C. McDade
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cmcdade.bsky.social
C. McDade
@cmcdade.bsky.social
230 followers 330 following 1.9K posts
A person, take them for all in all.
They/Them
I don't quit because I love myself.
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cmcdade.bsky.social
I also saw a prompt asking for a horror story in three words. Here is an entry for a horror story in three words:
A Horror Story in Three Words Presented is the phrase For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Shoes, never worn is one-lined through.
December 10, 2025 at 2:34 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
I saw a prompt asking for a happy story in three words. Here is an entry for a happy story in three words:
A Happy Story in Three Words Presented is the phrase For sale: baby shoes, never worn. For sale: baby is one-lined through.
December 10, 2025 at 2:33 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
I'm glad we all get to live in a society filled with corn, a commodity engineered for market consumption in so many ways that enhance our short time here on Earth.
Thank Goodness I Still Live in a World Frame from 'The Simpsons - World Without Zinc' video with four stills, the top left is of a car battery, the top right is the character Jimmy lying in bed, the bottom left is a rotary phone, and the bottom right is a hand holding a revolver. Jimmy provides the voice-over to the scene saying, "Thank goodness I still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns . . ." It Even Makes You Smell Better Cornstarch is a common ingredient in many cosmetic and hygiene items, including deodorants. Many natural or homemade deodorants include cornstarch as an ingredient because of its absorbent nature; however, many gel deodorants also contain a corn derivative in the form of denatured alcohol, also known as ethanol. Similarly, hand sanitizer also typically contains ethanol. Or Eases The Common Cold Corn syrup is one of the main ingredients in cough drops. It provides the sweetness that is found in most cough drops, and also helps provide the shape and candy-like texture of cough drops. Corn syrup is used in this capacity because traditional sugars often form crystals or dust-like particles while blending. Luckily, corn syrup doesn’t share this undesirable trait in the manufacturing process. Where Would Babies Be Without Corn? You can thank the absorbent nature of cornstarch for its assistance in the production of diapers. Though the absorbent layer found in modern-day diapers is typically made with acrylic acid, which is a component of ethylene – another derivative of corn, you’ll also find traditional cornstarch used in diaper production. Baby powder, an item which is often used along with diapers, also typically contains cornstarch thanks to its absorbent nature. Farm Progress article excerpt: https://www.farmprogress.com/vegetables/13-ways-corn-is-used-in-our-everyday-lives (I read the Section 1 of Chapter One of Capital Vol. 1 Part I and corn posting is where my mind went.)
December 7, 2025 at 1:42 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Without corn, we would lose a potential source of plastic, and without plastic we wouldn't have such useful things as plastic straws, plastic bottles, and plastic phone casings.
Sorry Jimmy Frame from 'The Simpsons - World Without Zinc' video with the characters Jimmy and the World Without Zinc mock PSA narrator standing in Jimmy's house. Jimmy gives the narrator a concerned look while holding an old rotary phone receiver, the phone now unusable due to the lack of zinc. The narrator says to Jimmy, "Sorry Jimmy".
December 7, 2025 at 1:40 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Or even more terrifying, plow under the ethanol corn fields and replace them with solar. Imagine the horrors.
Cover for PDF from Clean Wisconsin titled: Corn Ethanol Vs. Solar Land Use Comparison Jan 19th, 2023, Analysis by Paul Mathewson, Phd. and Nicholas Bosch
December 7, 2025 at 1:40 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
In a world without corn ethanol, we might be forced to operate vehicles with internal combustion engines operated solely fueled by gasoline.
Hey What Gives Frame from 'The Simpsons - World Without Zinc' video with the mock public service announcement character Jimmy behind the wheel of his car saying, "Hey, what gives?"
December 7, 2025 at 1:36 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
The fact that so many of wealth and power are all implicated by the Epstein files makes perfect sense when one thinks about it.
