. It signifies that the social group in question may indeed have its own conception of the world, even if only embryonic; a conception which manifests itself in action, but occasionally and in flashes - when, that is, the group is acting as an organic totality. But the same group has, for reason of submission and intellectual subordination, adopted a conception which is not its own but is borrowed from another group
    
42. The family has a very special place among the relationships which through conscious and unconscious mechanisms influence the psychic character of the vast majority of men. The processes that go on in the family shape the child from his tenderest years and play a decisive role in the development of his capabilities. The growing child experiences the influence of reality according as the latter is reflected in the mirror of the family circle. The family, as one of the most important formative agencies, sees to it that the kind of human character emerges which social life requires, and gives this human being in great measure the indispensable adaptation for a specific authority-oriented conduct on which the existence of the bourgeois order largely depends.
    
43. Christianity began its course as a doctrine of itinerant artisan journeymen. During all periods of its mighty external and internal development it has been a quite specifically urban, and above all a civic, religion … The city of the Occident, unique among all other cities of the world - and citizenship, in the sense in which it has emerged only in the Occident - has been the major theatre for Christianity.
    
44. In the formation of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intention that there should always be ruler and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which this division is no longer necessary?
    
45. Philosophy in general does not in fact exist. Various philosophies or conceptions of the world exist, and one always makes a choice between them.
    
46. What emerges then is the need for combined action on the individual and on the group. As a psychoanalyst, I should help my patient to become conscious of his unconscious and abandon his attempts at a hallucinatory whitening, but also to act in the direction of a change in the social structure.
    
47. If by freedom we mean agency freedom, then it is quite possible that an expansion of (agency) freedom may go hand in hand with a reduction in well-being freedom as well as well-being achievement. If, on the other hand, we take freedom to mean well-being freedom, then any conflict between freedom and achieved well-being cannot, of course, arise from the shrinkage of opportunities of well-being achievement with increased (well-being) of freedom
    
48. In treating suffering as a symptom of odiousness in the eyes of the gods and as a sign of secret guilt, religion has psychologically met a very general need. The fortunate is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune.
    
49. One of the most basic problems of women, as we have seen, is the reconciliation of her reproductive role and her part in productive labor. The fundamental fact that from the beginning of history doomed women to domestic work and prevented her from taking part in the shaping of the world was her enslavement to the generative function.
    
50. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a social critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in a communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.
    
51. Whereas prevailing academic approaches fragment social life by separating paid work from social reproduction, activism from mothering, and family from community, the ideas and actions of Black women community workers challenge these arrangements. Many of the women initially became involved in community politics because of their children. But their subsequent political involvement grew beyond their own individual families as they saw how their personal troubles were politically constituted.
    
52. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men.
    
53. If the intellectuals has been organically the intellectuals of those masses, and if they had worked out and made coherent the principles and the problems raised by the masses in their practical activity, thus constituting a cultural and social bloc.
    
54. I said in my introduction that man is a yes. I will never stop reiterating that. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.
    
55. It already been said that the protagonist of the new Prince could not in the modern epoch be an individual hero, but only the political party.
    
56. The lack of all training in calculation, even in grade schools, is a very striking feature of Chinese education.
    
57. The white family is the workshop in which one is shaped and trained for life in society… The Antillean has to choose between his family and European society; on other words, the individual who climbs up into society - white and civilized - tends to reject his family - black and savage - on the plane of imagination, in accord with the childhood Erlebnisse.
    
58. It is estimated that more than 3.5 million family-run kirin shops supply wheat to Indian consumers. More than 2 million small neighborhood mills produce fresh flour. While 40 million tons of wheat are traded, only 15 million tons are purchased directly as packaged flour because Indians love freshness and quality in food. Less than 1 percent of the flour consumed in India comes from packaged brands.
    
59. Any formation of the national-popular collective will is impossible, unless the great mass of peasant farmers bursts simultaneously into political life.
    
60. It is possible to argue for seeing poverty as the failure of basic capabilities to reach certain minimally acceptable levels.
    
