“Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded, and deepened, only along the lines laid down by its founders.”

György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness

“The idea of a super Bretton Woods would be to cancel the obligation to convert into a capital account. This convertibility has, since the 1980s, represented the precondition of international market liberalization and the accumulation of global imbalances that repeatedly produced the financial crises of the last 30 years. Today even the IMF recognizes that this freedom of movement of capital significantly contributed to the destabilization of the system of commercial exchanges and international financial flows. However, the removal of the convertibility obligation into a capital account from the statuses of a hypothetical new IMF—that has its fundamental objective the reestablishment of the economic sovereignty of nations and the symmetry of exchange relations guaranteed by a supranational monetary system—would have the inevitable consequence of disabling the apparatus that ensured, although with an impressive accumulation of contradictions and financial drifts, the development and affirmation of biocapitalism.”

—Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism

“I found a very, very interesting mass of literature back on the sixteenth and seventeenth century, which economic historians have created, which is about what they called the fiscal military state. And it’s about the way in which debt, state debt in particular, and militarization kind of went together. And that’s how the wars were fought, and all rest of it: and what a crucial role this played in the dynamics and origins of capitalism, one that has been largely left unexamined. And out of this came this idea that, well, actually capitalism requires something that I called ‘a state-finance nexus,’ which is a sort of, some sort of configuration of state and capitalist power, which, working together, can actually orchestrate what needs to be orchestrated in terms of this relationship between debt accumulation and accumulation of wealth. It has some way to do that. And if you look historically, you find this begins to become apparent, particularly in British history, the formation at this debt-finance nexus.”

David Harvey, “The End of Capitalism”

“It may be that the problem is not that there will be too few psychiatrists for too many patients, but that there will be too few patients coming along in the next ten or twenty years.”

R. D. Laing, “The Obvious”