There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes “the practice of freedom,” the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. The development of an educational methodology that facilitates this process will inevitably lead to tension and conflict within our society. But it could also contribute to the formation of a new man…

Like a cyclone, imperialism spins across the globe; militarism crushes peoples and sucks their blood like a vampire. For capitalism, war and peace are business and nothing but business. As far as it’s concerned, the lives and wellbeing of the millions of men that constitute the proletariat of all countries are an object of exploitation and nothing but that. Capitalism is war; socialism is peace. —Karl Liebknecht, Where Will Peace Come From? (1912)

Go through the byways and alleys of that great city. Count the myriads starving; count the multiplied thousands who are homeless; number those who work harder than slaves and live on less and have fewer comforts than the meanest slaves. You will be dumbfounded by your discoveries, you who have paid no attention to these poor, save as objects of charity and commiseration. They are not objects of charity, they are the victims of the rank injustice that permeates the system of government, and of political economy that holds sway from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. —Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire (2004)

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. … In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes. ―Aldous Huxley

What is called “love” by the best thinkers who have approached the subject is the beating heart of communism. The love that we have been theorizing tends toward communism in every meaningful way, even if only in miniature. The love that we have been theorizing, which is neither a commodity nor a private property nor a corrupt “love” of only one’s self or one’s “own kind,” tends toward a humanizing sociality, toward the *Gemeinwesen* in and against a world of alienation. If we would speak of a politics of love, we would have to speak of a politics of insurgency against the order of exchange.

Industrial capitalism depended upon the exploitation and control of nature, with catastrophic consequences that we only now recognize. Surveillance capitalism, I have suggested, depends instead upon the exploitation and control of human nature. The market reduces us to our behavior, transformed into another fictional commodity and packaged for others’ consumption…

the pioneer surveillance capitalists at Google and Facebook evaded the disciplines of corporate governance and rejected the disciplines of democracy, protecting their claims with financial influence and political relationships. Finally, they benefited from history, born in a time when regulation was equated with tyranny and the state of exception precipitated by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 produced surveillance exceptionalism, further enabling the new market to root and flourish. Surveillance capitalists’ purposeful strategies and accidental gifts produced a form that can romance and beguile but is also ruthlessly efficient at extinguishing space for democratic deliberation, social debate, individual self determination, and the right to combat as it forecloses every path to exit.