61. One can only demand of the teacher that he have the intellectual integrity to see that it is one thing to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations. These are quite heterogeneous problems.
    
62. We can now see that the myth is in large part explained by its usefulness to man. The myth of woman is a luxury. It can appear only if man escapes from the urgent demands of his needs; the more relationships are concretely lived, the less they are idealized. The fellah of ancient Egypt, the Bedouin peasant, the artisan of the Middle Ages, the worker of today has in the requirements of work and poverty relations with his particular woman companion which are too definite for her to be embellished with an aura either auspicious or inauspicious. The epochs and the social classes that have been marked by the leisure to dream have been the ones to set up the images, black and white, of femininity. But along with luxury there was utility; these dreams were irresistibly guided by interests.
    
63. Every human way of acting which hides the true nature of society, built as it is on contraries, is ideological, and the claim that philosophical, moral, and religious acts of faith, scientific theories, legal maxims, and cultural institutions have this function is not an attack on the character of those who originate them but only states the objective role such realities play in society.
    
64. The working men have no county. We cannot take from them what they have not got.
    
65. This work represents the sum of the experience and observation of seven years; regardless of the area I have studied, one thing has struck me: The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.
    
66. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are avarice and the war amongst the avaricious---competition.
    
67. It is quite understandable that the more weighty the civic strata as such have been, and the more they have been torn from bonds of taboo and from divisions into sibs and castes, the more favorable has been the soil for religions that call for action in this world. Under these conditions, the preferred religious attitude could become the attitude of active asceticism, of God-willed action nourished by the sentiment of being God's "tool," rather than the possession of the deity or the inward and contemplative surrender to God, which has appeared as the supreme value to religions influenced by strata of genteel intellectuals.
    
68. This free and mobile stratum of literati were carriers of philosophical schools and antagonisms, a situation comparable to those of India, and of Hellenic Antiquity, and of the middle Ages with its monks and scholars.
    
69. In this work I have made it a point to convey the misery of the black man. Physically and affectively. I have not wished to be objective. Besides, that would be dishonest: It is not possible for me to be objective
    
70. The government conscious of the weakness of its administrative apparatus, confined itself to the care of the tide and the maintenance of the water routes, which were indispensable for provisioning the leading provinces with rice.
    
71. When Third World farmers sow seed, they pray, "May this seed be exhaustless." Monsanto and the USDA, on the other hand, seem to be saying, "Let this seed be terminated so that our profits and monopoly will be exhaustless."
    
72. Ensnared by nature, the pregnant woman is plant and animal, a stock-pile of colloids, an incubator, an egg; she scares children proud of their young, straight bodies and makes young people titter contemptuously because she is a human being, a conscious and free individual, who has become life's passive instrument.
    
73. Above all, this fact must not lead to that kind of pseudo-scientific operation with the concept of 'class' and 'class interests' so frequently found these days, and which has found its most classic expression in the statement of a talented author, that the individual may be in error concerning his interests but that the 'class' is 'infallible' about its interests.
    
74. To be sensuous is to suffer. (Sinnlich sein ist leidend sein).
    
75. It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of arms. Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.
    
76. Ah, yes, as you can see, by calling on humanity, on the belief in dignity, on love, on charity, it would be easy to prove, or to win the admission, that the black is the equal of the white. But my purpose is quite different: What I want to do is help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment.
    
77. If, however the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that his presentation of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges.
    
78. Surely, utilitarianism does not, in general, want the equality of the total utilities by different people. The utilitarian formula requires the maximization of the sum-total of the utilities of all people taken together, and that is, in an obvious sense, not particular egalitarian. In fact, the equality that utilitarianism seeks takes the form of equal treatment of human beings in the space of gains and losses of utilities. There is an insistence on equal weights on everyone's utility gains in the utilitarian objective function
    
79. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.
    