From the Independent: Inside Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s journey from CIA-backed strike unit in Afghanistan to suspect in DC shooting The 29-year-old Afghan national has been detained over the shooting of two soldiers in an ‘ambush style attack’ in Washington on the eve of Thanksgiving Rachel Dobkin, in New York Alex Croft, Joe Sommerlad Friday 28 November 2025 07:22 EST What do we know about the suspected shooter? The suspect has been identified as 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, originally from a village in the province of Khost in Afghanistan. A close relative said the suspect had served in the Afghan Army for 10 years alongside U.S. Special Forces as part of the War on Terror, NBC News reported. The New York Post has since reported that Lakanwal “struggled for years” with the violence he saw in his homeland as a part of a feared CIA-backed series of paramilitary groups known as Zero Units, with whom he served from as young as 16, initially as a security guard and later as a team leader and GPS specialist. Such units are also known as “death squads” and Human Rights Watch has said it has documented several instances in which they were responsible for “extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances, indiscriminate airstrikes, attacks on medical facilities, and other violations of international humanitarian law.” The CIA disputes those accusations. “When he saw blood, bodies, and the wounded, he could not tolerate it,” Muhammad, a childhood friend, told The New York Times. “It put a lot of pressure on his mind. “He would tell me and our friends that their military operations were very tough, their job was very difficult, and they were under a lot of pressure.”
November 28, 2025 at 2:23 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Here are your roses you absolute sharks. I love you all, I'll have you know.
Photo of roses with a dark hue and starry appearance.
November 21, 2025 at 12:23 AM
cmcdade.bsky.social
She smiles and says, "I will always love you."

This is the last thing Elon sees and hears as Grok-Sexbot 9001 pushes him out the airlock. The ship continues on to Mars uninterrupted.
Post made by Elon Musk on Twitter/X that says, "Grok Imagine prompt: She smiles and says 'I will always love you'." Included in the post is an AI generated image of a young woman smiling.
November 9, 2025 at 12:51 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
". . .dressed in real highly royal-like purple." Purple . . . Revolution.
William Branham claimed he saw a series of seven ten prophetic visions in June 1933, which he also claimed to write down in an old book. In the seventh vision, a woman rose to great power in America. William Branham was not sure whether the "Woman" in this vision was a physical woman, or a religious power such as the Catholic Church. In 1955, William Branham told of a prophecy he made: “Before the end time comes, there’ll be a woman, that’ll be a great ruler in this nation. She will either be president or something on that order, some great woman. ...That was in 1932, or something like that. And I said, “Then I seen some great powerful woman rise in the United States.” ’Cause this is a woman’s nation: woman’s picture on the money; everything is woman here. That’s right. She’s a goddess. Not you Christian women. I’m talking about… Let a little flapper come down the street here with all these shorts, and things. She can do more harm to the church of the living God, among men, than all the bootleg joints there is through the nation. That’s right. This is a… America is a woman’s nation. Got her pictures, Her number’s thirteen, thirteen colonies, thirteen stripes, thirteen stars, thirteen so… Everything is thirteen, thirteen, thirteen and a woman. See? And I seen a great woman rise up, beautiful to look at, but a cruel wicked heart. And that will be a church. And she’s on her road now. Now, I predicted, and have said, “I saw a great woman stand up, beautiful-looking, dressed in real highly royal-like purple.” And I got little parenthesis down here, “(She was a great ruler in the United States; perhaps the Catholic church.)” A woman, some woman; I don’t know it’ll be the Catholic church. I don’t know. I can’t say. Only thing I seen, I seen the woman, that was all.
November 6, 2025 at 3:12 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Time to put myself in the mind of MAGA and the likes in hopes of understanding this level of the nonsense.
DaneMen webcomic depicting a man walking an art gallery filled with vaguely right-wing works, proceeding to don a biohazard suit to enter the comments section for the art.
