“While the concepts of natural science are thought abstractions, the economic concept of value is a real one. It exists nowhere other than in the human mind but it does not spring from it. Rather it is purely social in character, arising in the spatial-temporal sphere of human interactions. It is not people who originate these abstractions but their actions”

—Alfred Sohn-Rethel

“At this turn of his Life, Capt. Grant has discover’d in his own feckless Youth, a Source of pre-civiliz’d Sentiment useful to his Praxis of now and then pretending to be insane, thus deriving an Advantage over any unsure as to which side of Reason he may actually stand upon.”

Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“Class consciousness is the ‘ethics’ of the proletariat, the unity of its theory and its practice, the point at which the economic necessity of its struggle for liberation changes dialectically into freedom.”

Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness