Try QuoteGPT
Chat naturally about what you need. Each answer links back to real quotes with citations.
Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to re… - Curtis White
" "Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human interest. Thoreau's revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx's first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most human, which is to say most spiritual.
English
Collect this quote
About Curtis White
Curtis White is an American essayist and author. He serves as professor of English at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and as President of the Board of Directors of the Center for Book Culture.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Curtis White
Limited Time Offer
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.
Although the '60s counterculture has been much maligned and discredited, it attempted to provide what we still desperately need: a spirited culture of refusal, a counter-life to the reigning corporate culture of death. We don't need to return to that counterculture, but we do need to take up its challenge again. If the work we do produces mostly bad, ugly, and destructive things, those things in turn will tend to re-create us in their image. We need to turn to good, useful, and beautiful work. We need to ask, as Thoreau and Ruskin did, What are the life-giving things? Such important questions are answered for us in the present by the corporate state, while we are left with the most trivial decisions: what programs to watch on TV and what model car to buy.
Loading...