80. Thus woman's work within the home gives her no autonomy; it is not directly useful to society, it does not open out upon the future, it produces nothing. It takes on meaning and dignity only as it is linked with existent beings who reach out beyond themselves, transcend themselves, towards society in production and action. That is, far from freeing the matron, her occupation makes her dependent upon husband and children; she is justified thru them; but in their lives she is only an inessential intermediary.
    
81. However, the conflict over genetically engineered crops and foods is not a conflict between "culture" and "science." It is between two cultures of science: one based on transparency, public accountability, and responsibility toward the environment and people, and another based on profits and lack of transparency, accountability, and responsibility.
    
82. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless world. It is the opium of the people.
    
83. On the other side, production produces consumption by creating the specific manner of consumption; and further, by creating the stimulus of consumption, the ability to consume, as a need. This last identity, as determined under (3), [is] frequently cited in economics in the relation of demand and supply, of objects and needs, of socially created and natural needs.
    
84. The need to determine conceptual priorities - important in principle - becomes momentous in practice because of the far-reaching diversities of human beings. The demands of equality in different spaces tend to conflict, in fact (not just in principle), with each other. Thus, the choice of basal equality has tremendous practical importance in asserting some claims and denying others. The need for ensuring the fulfillment of basal demands, including basal equality, necessitates the tolerance of inequality in what are seen as the outlying "peripheries."
    
85. It is normal for the Antillean to be anti-Negro. Through the collective unconscious the Antillean has taken over all the archetypes belonging to the European. The anima of Antillean Negro is almost always a white woman. In the same way, the animus of the Antillean is always a white man.
    
86. Indeed, strictly speaking, posing the problem in terms of the latter contrast ["liberty versus equality"] reflects a "category mistake." They are not alternatives. Liberty is among the possible fields of application of equality, and equality is among the possible patterns of distribution of liberty
    
87. Among the vast majority of the ruled there is the unconscious fear that theoretical thinking might show their painfully won adaptation to reality to be perverse and unnecessary. Those who profit from the status quo entertain a general suspicion of any intellectual independence.
    
88. The traditional use of the head-count ratio as a measure of poverty can deflect anti-poverty policy by ignoring the greater misery of the poorer among the poor. Indeed, with the head-count ratio as the measure of poverty, any government faces a strong temptation to concentrate on the richest among the poor, since that is the way that the number of the poor - and the head-count ratio H - can be most easily reduced.
    
89. Incidentally, it goes without saying that all forms of state have democracy for their truth and that they are therefore untrue insofar as they are not democracy.
    
90. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, insofar as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper. Machinery appears, then, as the most adequate form of fixed capital.
    
91. Jung locates the collective unconscious in the inherited cerebral matter. But the collective unconscious, without our having to fall back on the genes, is purely and simply the sum of prejudices, myths, collective attitudes of a given group.
    
92. We must not believe, certainly, that a change in woman's economic condition alone is enough to transform her, though this factor has been and remains the basic factor in her evolution; but until it has brought about the moral, social, cultural, and other consequences that it promises and requires, the new woman cannot appear. At this moment they have been realized nowhere, in Russia no more than in France or the United States; and this explains why the woman of today is torn between the past and the future.
    
93. Under the pressure of such a family situation the individual does not learn to understand and respect his mother in her concrete existence, that is, as this particular social and sexual being. Consequently he is not only educated to repress his socially harmful impulses (a feat of immense cultural significance), but, because this education takes the problematic form of camouflaging reality, the individual also loses for good the disposition of part of his psychic energies. Reason and joy are in its exercise restricted; the suppressed inclination towards the mother reappears as a fanciful and sentimental susceptibility to all symbols of the dark, maternal, and protective powers. Because the woman bows to the law of the patriarchal family, she becomes an instrument for maintaining authority in this society.
    
94. A study comparing traditional polycultures with industrial monocultures shows that a polyculture system can produce 100 units of food from 5 units of inputs, whereas an industrial system requires 300 units of input to produce the same 100 units. The 295 units of wasted inputs could have provided 5,900 units of additional food. This is a recipe for starving people, not for feeding them.
    
