Bertolt Brecht Quotes
There must always be some who are brighter and some who are stupider, the latter make up for it by being better workers.
Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children. Translated by John Willett, Methuen, 1980.
He was a strong opponent of communism (see {586209} and {586210}) but was also skeptical of unbridled capitalism.
This observation seems to have held for many centuries.
She was running for the Democratic Presidential Nomination.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
They lost. Sweden had a combination of a high standard of living, a very robust and effective social safety net and a high marginal income tax rate. For Swedes who do not work, life is far better than for employed people in most other countries. For those who work, they pay a large proportion of their earnings as taxes. So the very hard worker is left with comparatively little advantage over non workers. Conservatives have always warned that this is a formula for economic stagnation as few people will work. The reality in Sweden and a few other nations, is that the vast majority of the Swedes choose to work—but they work not to survive, but for reasons which range from interest in their work, the social interaction of the workplace, the desire to create things and make a difference in society. Even in America there are many who work who do not need the money and are motivated by non-monetary factors.
This was the prevailing view in Europe at the time; it was less so in the United States, where there were so many people who owned their own land and farmed it or developed manufacturing facilities and hence were the mind AND the limbs of the enterprises. However, the upper classes tended to agree with the European view. The difference between the American and European views was one of class mobility. In America “limbs” who demonstrated capacities of “mind” were much more able to advance in America. However, even into the 21st century here was a general feeling of the upper class that the “minds” made the critical and impactful decisions. This is one of the reasons that executive and CEO pay advanced so rapidly when compared with workers (the “linbs”).
The doctrine of the Southern Cotton industry before the Civil War was that Capital should not only use labor and control labor, but that in true capitalism, Capital should own labor—slavery. This Southern hostility towards labor rights and organized labor was derived from this extremist view of capitalism.
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a lifelong collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the so-called V-effect.
