socialism

"When women took to their piazzas and fields in Sicily in 1892–94, they focused their anger on those who directly challenged their ability to subsist. Many considered the nation-state, large landholders, and those priests who were allied with such interests to be the most egregious off enders. After the Italian nation was formed in 1861, many members of the urban bourgeoisie and middle classes supported the national project, but most of the poor actively revolted against it. For the vast majority of Italy’s residents—the peasantry—the new state meant excessive taxation, forced conscription, dispossession from land, widespread poverty, police brutality, and government repression."

"Local economies gave shape to women’s protests, whether they were based in subsistence agriculture, market cultivation, or large wheat estates. The tactics of striking and land occupation, for example, were more common in towns dominated by large-scale agriculture and industry. Tax protests typically occurred in places that were market- oriented. Because of this, the movement differed depending on the locale, leading the fasci to function in multiple ways—as mutual aid societies, trade unions, agricultural cooperatives, and political parties. In each of these towns, however, the fasci included the majority of residents. They might have developed in a single neighborhood but very quickly branched outward."

"The French writer, Albert Camus, once lamented that "man eventually becomes accustomed to everything". I have always believed that this is an unjustly pessimistic view of our human condition; and in recent weeks I have seen enough to convince me that Camus, on this point at least, was wrong: 30,000 East Germans abandoning home, friends, jobs, everything, to escape to a new life of opportunity but also uncertainty in the West; thousands of Soviet miners striking not for more pay, but for better supplies; the joy of Poles as they greet their first non-Communist Prime Minister in 40 years; over a million inhabitants of the Baltic states forming a human chain to protest against the forced annexation of their nations; demonstrators in Prague braving the security forces to mark the 21st anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion; or in Leipzig calling for freedom of speech. Clearly the peoples of the East have not become accustomed to their lot. Totalitarian rule has not made people less attracted by freedom, democracy and self-determination. The opposite is true. Nor has it made them incapable of exercising these values through political organization and self-expression: look at the debates in the new Congress of the People's Deputies, the activities of the popular fronts, Solidarity in Poland or the opposition parties in Hungary. The demand for pluralism and reform can now be heard in every Eastern nation."

"A persuasive way of understanding the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is to think of nineteenth- or twentieth-century slum clearance. For in many respects the Soviet Empire was a slum of continental proportions. Beyond the grotesque architectural assertions of an alien ideology, public housing – almost all housing – consisted of anomic and primitive concrete barracks where the smells of cabbage, damp and low-grade tobacco combined. Rivers and lakes were polluted by chemicals, with the Pleisse river in East Germany alternately turning first red then yellow."

"I find it difficult to say whether the leadership's 'second echelon' could have preserved the German Democratic Republic. Helmut Kohl later told me he had never believed that Egon Krenz was capable of getting the situation under control. I do not know - we are all wiser after the event, as the saying goes. For my part, I must admit I briefly had a faint hope that the new leaders would be able to change the course of events by establishing a new type of relations between the two German states - based on radical domestic reforms in East Germany."

"During the Cold War, while West Germans were confronting their Nazi past, East Germans were avoiding it. The Communist state of East Germany managed to detach itself from all connection to or responsibility for the Nazi period. Hitler and the Nazis were said to represent the final stage of capitalism. It was they who had started the war and they who had killed millions of Jews and other Europeans. East Germany was socialist and progressive and had always stood side by side with the Soviet Union against fascism. Indeed, a significant number of East Germans grew up thinking their country had fought on the Soviet side in World War II. Although the East German regime made memorials of three of the concentration camps, the only deaths remembered were those of Communists; Jews and Gypsies were not mentioned."

"In their native countries, Roosevelt and Churchill are regarded as examples of wise statesmen. But we, during our jail conversations, were astonished by their constant shortsightedness and even stupidity. How could they, retreating gradually from 1941 to 1945, leave Eastern Europe without any guarantees of independence? How could they abandon the large territories of Saxony and Thuringia in return for such a ridiculous toy as the four-zoned Berlin that, moreover, was later to become their Achille’s heel? And what kind of military or political purpose did they see in giving away hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens (who were unwilling to surrender, whatever the terms) for Stalin to have them killed? It is said that by doing this, that they secured the imminent participation of Stalin in the war against Japan. Already armed with the Atomic bomb, they did pay for Stalin so that he wouldn’t refuse to occupy Manchuria to help Mao Zedong to gain power in China and Kim Il Sung, to get half of Korea!… Oh, misery of political calculation! When later Mikolajczyk was expelled, when the end of Beneš and Masaryk came, Berlin was blocked, Budapest was in flames and turned silent, when ruins fumed in Korea and when the conservatives fled from Suez – didn’t really some of those who had a better memory, recall for instance the episode of giving away the Cossacks?"