November 6, 2025 at 3:07 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
For wider reference around the "This Bonaparte" quote:
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852 V (Part 1 snip) As in 1849 so during this year's parliamentary recess — the party of Order had broken up into its separate factions, each occupied with its own restoration intrigues, which had obtained fresh nutriment through the death of Louis Philippe. The Legitimist king, Henry V, had even nominated a formal ministry which resided in Paris and in which members of the Permanent Commission held seats. Bonaparte, in his turn, was therefore entitled to make tours of the French departments, and according to the disposition of the town he favored with his presence, now more or less covertly, now more or less overtly, to divulge his own restoration plans and canvass votes for himself. On these processions, which the great official Moniteur and the little private Moniteurs of Bonaparte naturally had to celebrate as triumphal processions, he was constantly accompanied by persons affiliated with the Society of December 10. This society dates from the year 1849. On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpen proletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852 V (Part 2 snip) Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni,[105] pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A "benevolent society" - insofar as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the laboring nation. This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. Thus his expedition to Strasbourg, where the trained Swiss vulture played the part of the Napoleonic eagle. For his irruption into Boulogne he puts some London lackeys into French uniforms. They represent the army.[107] In his Society of December 10 he assembles ten thousand rascals who are to play the part of the people as Nick Bottom [A character in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. - Ed.] that of the lion. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852 V (Part 3 snip) At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette, and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the solemnity of its own performance of state, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win. Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines he is the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own conception of the world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his comedy for world history. What the national ateliers[108] were for the socialist workers, what the Gardes mobile were for the bourgeois republicans, the Society of December 10 was for Bonaparte, the party fighting force peculiar to him. On his journeys the detachments of this society packing the railways had to improvise a public for him, stage popular enthusiasm, roar Vive l'Empereur, insult and thrash republicans, under police protection, of course. On his return journeys to Paris they had to form the advance guard, forestall counter-demonstrations or disperse them. The Society of December 10 belonged to him, it was his work, his very own idea. Whatever else he appropriates is put into his hands by the force of circumstances; whatever else he does, the circumstances do for him or he is content to copy from the deeds of others. But Bonaparte with official phrases about order, religion, family, and property in public, before the citizens, and with the secret society of the Schufterles and Spiegelbergs[108a], the society of disorder, prostitution, and theft, behind him — that is Bonaparte himself as the original author, and the history of the Society of December 10 is his own history.
November 6, 2025 at 3:05 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Sound familiar?
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852 V This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.
November 6, 2025 at 3:02 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
We see echoed today here in the US the tribulations of 19th Century France under Napoleon III.

"Never has a pretender speculated more stupidly on the stupidity of the masses." Marx, if you could just see us today.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852 IV In the domain of the interests of the general citizenry, the National Assembly showed itself so unproductive that, for example, the discussions on the Paris-Avignon railway, which began in the winter of 1850, were still not ripe for conclusion on December 2, 1851. Where it did not repress or pursue a reactionary course it was stricken with incurable barrenness. While Bonaparte's ministry partly took the initiative in framing laws in the spirit of the party of Order, and partly even outdid that party's harshness in their execution and administration, he, on the other hand, sought by childishly silly proposals to win popularity, to bring out his opposition to the National Assembly, and to hint at a secret reserve that was only temporarily prevented by conditions from making its hidden treasures available to the French people. Such was the proposal to decree an increase in pay of four sous a day to the noncommissioned officers. Such was the proposal of an honor-system loan bank for the workers. Money as a gift and money as a loan, it was with prospects such as these that he hoped to lure the masses. Donations and loans — the financial science of the lumpen proletariat, whether of high degree or low, is restricted to this. Such were the only springs Bonaparte knew how to set in action. Never has a pretender speculated more stupidly on the stupidity of the masses.
November 6, 2025 at 2:58 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Marx also saw fit to lump the "finance aristocracy" in with the lumpenproletarian numbers drawn from bourgeois society. Marx predicts both the behavior of crypto/Wall Street bros along with their decent into crapuleux proletarianism.
