jews-from-austria

"Doctrinaire formula-worship, that is our real enemy."

"Both the peacock and the chicken passed through [Mesopotamia] on their way westward[;] the Sumerians called the chicken ‘ the bird from Meluhha’ and the Syrians called it the ‘Akkadian bird’."

"In spite of my admiration for , I myself left his seminar and even his private circle, to which I had been admitted. I was the youngest in age in the , but I was disappointed that these gatherings could not give me guidance for my work in number theory. Had I realized what Gödel would achieve later, I would not have run away. For Gödel's results show that logic is not a subject that stands alone and is a basis for mathematical thinking; it is in fact part of mathematics."

"The work at school was really not that difficult if one applied oneself to it, but it was so uninteresting that you could not wish to apply yourself. I felt there was another mathematics. I later found that the yearning for and the satisfaction gained from mathematical inslight brings the subject near to art. While talent is undoubtedly needed by itself, it does not always make a person a mathematician. Yet most people who go into mathematics do it because they are know they are good at it. When their talent slowly declines they find themselves occasionally quite lost. This happens to some people at an early age. But what are they to do then?"

"Olga Taussky is remembered by many for her lectures. One was 's in 1981; this had a special resonance, for she had known Emmy Noether both at Göttingen and at Bryn Mawr. Others remember Olga as author of some beautiful research papers, as teacher, as collaborator, and someone whose zest for mathematics was deeply felt and contagious. The field she is most identified with—which might be called "linear algebra and applications," though "real and complex matrix theory" would be preferred by some—did not have autonomous existence in the 1930s, despite the textbook by . Her service in that field is the very highest, as was palpable in the standing ovation after her survey talk at the second Raleigh conference."

"Stalin’s direct appeal to proletarian instincts, begun in the 1923 fight against Trotsky, was continued and amplified into a new manipulatory device which developed to its full flower during the dekulakization period of the 1928-1929."

"After the Russian-German pact of 1939 divided Poland, almost one million Poles were deported by the w: NKVD to Siberia, and another million by the w:Gestapo to forced labor in Poland and Germany… Mass deportation was an important accomplishment to the russification of East Prussia, the Baltic states, the Balkans."

"In 1923, Stalin’s terrorist subduing of the revolting Georgians contributed substantially to Lenin’s break with him."

"A nationalized industry, or partially nationalized industry, can be integrated into a classic capitalist economy without breaking it contour. What decides the character of nationalized economy is the relation between man and man, is whether the working class has the key role in its control. Without a fundamental change in the class structure, nationalization alone equals not socialism but state capitalism. Under state capitalism the exploitation of the worker continues and can even be intensified."

"When the Russian famine reached its peak in 1932-1933, most of the peasantry had been Collectivized, either in the forced-labor camps or on the collective farms. On the kolkhoz, the peasant had, exactly as before the revolution, a small plot of his own, not quite sufficient to feed himself and his family adequately; but the major portion of his labor power was forcibly directed into cultivating the land of his masters. Terror, from a weapon in the class war, had become the motive power of a new type of economy."

"Russian policy had to be redefined in a new world setting, and the principal factor to be taken into account was the hostility of the Russian peasant. The w:New Economic Policy had broken the straightjacket of w:War Communism, but the market did not begin to function spontaneously. The revolution had broken the connections between industry and the village, and new ones were not easily built up."

"The Bolsheviks were able to take power in 1917 in spite of their numerical insignificance not because they had fashioned a fool-proof coup d’état but because they advanced on the crest of a revolutionary peasant wave, which in the hinterland had carried out revolutionary slogans months before they were taken over by the Bolsheviks. At the head of this vast peasant mass, the Bolsheviks were enabled, in the first phrase, to overcome the resistance of large urban groups and, later, when foreign intervention and the regrouping of the White forces had reduced Soviet Russia to the Grand Principality of Moscow, to overcoming all counter-revolutionary attempts and throw the invaders back to the borders of the country."