"East Germany ranked higher among the world’s economies than South Korea does today, and was able to make some claim to superiority over the Federal Republic on socialist grounds. The Wall came down anyway."

"If the Soviet zone, after the initial chaos, for a while seemed to work better than the west, this was due not so much to Stalin as to Red Army administrators and the German Communists who had come back with them. They were more than ready to take over the centralized planning systems that had existed in Nazi Germany and to rely on them in order to get basic infrastructure and production going wherever possible. After a while former Nazi officials at the lower levels—those the Soviets decided not to put on trial—also found it remarkably easy to collaborate; the Communist ideas of planning were not, after all, that different from those of their former masters. Publicly, however, the new east German authorities held high the banner of anti-Fascism. They were the “good Germans”; the bad Germans, plenty of them, were all collaborating in the western occupation zones, or so German Communist propaganda claimed. Many Left-wing Germans fell for the disinformation, especially intellectuals and artists, some of whom moved east, including top names in German literature like Stefan Heym and Bertolt Brecht, who both moved there from wartime exile in the United States. In the spring of 1946 the Soviets and the German Communists forced the Social Democrats in the east into a Socialist Unity Party (SED), in which the Communists under Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht had full control. Again, some non- Communist Left-wingers joined enthusiastically, believing that they thereby made up for the failure of the German Left to cooperate against Hitler in the 1930s. Most Social Democrats were made of sterner stuff, however, and fought to keep their party separate, even if it meant relocating to the western occupation zones. Still, the SED scored enough successes for Stalin to be convinced that there would be a future for Soviet political influence in a united Germany."

"East Germany, apparently the most successful Communist regime, although with its economy wrecked by ideological mismanagement, was on the edge of bankruptcy in the autumn of 1989. It had only been able to continue that long thanks to large loans from the West, notably West Germany. As a sign of good relations, Erich Honecker paid an official visit to West Germany in 1987. However, the East German government could no longer finance its social programmes. Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, to which Honecker reacted critically, intensified the regime’s loss of legitimacy and, by September, East German society was dissolving as people, especially the younger generation, left in large numbers. Hungary’s opening of its Austrian border on 2 May had permitted substantial numbers of East Germans to leave for West Germany via Hungary and Austria. They abandoned not only economic failure but also the lack of modern civilisation in the shape of free expression, tolerance, opportunity and cultural vitality. Hungary refused to heed pressure from East Germany to stem the tide of departures, and Gorbachev was unwilling to help. In the first nine months of the year, 110,000 East Germans resettled in West Germany. Others took part in mass demonstrations in East Germany, notably in the major city of Leipzig from 4 September, with steadily larger numbers demonstrating. A sense of failure and emptiness demoralised supporters of the regime, while West German consumerist democracy, and what had been pejoratively termed the fetishism of ‘things’, proved far more attractive to the bulk of the population. The repressive state, moreover, no longer terrified. Indeed, it had suffered a massive failure of intelligence, with a serious inability to understand developments, let alone to anticipate them. All its intercepted letters and spying availed the Stasi naught. In addition, the situation was very different to that when East Germany had faced disturbances in 1953 and 1961: unwilling to compromise its domestic and international reputation, the regime did not wish to rely on force. The old ruthlessness was no longer there: the Leninist instinct for survival had been lost. The East German army anyway was unwilling to act. Moreover, the nature of the demonstrations – both peaceful and without central leadership – lessened the opportunity for repression; not that that had stopped the Chinese authorities earlier in the year."

"The authorities in the German Democratic Republic kept an even more rigid control over their people than was achieved by Hoxha in Albania, whose mountainous terrain and village traditions made things difficult for the central state authorities. Walter Ulbricht aimed to turn his state into a model of contemporary communism. It was his constant pestering that pushed the Soviet Presidium into sanctioning the building of the Berlin Wall. Competition was joined with West Germany to raise the quality of material and social life, and Ulbricht constantly claimed that the German Democratic Republic was winning. In 1963 he introduced a New Economic System which provided enterprises and their managers with somewhat wider powers outside central planning control. Output rose but never as quickly as in West Germany. Although people were better off than previously, Ulbricht’s unpopularity deepened. His ideological rigidity made even Brezhnev appear flexible. No one could forget that he bore responsibility for stopping people from meeting their relatives in the West. He was fired in May 1971, utterly convinced of the correctness of his policies to the very end. His successor Erich Honecker was only marginally less gloomy. Political presentation was made somewhat livelier but the basic policies remained the same. Far from being a workers’ paradise, the German Democratic Republic was eastern Europe’s most efficient police state."