95. The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question
    
96. All of these emotions-the fact that Whites know that Blacks are human, the fact that men love women, and the fact that women have deep feelings for one another-must be distorted on the emotional level of the erotic in order for oppressive systems to endure. Sexuality in the individual, interpersonal domain of power becomes annexed by intersecting oppressions in the structural domain of power in order to ensure the smooth operation of domination.
    
97. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.
    
98. This materialist view has the negative significance that it rejects a metaphysically grounded morality. But in addition it has always meant to materialists that man's striving for happiness is to be recognized as a natural fact requiring no justification.
    
99. I believe that the fact of the juxtaposition of the white and black races has created a massive psychoexistential complex. I hope by analyzing it to destroy it
    
100. African-American women need wisdom to know how to deal with the "educated fools" who would "take a shotgun to a roach." As members of a subordinate group, Black women cannot afford to be fools of any type, for our objectification as the Other denies us the protections that White skin, maleness, and wealth confer. This distinction between knowledge and wisdom, and the use of experience as the cutting edge dividing them, has been key to Black women's survival. In the context of intersecting oppressions, the distinction is essential. Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essential to the survival of the subordinate.
     
101. If it is true that every language contains the elements of a conception of the world and of a culture, it could also be true that from anyone's language one can access the greater or lesser complexity of his conception of the world.
     
102. In this sense the real philosopher is, and cannot be other than, the politician, the active man who modifies the environment, understanding by environment the ensemble of relations which each of us enters to take part in. If one's own individuality is the ensemble of these relations, to create one's personality means to acquire consciousness of them and to modify one's own personality means to modify the ensemble of these relations.
     
103. Moral consciousness implies a kind of scission, a fracture of consciousness into a bright part and an opposing black part. In order to achieve morality, it is essential that the black, the dark, the Negro vanish from consciousness. Hence a Negro is forever in combat with his own image.
     
104. The judgment and measurement of inequality is thoroughly dependent on the choice of the variable (income, wealth, happiness, etc.) in terms of which comparisons are made
     
105. In the collective unconscious of homo occidentalis, the Negro - or, if one prefers, the color black - symbolizes evil, sin, wretchedness, death, war, famine … The collective unconscious is not dependent on cerebral heredity; it is the result of what I shall call the unreflected imposition of a culture.
     
106. We are driven from the individual back to the social structure. If there is a taint, it lies not in the "soul" of the individual but rather in that of the environment.
     
107. Wanting equality in what is taken to be the "central" social exercise goes with accepting inequality in the remoter "peripheries." The disputes reside ultimately in locating the central social arrangement.
     
108. "Every state is founded on force," said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of "state" would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as "anarchy," in the specific sense of this word.
     
109. Normally, Protestantism, however, absolutely legitimated the state as a divine institution and hence violence as a means. Protestantism, especially, legitimated the authoritarian state.
     
110. I heard a charwoman declare, while scrubbing the stone floor of a hotel lobby: 'I never asked anybody for anything; I succeeded all by myself.' She was as proud of her self-sufficiency as a Rockefeller. It is not to be supposed, however, that the mere combination of the right to vote and a job constitutes a complete emancipation: working, today, is not liberty. Only in a socialist world would woman by one attain the other. The majority of workers are exploited today. On the other hand, the social structure has not been much modified by the changes in women's condition; this world, always belonging to men, still retains the form they have given it.
     
111. Those men whose fate is not determined by the chance of using goods or services for themselves on the market, e.g. slaves, are not, however, a "class" in the technical sense of the term. They are, rather, a "status group."
     
112. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilderers" separate the exploited from from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of riffle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speack the language of pure force.
     
113. In assessing the freedoms that we enjoy and in examining how unequal we are in that respect, the informational basis of the evaluation has to take into account our counterfactual choices (what we would choose) and their relation to what is made to happen. An exclusive concentration on the levers of control would be inadequate for analyzing our freedoms.