"The content of the struggle between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks embraced every aspect of the change that a revolution would bring about. The Mensheviks insisted that social conditions in Russia were not ripe for socialism and that their task was to lead a democratic bourgeois revolution against Tsarist autocracy; and Lenin, contrary to Leninism as later fabricated, agreed fully with his Menshevik adversaries that it would be folly to hope that from the starting point of overthrowing feudal Tsarism a socialist society could be realized in Russia."

"You cry out against Jewish capital, gentlemen? Whoever condemns Jewish capital, gentlemen, is already engaged in the class struggle, even though he does not realize it. You are against Jewish capital and want to eliminate the stock manipulators. This is right. Trample the Jewish capitalists under foot, hang them on the lamp post and stamp them out. But what do you want to do with the big capitalists, the Klöckners, Stinnes...?"

"The anti-Nazi camp also was split down the middle, split by an ax wielded by Stalin—an ax called social fascism—by which the Communist half of the anti-Nazi camp was made into the silent ally of Hitler."

"States the self may expand far beyond the borders of the individual, or it may shrink and become identical with a single one of his actions or aims."

"The creative individual, whether in art or science, is less psychologically separated from his surroundings than the non-creative one; the "I-you" barrier is not as clearly defined."

"The antithesis to narcissism is not the object relation but object love."

"The self in the psychoanalytic sense is variable and by no means coextensive with the limits of the personality as assessed by an observer of the social field."

"When the production process demands less work and distributes less and less wages, it gradually becomes obvious that the right to an income can no longer be reserved for those who have a job; nor, most importantly, can the level of incomes be made to depend on the quantity of work furnished by each person. Hence the idea of guaranteeing an income to every citizen which is not linked to work, or the quantity of work done."

"The necessity -from a technical point of view - for control and, consequently, for domination, can be overcome without too much difficulty in small and medium-sized enterprises; it cannot be overcome in large enterprises except by effecting changes which are all the more difficult to implement since they affect both the enterprise's hierarchical structure and its technical (and spatial) organization. William F. Whyte provides a number of examples to show that organizations can be modified so that workers enjoy their work, espouse the aims of the enterprise and mobilize the reserves of productivity and skill they usually keep to themselves. The success of this kind of reorganization necessarily presupposes, first, a relationship of between and organized labour, second, recognition of the workers' ability to organize themselves, take the initiative and participate in , and third, financial involvement of the workers in the results of their labour. Sooner or later, however, this policy of 'participation' or co-management - of which the Scanlon Plan was one of the best example; and one in advance of the 'quality circles' of thirty years later -meets with the following difficulty: for job security to be guaranteed, the volume of sales must increase at the same rate as the productivity of labour. A duly motivated , however, can achieve staggering increases in: productivity (increases of 20 per cent per annum over a period of several years in the examples cited by Whyte). The volume of sales, however, cannot continue to increase at such a rate. The point inevitably comes when management decides to reduce the workforce in order to reduce costs, thus regaining sole ownership of the enterprise's decision-making power. The 'partnership' of labour and capital is thus destroyed at one fell swoop; the workers realize their co-operation with the management has been a swindle; and antagonistic class relations are re-established."

"A system of co-operation between workers and management cannot survive, therefore, unless management effectively guarantees its employees job security, by which I mean employment for life. It is on this condition alone that there can be social integration on the Japanese model within the enterprise. Yet large Japanese firms are only able to guarantee their employees jobs for life by out the manufacturing and services which they, as , have no vital interest in undertaking themselves, to a vast network of satellite companies. These subcontracting enterprises cushion the parent company from fluctuations in economic conditions: they employ and dismiss their workers according to changes in demand, and the fact that their employees often have no union or whatsoever means this can be accomplished with great speed. Job security in the parent companies is matched by unstable employment and social insecurity throughout the rest of the economy. Employment for life and are privileges reserved for an elite (about 25 per cent of Japanese employees in 1987, a figure which is decreasing markedly as older workers are encouraged to retire early and are not replaced). They are only compatible with economic rationality within the framework of a dual society. This social division (or 'dualization') has been the dominant characteristic of all the industrialized societies since the mid seventies."