"An attempt is being made by the Russians in Berlin to build up a quasi-Communist party in their zone of Occupied Germany by showing special favors to groups of left-wing German leaders. At the end of the fighting last June, the American and British Armies withdrew westwards, in accordance with an earlier agreement, to a depth at some points of 150 miles upon a front of nearly four hundred miles, in order to allow our Russian allies to occupy this vast expanse of territory which the Western Democracies had conquered. If now the Soviet Government tries, by separate action, to build up a pro-Communist Germany in their areas, this will cause new serious difficulties in the British and American zones, and will give the defeated Germans the power of putting themselves up to auction between the Soviets and the Western Democracies. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from these facts - and facts they are - this is certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace."

"It seems to me that certain definite patterns are emerging from the situation in East Germany and the Eastern European satellite countries--patterns which will unquestionably have a profound effect upon the future, including the proposed meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Four Powers. I think, therefore, that it will be useful for me to share my thoughts with you in some detail at this time. Great historical developments, such as the recent Berlin and East German anti-Communist demonstrations, rarely have single roots. Nevertheless, I am quite certain that future historians, in their analysis of the causes which will have brought about the disintegration of the Communist Empire, will single out those brave East Germans who dared to rise against the cannons of tyranny with nothing but their bare hands and their stout hearts, as a root cause. I think also that those same historians will record your own extraordinary steadfastness in the cause of European peace and freedom over many, many years."

"The creation of two German states, an event unforeseen at Tehran, Yalta, or even at Potsdam, was a signal Cold War phenomenon. Foreshadowed by the dual occupation of Korea, Germany’s partition in 1949 combined both real and symbolic elements as a means of stabilizing Central Europe as well as a punishment for the Nazis’ crimes. Four-power occupation had worked in Austria—thanks to the smaller strategic stakes, a moderate socialist government, and the Allies’ Tehran decision to treat this country gently as “Hitler’s first victim”—and the country remained intact. In the more populous, resource-rich Germany, which lacked a central government, the occupiers were able to dominate the revival of local politics. East Germany became the first “workers’ and peasants’ state on German soil,” and West Germany a liberal, robustly capitalist state. Both regimes represented not only a renunciation of the Nazi past but also the revitalization of two opposing political traditions—Marxism and liberalism—each claiming redemptive power over Germany and Europe’s future and each mirroring the Cold War itself."

"To my mind, imperialism is something very simple and clear and it exists as a fact when one country, a large country, seizes a certain strip of territory and subjects to its laws a certain number of men and women against their will. Soviet policy after the beginning of the second world war was precisely this. There is no difficulty in pointing this out, but the difficulty lies in the fact that when one quotes from memory one will forget one or other argument. Because the Russians, thanks to the second world war, have quite simply annexed the three Baltic States, taken a piece of Finland, a piece of Rumania, a piece of Poland, a piece of Germany and, thanks to a well thought-out policy composed of internal subversion and external pressure, have established Governments justifiably styled as Satellites, in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Tirana and East Berlin - I except Belgrade where the regime is unique thanks to the energy and courage of Marshal Tito. If all this does not constitute manifestations of imperialism, if all this is not the result of a policy consciously willed and consciously pursued, an imperialist aim, then indeed we shall have to start to go back to a new discussion and a new definition of words."

"The example of East Germany exerts a far greater cautionary effect on the North Koreans than Qaddafi’s fate does. The Honecker regime took what Americans and South Koreans keep recommending to North Korea as the “pragmatic” way out of its problems: It began opening up to the West, quasi-formally recognized the rival coethnic state’s right to exist, and focused on improving its own citizens’ standard of living. We all know how that ended."

"The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies -- West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam -- it is the democratic countries what are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people. And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving."

"An app with the basic functionality of UberX can be duplicated and improved upon by independent developers who are working in tandem with cooperatives... Why bother handing over the revenue to Uber, the middleman? Lyft and Uber have serious issues with attrition; the pay rates for drivers can (and have been) lowered from one moment to the next, workplace surveillance is constant, and drivers can be “de– activated” (fired) at any time for digressions as small as criticizing the Uber mothership on Twitter...Worker-owned cooperatives can offer an alternative model of social organization to address financial instability. They will need to be: -collectively owned, -democratically controlled businesses, -with a mission to anchor jobs, -offer health insurance and pension funds and, -a degree of dignity."

"There isn’t just one, inevitable future of work. Let us apply the power of our technological imagination to practice forms of cooperation and collaboration. Worker–owned cooperatives could design their own apps-based platforms, fostering truly peer-to-peer ways of providing services and things, and speak truth to the new platform capitalists.. Companies like Uber and airbnb are enjoying their Andy Warhol moment, their $15 billion of fame, in the absence of any physical infrastructure of their own. They didn’t build that— they are running on your car, apartment, labor, and importantly, time. Think Outside the Boss. Instead of counting down to next month’s apocalypse, let’s make the idea of worker-owned cooperatives using ride ordering apps more plausible... Is real social change only thinkable if you have Big Money on your side? ...The inability to imagine a different life is capital’s ultimate triumph. Teachout recently proposed that one of the pathologies of the current system is that it trains people to be followers. I might add that it trains people to think of themselves as workers instead of collective owners..."