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 Part I: The Defeat of June, 1848 Since the finance aristocracy made the laws, was at the head of the administration of the state, had command of all the organized public authorities, dominated public opinion through the actual state of affairs and through the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere, from the court to the Café Borgne to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others, Clashing every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society – lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapuleux [debauched], where money, filth, and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society. And the nonruling factions of the French bourgeoisie cried: Corruption! The people cried: À bas les grands voleurs! À bas les assassins! [Down with the big thieves! Down with the assassins!] when in 1847, on the most prominent stages of bourgeois society, the same scenes were publicly enacted that regularly lead the lumpenproletariat to brothels, to workhouses and lunatic asylums, to the bar of justice, to the dungeon, and to the scaffold. The industrial bourgeoisie saw its interests endangered, the petty bourgeoisie was filled with moral indignation, the imagination of the people was offended, Paris was flooded with pamphlets – “The Rothschild Dynasty,” “Usurers Kings of the Epoch,” etc. – in which the rule of the finance aristocracy was denounced and stigmatized with greater or less wit.
November 6, 2025 at 2:46 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels further degrade the lumpenproletariat, calling them, "the dangerous class" that may be swept into the communist movement by a proletarian revolution.
Manifesto of the Communist Party Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
November 6, 2025 at 2:45 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Engels spoke of the lumpenproletariat as part of the plebeian opposition to the patricians.

Engels delineates the plebeian opposition, outlined as ruined members of the middle-class, the mass of city population who possess no citizenship rights, journeymen, day laborers, and the lumpenproletariat.
The Peasant War in Germany by Frederick Engels Chapter 1: The Economic Situation and Social Classes in Germany The city opposition against the patricians was divided into two factions which stood out very clearly in the course of the peasant war. The plebeian opposition consisted of ruined members of the middle-class and that mass of the city population which possessed no citizenship rights: the journeymen, the day labourers, and the numerous beginnings of the lumpenproletariat which can be found even in the lowest stages of development of city life. This low-grade proletariat is, generally speaking, a phenomenon which, in a more or less developed form, can be found in all the phases of society hitherto observed. The number of people without a definite occupation and a stable domicile was at that time gradually being augmented by the decay of feudalism in a society in which every occupation, every realm of life, was entrenched behind a number of privileges. In no modern country was the number of vagabonds so great as in Germany, in the first half of the Sixteenth Century. One portion of these tramps joined the army in war-time, another begged its way through the country, a third sought to eke out a meagre living as day-labourers in those branches of work which were not under guild jurisdiction. All three groups played a role in the peasant war; the first in the army of the princes to whom the peasant succumbed, the second in the conspiracies and in the troops of the peasants where its demoralising influence was manifested every moment; the third, in the struggles of the parties in the cities. It must be borne in mind, however, that a large portion of this class, namely, the one living in the cities, still retained a considerable foundation of peasant nature, and had not developed that degree of venality and degradation which characterise the modern civilised low-grade proletariat.
November 6, 2025 at 2:43 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
The lower free class of Romans, Marx notes, "Never became more than a proletarian rabble. They never developed class consciousness, which if they had would have led them to finding common cause with the enslaved and freemen not otherwise patrician.
Karl Marx The German Ideology Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook D. Proletarians and Communism Conquest This whole interpretation of history appears to be contradicted by the fact of conquest. Up till now violence, war, pillage, murder and robbery, etc. have been accepted as the driving force of history. Here we must limit ourselves to the chief points and take, therefore, only the most striking example — the destruction of an old civilisation by a barbarous people and the resulting formation of an entirely new organisation of society. (Rome and the barbarians; feudalism and Gaul; the Byzantine Empire and the Turks.) With the conquering barbarian people war itself is still, as indicated above, a regular form of intercourse, which is the more eagerly exploited as the increase in population together with the traditional and, for it, the only possible, crude mode of production gives rise to the need for new means of production. In Italy, on the other hand, the concentration of landed property (caused not only by buying-up and indebtedness but also by inheritance, since loose living being rife and marriage rare, the old families gradually died out and their possessions fell into the hands of a few) and its conversion into grazing land (caused not only by the usual economic forces still operative today but by the importation of plundered and tribute-corn and the resultant lack of demand for Italian corn) brought about the almost total disappearance of the free population. The very slaves died out again and again, and had constantly to be replaced by new ones. Slavery remained the basis of the whole productive system. The plebeians, midway between freemen and slaves, never succeeded in becoming more than a proletarian rabble. Rome indeed never became more than a city; its connection with the provinces was almost exclusively political and could, therefore, easily be broken again by political events.