"This revaluation of the image of the worker rests, on the part of the employers, on a rational calculation: it is not only a question of winning. the loyalty of an elite of workers they cannot do without and integrating them into the enterprise; it also means cutting this elite off from its class of origin and from class organizations, by giving it a different social identity and a different sense of social worth. In a society cut in two ('dualized'), this elite necessarily belongs to the world of 'the fighters and winners' who deserve a different status from the work-shy masses. The members of this elite of workers will therefore be encouraged to form their own independent trade unions and their own forms of social insurance, co-financed by the enterprises in which they work. At the same time, the employers will have limited the ability of this elite to bargain or fight trade-union struggles, by isolating it and stressing its privileges: its members have been chosen from among a very large number of applicants; they enjoy job security, a steady income and the kind of work and possibilities of promotion that are envied by all. And above all they owe their status to the fact that they are, professionally, the most capable; economically, the most productive; and, individually, the most hard-working. Insofar as it corresponds in large part to the ideal of the sovereign, multi-skilled worker of the utopia of work, the employers' discourse and the strategy concealed within it, have brought about the most serious crisis in the history of the trade-union movement. If, as is the case in West Germany, trade-union organization derives its strength from its roots in the ranks of the skilled workers, the threat exists that it will rapidly degenerate into neo-corporatism. If, on the other hand, trade unionism is particularly strong among semi-skilled workers - as is the case in Italy where until recently there was practically no foreign workforce and where semi-skilled workers owe their job security to their trade-union organization -then the unions find themselves in the dangerous position of having strong support among a declining category of workers and weak backing from the two categories which are in rapid expansion: the mass of temporary workers, which is expanding but difficult to organize, the unemployed and 'odd jobbers'; and the new elite of 'reprofessionalized' workers, characterized by a marked tendency to defend their own specific interests by forming company unions or small craft unions."

"Enterprises are adopting a strategy of flexible response on two levels simultaneously: the firm's stable core of employees must be functionally flexible; the peripheral workforce, for its part, must be numerically flexible. In other words, 'around a core of stable workers with a wide range of skills, there is a fluctuating, peripheral workforce with a more restricted range of more basic skills, who are dependent on the chance play of economic forces. The stable core must accept occupational mobility, both in the short term (changing their positions and acquiring new skills) and in the long term (retraining and modifyi~g their career plans), in exchange for job security. Their skills are essentially company skills provided, enhanced and perfected by the firm by means of a process of continuous in-house training. The firm therefore relies heavily on the employees it has trained, and vice versa."

"The ideology of work and the ethics of effort therefore become cover for ultra-competitive egoism and careerism: the best succeed, the others have only themselves to blame; hard work should be encouraged and rewarded, which therefore means we should not subsidize the unemployed, the poor and all the other 'layabouts'. This ideology (which in Europe finds its most overt expression in Thatcherism) is strictly rational, as far as capitalism is concerned: the aim to motivate a workforce which cannot easily be replaced (for the moment, at least) and control it ideologically for want of a means of controlling it physically. In order to do this, it must preserve the work-force's adherence to the work ethic, destroy the relations of solidarity that could bind it to the less fortunate, and persuade it that by doing as much work as possible it will best serve the collective interest as well as its own private interests. It will thus be necessary to conceal the fact that. there is an increasing structural glut of workers and an increasing structural shortage of secure, full-time jobs; in short, that the economy no longer needs everyone to work - and will do so less and less. And that; as a consequence, the 'society of work' is obsolete: work can no longer serve as the basis for social integration. But, to conceal these facts it is necessary to find alternative explanations for the rise in unemployment" and the decrease in job security. It will thus be asserted that casual labourers and the unemployed are not serious about looking for work; do not possess adequate skills, are encouraged to be idle by over~ generous dole payments and so on. And, it will be added, these people are all paid far too much for the little they are able to do, with the result that the economy, which is groaning under the weight of these excessive burdens, is no longer buoyant enough to create a growing number of jobs. And the conclusion will be reached that, 'To end unemployment, we have to work more.'"

