
“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”
Source: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”
Source: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
“In capitalism, communists are always better”
As he said in Epsilon TV (12 May 2018)
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZIbFJPreBQ&t=1094s
Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 2, pg. 686.
(Buch I) (1867)
“I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.”
Unarmed Victory (1963), p. 14
1960s
1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)
Context: To my mind the failure resolutely to follow progressive policies is the negation of democracy as well of progress, and spells disaster. But for this very reason I feel concern when progressives act with heedless violence, or go so far and so fast as to invite reaction. The experience of John Brown illustrates the evil of the revolutionary short-cut to ultimate good ends. The liberty of the slave was desirable, but it was not to be brought about by a slave insurrection. The better distribution of property is desirable, but it is not to be brought about by the anarchic form of Socialism which would destroy all private capital and tend to destroy all private wealth. It represents not progress, but retrogression, to propose to destroy capital because the power of unrestrained capital is abused. John Brown rendered a great service to the cause of liberty in the earlier Kansas days; but his notion that the evils of slavery could be cured by a slave insurrection was a delusion analogous to the delusions of those who expect to cure the evils of plutocracy by arousing the baser passions of workingmen against the rich in an endeavor at violent industrial revolution. And, on the other hand, the brutal and shortsighted greed of those who profit by what is wrong in the present system, and the attitude of those who oppose all effort to do away with this wrong, serve in their turn as incitements to such revolution; just as the insolence of the ultra pro-slavery men finally precipitated the violent destruction of slavery.
Source: Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, 1955, p.40
Workers Councils (1947), Section 2.5
Žižek! (2005); as Žižek notes on p. 1 of Mapping Ideology (1994), the observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the earth than the end of capitalism was originally made by Fredric Jameson.