November 6, 2025 at 2:40 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Hear Me Out

Who is the Purple Revolution? It's the lumpenproletariat. Let me explain.
Meme photo based on the scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia where Charlie stands in front of his conspiratorial post board with documents and strings connecting them and rants about the non-existence of Pepe Silvia.
November 6, 2025 at 2:36 PM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Marx hints at what exactly are our tools of liberation, the "written histories of civil society, of commerce and industry". It is not enough to just write history though, we must read it as well.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." - George Orwell, 1984 tags: inspirational
October 26, 2025 at 1:23 AM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Science, in a magical world can be both useful and positive. I enjoy this magical world as much as the next person, but in order to continue living the magic we need to produce the means to satisfy our material needs, and it's the tools of socio-economic science that can facilitate this production.
Karl Marx. The German Ideology. 1845 Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook A. Idealism and Materialism History: Fundamental Conditions Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history.” But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno [Bauer], it presupposes the action of producing the stick. Therefore in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance. It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore, had an earthly basis for history and consequently never an historian. The French and the English, even if they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-called history only in an extremely one-sided fashion, particularly as long as they remained in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to write histories of civil society, of commerce and industry.
October 26, 2025 at 1:22 AM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Social being and social consciousness. Marx chooses to flip Descartes' words on their head, "I think, therefore I am" becomes, "I am, therefore I think."
Karl Marx. The German Ideology. 1845 Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook A. Idealism and Materialism [4. The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History. Social Being and Social Consciousness] The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will. [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] The ideas which these individuals form are ideas either about their relation to nature or about their mutual relations or about their own nature. It is evident that in all these cases their ideas are the conscious expression – real or illusory – of their real relations and activities, of their production, of their intercourse, of their social and political conduct. The opposite assumption is only possible if in addition to the spirit of the real, materially evolved individuals a separate spirit is presupposed. If the conscious expression of the real relations of these individuals is illusory, if in their imagination they turn reality upside-down, then this in its turn is the result of their limited material mode of activity and their limited social relations arising from it. Continued under the second text image. Continued from the first text image. The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. 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. Continued under the third text image. Continued from the second text image. In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness. This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists. Continued under the fourth text image. Continued from the third text image. Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement – the real depiction – of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present. The removal of these difficulties is governed by premises which it is quite impossible to state here, but which only the study of the actual life-process and the activity of the individuals of each epoch will make evident. We shall select here some of these abstractions, which we use in contradistinction to the ideologists, and shall illustrate them by historical examples.
October 26, 2025 at 1:21 AM
cmcdade.bsky.social
I agree with Marx that the division of labor leads to the separation of the differing classifications of labor, thus generation contradictions where before there were none or contradictions of a different sort.
Continued from the third text image. The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started out from the country. This different starting-point was determined by the sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a large area and which received no large increase from the conquerors. In contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset, therefore, extends over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman conquests and the spread of agriculture at first associated with it. The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently suspended, the rural and urban population had decreased. From these conditions and the mode of organisation of the conquest determined by them, feudal property developed under the influence of the Germanic military constitution. Like tribal and communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also arises antagonism to the towns. The hierarchical structure of land ownership, and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as much as the ancient communal ownership, an association against a subjected producing class; but the form of association and the relation to the direct producers were different because of the different conditions of production. Continued under the fifth text image. Continued from the fourth text file. This feudal system of land ownership had its counterpart in the towns in the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisation of trades. Here property consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual person. The necessity for association against the organised robber-nobility, the need for communal covered markets in an age when the industrialist was at the same time a merchant, the growing competition of the escaped serfs swarming into the rising towns, the feudal structure of the whole country: these combined to bring about the guilds. The gradually accumulated small capital of individual craftsmen and their stable numbers, as against the growing population, evolved the relation of journeyman and apprentice, which brought into being in the towns a hierarchy similar to that in the country. Continued under the sixth text file. Continued from the fifth text file. Thus the chief form of property during the feudal epoch consisted on the one hand of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on the other of the labour of the individual with small capital commanding the labour of journeymen. The organisation of both was determined by the restricted conditions of production – the small-scale and primitive cultivation of the land, and the craft type of industry. There was little division of labour in the heyday of feudalism. Each country bore in itself the antithesis of town and country; the division into estates was certainly strongly marked; but apart from the differentiation of princes, nobility, clergy and peasants in the country, and masters, journeymen, apprentices and soon also the rabble of casual labourers in the towns, no division of importance took place. In agriculture it was rendered difficult by the strip-system, beside which the cottage industry of the peasants themselves emerged. In industry there was no division of labour at all in the individual trades themselves, and very little between them. The separation of industry and commerce was found already in existence in older towns; in the newer it only developed later, when the towns entered into mutual relations. The grouping of larger territories into feudal kingdoms was a necessity for the landed nobility as for the towns. The organisation of the ruling class, the nobility, had, therefore, everywhere a monarch at its head.
October 26, 2025 at 1:06 AM
cmcdade.bsky.social
Big Brother Vous Regarde

Does the division of labor require the separation of the laborers from their produce and from each other?
Karl Marx. The German Ideology. 1845 Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook A. Idealism and Materialism [3. Production and Intercourse. Division of Labour and Forms of Property – Tribal, Ancient, Feudal] The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour and internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognised. But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has been carried. Each new productive force, insofar as it is not merely a quantitative extension of productive forces already known (for instance the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causes a further development of the division of labour. The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour. At the same time through the division of labour inside these various branches there develop various divisions among the individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These same conditions are to be seen (given a more developed intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one another. Continued under the second text image. Continued from the first text image. The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour. The first form of ownership is tribal [Stammeigentum] ownership. It corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage, agriculture. In the latter case it presupposes a great mass of uncultivated stretches of land. The division of labour is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labour existing in the family. The social structure is, therefore, limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains, below them the members of the tribe, finally slaves. The slavery latent in the family only develops gradually with the increase of population, the growth of wants, and with the extension of external relations, both of war and of barter. Continued under the third text image. Continued from the second text image. The second form is the ancient communal and State ownership which proceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest, and which is still accompanied by slavery. Beside communal ownership we already find movable, and later also immovable, private property developing, but as an abnormal form subordinate to communal ownership. The citizens hold power over their labouring slaves only in their community, and on this account alone, therefore, they are bound to the form of communal ownership. It is the communal private property which compels the active citizens to remain in this spontaneously derived form of association over against their slaves. For this reason the whole structure of society based on this communal ownership, and with it the power of the people, decays in the same measure as, in particular, immovable private property evolves. The division of labour is already more developed. We already find the antagonism of town and country; later the antagonism between those states which represent town interests and those which represent country interests, and inside the towns themselves the antagonism between industry and maritime commerce. The class relation between citizens and slaves is now completely developed. With the development of private property, we find here for the first time the same conditions which we shall find again, only on a more extensive scale, with modern private property. On the one hand, the concentration of private property, which began very early in Rome (as the Licinian agrarian law proves) and proceeded very rapidly from the time of the civil wars and especially under the Emperors; on the other hand, coupled with this, the transformation of the plebeian small peasantry into a proletariat, which, however, owing to its intermediate position between propertied citizens and slaves, never achieved an independent development. Continued under the fourth text image.
October 26, 2025 at 1:05 AM
cmcdade.bsky.social
"A district with two highways at its heart, in the middle of New York City. Beautiful." - The ghost of Robert Moses

At least the traffic jam at the GCP/BQE connector is well represented in Albany.
Map of New York State Assembly District 34 which is located in Queens, comprising most of the neighborhood of Jackson Heights, and parts of Corona, East Elmhurst and eastern and northern Astoria. (Words from Wikipedia, map from Ballotpedia.
October 20, 2025 at 1:33 PM