"At the very point when a privileged fraction of the working class seems to be in a position to acquire multiple skills, to achieve workplace autonomy and continually widen their capacities for action - all of which are things that were ideals of the worker self-management currents within the labour movement - the meaning of this ideal is thus radically altered by the conditions in which it seems destined to be fulfilled. It is not the working class which is achieving these possibilities of self-organization and increasing technological power; it is a small core of privileged workers who are integrated into new-style enterprises at the expense of a mass of people who are marginalized and whose job security is destroyed -people shunted from one form of occasional, unrewarding and uninteresting employment to another, who are often reduced to competing for the privilege of selling personal services (including shoe-shining and house-cleaning) to those who retain a secure income."

"The image of the enterprise as a place where employees can achieve personal fulfilment is therefore an essentially ideological invention. It conceals the real transformations that have taken place, namely that enterprises are replacing labour by machines, producing more and better with a decreasing percentage of the workforce previously employed, and offering privileges to a chosen elite of workers, which are accompanied by unemployment, precarious employment, de-skilling and lack of job security for the majority. The advance of technology has thus resulted in the segmentation and disintegration of the working class. An elite has been won over to collaboration with capital in the name of work ethic; the great mass of workers have become marginalized or lost their job security and serve as a reserve army for industry which wishes to be able to adjust its workforce rapidly according to fluctuations in demand."

"Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one's fellow man was experienced. as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules."

"If one speaks about torture, one must take care not to exaggerate."

"It would be totally senseless to try to describe here the pain that was inflicted on me. Was it 'like a red-hot iron in my shoulders,' and was another 'like a dull wooden stake that had been driven into the back of my head'? One comparison would only stand for the other, and in the end we would be hoaxed by turn on the hopeless merry-go-round of figurative speech. The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing to say. Qualities of feeling are as incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limit of the capacity of language to communicate. If someone wanted to impart his physical pain, he would have to inflict it and thereby become a torturer himself."

"... nowhere else in the world did reality have as much effective power as in the camp, nowhere else was reality so real. In no other place did the attempt to transcend it prove so hopeless and so shoddy."

"Well, hardly ever. Unless the individual happens to be oneself. The Sunday Timess list ends with one living relic. On the face of it, the appearance of the name Carl Djerassi is patently ridiculous by any criterion but one: as a surrogate for the Pill."

"... I got to writing poetry out of revenge — self-pity and revenge."

"The list was heavily skewed in favor of science and technology. ..."

"In the final analysis, in science, unlike art, the individual hardly matters."

"In the cover story of its 12 September 1999 issue, the London Sunday Times Magazine featured the Top Thirty persons of the present millennium. ..."

"Dabei ist grad der Staat das größte Übel, das alle Menschen seit Jahrhunderten versaut; und jeder einzelne von uns ist nur ein Dübel, in den der Staat den Nagel seiner Allmacht haut."

"Gott denkt in den Genies, träumt in den Dichtern und schläft in den übrigen Menschen."

"Men learned to speak in order to understand one another. Cultural languages have lost the ability to help men to advance beyond the most rudimentary level and attain understanding. It seems that the time has come to learn to be silent once again."

"By determining law — so far as it is the subject of a specific science of law — as norm, it is delimited against nature; and science of law against natural science. But in addition to legal norms, there are other norms regulating the behavior of men to each other, that is, social norms; and the science of law is therefore not the only discipline directed toward the cognition and description of social norms. There other social norms may be called “morals.” and the discipline directed toward their cognition and description, “ethics.” So far as justice is a postulate of morals, the relationship between justice and law is included in the relationship between morals and law."

