Deborah Castillo
Marx Palimpsest, 2016, Site-specific installation, Bust courtesy of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU
Handwritten wall text: Social progress may be measured by the social position of the feminine sex. The worker needs respect more than bread. True socialism used to constitute, in this aspect, arms in the hands of governments. We want to suppress the miserable character, which forces the worker not to live. Communism does not deprive anyone the power to appropriate social products; the only thing it does not admit is the power to usurp through this appropriation someone else’s work. Workers do not have anything to lose except their chains. The state is the soul of a soulless world, because it is the spirit of the states of the soul that are lacking spirit. Religion is the opium of the masses. Of all social classes currently confronting the bourgeoisie, the proletariat is the only true revolutionary class. The regime of property has suffered constant changes, constant historical transformations. Therefore, what the worker appropriates through his activity is strictly what he needs to sustain his miserable existence and reproduce himself. The dominant ideas of one era have never been more than the ideas of the class that dominates. All of Marx’s conceptions are not a doctrine, but a method. The history of all societies up to the present day has been exclusively the history of class struggles. The modern bourgeoisie, erected on the ruins of feudal society, has not abolished the antagonisms between classes. The modern government is nothing but an administrative committee for the business of the bourgeois class. Public power, strictly speaking, is the organized power of one class for the oppression of the rest. The bourgeoise has ripped up the veil of sentimentality that used to cover up familial relationships and has reduced them to simple relationships of money. Industry has created the universal market, prepared by the discovery of America. Due to the rapid development of the instruments of production and the means of communication, the bourgeoise drags the current of civilization to the most barbarous nations. The worker falls into misery, and poverty grows more rapidly than the population and wealth. The bourgeoise is currently confronting the bourgeoisie to impose currently supreme law. The immediate objective of communists is the domination of political power. The distinguishing characteristic of communism is not the abolition of property. The needs and the means of communication and the means of communication of man and the means of communication absolutely do not pertain to reality. The struggle against religion and the means of communication is religion. Capital is not a personal force; it is a social force.
