Two quotations: 1856 and 1955 (1955)

From the October 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the paradoxes of this century is that while a range of pleasures and diversions, unimagined by the wealthiest aristocrat a few generations ago, is now available to the ordinary man,, it gets more and more difficult to use them in the way pleasures should be used—impulsively. More and more of us possess beautiful new motor cats whose every line expresses the modern poetry of godlike, singing motion, of the marvellous escape from here, of the joyful ability to pierce the horizon-barrier and know the great earth. On some dreamlike Sunday afternoon, suddenly the whispering garden leaves and the bright innocent clouds invite us to rush, with the effortlessness of angels, out into the vast green landscape. And soon we are stuck behind an enormous thing with 84 wheels carrying a section of the Forth Bridge; we are hedged about by motor-cycle combinations containing identical families of one black-leather-coated man, one woman and one pale child; our dream dies among diesel fumes and brick suburbs.”—(Paul Jennings, Observer, 28/8/55).

“In our day, everything seems pregnant with its contrary; machinery, gifted with the wonderful-power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life and stultifying life into a material force. The antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.”— (“ Karl Marx, April 1856.)