"It is called a “pure” theory of law, because it only describes the law and attempts to eliminate from the object of this description everything that is not strictly law: Its aim is to free the science of law from alien elements. This is the methodological basis of the theory."

"The characterization of Kelsen’s pure theory of law as an ideology is here not meant as a reproach, though its defenders are bound to regard it as such. Since every social order rests on an ideology, every statement of the criteria by which we can determine what is appropriate law in such an order must also be an ideology. The only reason why it is important to show that this is also true of the pure theory of law is that its author prides himself on being able to ‘unmask’ all other theories of law as ideologies and to have provided the only theory which is not an ideology. This Ideolologie-kritik is even regarded by some of his disciples as one of Kelsen’s greatest achievements. Yet, since every cultural order can be maintained only by an ideology, Kelsen succeeds only in replacing one ideology with another that postulates that all orders maintained by force are orders of the same kind, deserving the description (and dignity) of an order of law, the term which before was used to describe a particular kind of order valued because it secured individual freedom. Though within his system of thought his assertion is tautologically true, he has no right to assert, as he constantly does, that other statements in which, as he knows, the term ‘law’ is used in a different sense, are not true. What ‘law’ is to mean we can ascertain only from what those who used the word in shaping our social order intended it to mean, not by attaching to it some meaning which covers all the uses ever made of it. Those men certainly did not mean by law, as Kelsen does, any ‘social technique’ which employs force, but used it in order to distinguish a particular ‘social technique’, a particular kind of restraint on the use of force, which by the designation of law they tried to distinguish from others. The use of enforceable generic rules in order to induce the formation of a self-maintaining order and the direction of an organization by command towards particular purposes are certainly not the same ‘social techniques’. And if, because of accidental historical developments, the term ‘law’ has come to be used in connection with both these different techniques, it should certainly not be the aim of analysis to add to the confusion by insisting that these different uses of the word must be brought under the same definition."

"Justice is primarily a possible, but not a necessary, quality of a social order regulating the mutual relations of men. Only secondarily it is a virtue of man, since a man is just, if his behavior conforms to the norms of a social order supposed to be just. But what does it really mean to say that a social order is just? It means that this order regulates the behavior of men in a way satisfactory to all men, that is to say, so that all men find their happiness in it. The longing for justice is men's eternal longing for happiness. It is happiness that men cannot find alone, as an isolated individual, and hence seeks in society. Justice is social happiness. It is happiness guaranteed by a social order."

"Law is an order of human behavior. An “order” is a system of rules. Law is not, as it is sometimes said, a rule. It is a set of rules having the kind of unity we understand by a system. It is impossible to grasp the nature of law if we limit our attention to the single isolated rule."

"One of the most important elements of Christian religion is the idea that justice is an essential quality of God. Since God is the absolute, his justice must be absolute justice, that is to say, eternal and unchangeable. Only a religion whose deity is supposed to be just can play a role in social life. To attribute justice to the deity in order to make religion applicable to human relations implies a certain tendency of rationalizing something which, by its very nature, is irrational-the transcendental being, the religious authority, and its absolute qualities."

"The mark of Platonic philosophy is a radical dualism. The Platonic world is not one of unity; and the abyss which in many ways results from this bifurcation appears in innumerable forms. It is not one, but two worlds, which Plato sees when with the eyes of his soul he envisages a transcendent, spaceless, and timeless realm of the Idea, the thing-in-itself, the true, absolute reality of tranquil being, and when to this transcendent realm he opposes the spacetime sphere of his sensuous perception-a sphere of becoming in motion, which he considers to be only a domain of illusory semblance, a realm which in reality is not-being."

"Feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother."

"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. … For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.""

"If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death."

"There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life."