"Publix Super Markets, which operates in the Southeast, and W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, are owned by employee stock ownership plans. America still harbors small worker cooperatives owned and operated by their employees, such as the Cheese Board Collective in my hometown Berkeley, Calif. But since the 1980s, profit-sharing has almost disappeared from large corporations. That’s largely because of a change in the American corporation that began with a wave of hostile takeovers and corporate restructurings in the 1980s. Raiders like Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken targeted companies they thought could deliver higher returns if their costs were cut. Since payrolls were the highest cost, raiders set about firing workers, cutting pay, automating as many jobs as possible, fighting unions, moving jobs to states with lower labor costs and outsourcing jobs abroad. To prevent being taken over, C.E.O.s began doing the same. This marked the end of most profit-sharing with workers."

"It’s no wonder, then, that Uber drivers in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and elsewhere have protested... upset about their industry being disrupted (a term the tech world loves) by a company offering low wages, stripping away worker protections, and bypassing regulations – all while stuffing the wallets of Silicon Valley executives.... As sharing activist Mira Luna puts it, “If greed was a major characteristic of the dying economy, sharing is a key element of the blueprint or DNA for the new economy.”...people should be able to use a service like AirBnB or Uber. But they should also own them cooperatively. A cooperative is a business or organization that is democratically owned and governed by its membership. This membership can be comprised of workers, consumers, producers, and a combination thereof... Cooperatives exist all around world, as well as in almost every sector. In the bad times, members of cooperatives collectively share the burden. In the good times, members of cooperatives collectively share the benefits. They also democratically govern the organization – one member, one share, one vote. In short, cooperatives are means to voluntarily redistribute the wealth amongst the laborers and the producers... Already, cooperatives are breaking into the domain of the sharing economy – in theory and in practice – and many of the people leading the charge are those dissatisfied with what both the traditional economy and the sharing economy had to offer them."

"Young Democratic Socialists of America is the youth and student section of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a national organization of recognized campus chapters and several hundred activists. We are students organizing in our universities, colleges, and high schools to fight for the immediate needs of workers and students while building our capacity to fight for more radical and structural changes. We work with labor campaigns to organize student workers of staff. We organize to defend immigrants through campaigns for sanctuary campuses. We campaign to divest our schools from fossil fuels. We do anti-poverty work through local mutual aid programs in our communities, and much much more."

"In the long run democratic socialists want to end capitalism... by pursuing a reform agenda today in an effort to revive a politics focused on class hierarchy and inequality... The eventual goal is to transform the world to promote everyone’s needs rather than to produce massive profits for a small handful of citizens. When democratic socialists choose reforms to rally behind, we favor battles with the potential to transform ordinary people’s lives for the better and teach millions of people the value of uniting to fight the capitalist Goliaths currently in charge of our society."

"It's easy to focus on the "socialist" part here, but the word "democratic" is also a part of the group's name, and members often stress that part of their ideology. They say putting workers in charge of businesses, for example, necessarily makes those businesses more democratic... In addition to skyrocketing growth, the group is benefiting from young American adults growing more open to socialist ideas. One 2016 Harvard poll of 18 to 29 year olds found that 33 percent supported socialism. Capitalism was only slightly more popular with that cohort, drawing 42 percent support. "Thanks to the economic downturn of 2008, which turned the millennial generation in a significant way to the left, it made them much more open to the idea of socialism," Isserman explained. On top of that, he added, movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street acquainted young Americans with organizing, making them more open to a group like DSA, with its ambitious agenda. And Bernie Sanders, despite not being a DSA member, claimed the label of "democratic socialist," helping the group gain visibility as well."

"The thousands of democratic socialists in the United States who have been organizing and fighting for justice in political obscurity for years likely never thought their ideas would be the subject of heated debates on prominent talk-shows like "The View" or feature pieces in such establishment mainstays as PBS and NPR. But—driven in large part by the persistent popularity of Bernie Sanders' brand of politics and the recent landslide victory of self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York's congressional primary—the past several weeks have seen a torrent of news headlines, television segments, and hot takes on democratic socialism's rapid emergence into everyday political discourse, an indication that ideas previously defined as "fringe" by corporate media outlets, pundits, and politicians are quickly going mainstream."

"Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society... We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history.. We want a democracy that creates space for us all to flourish not just survive and answers the fundamental questions of our lives with the input of all. We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation. We want the multiracial working class united in solidarity instead of divided by fear. We want to win “radical” reforms like single-payer Medicare for All, defunding the police/refunding communities, the Green New Deal, and more as a transition to a freer, more just life."

"Socialism is no longer a dirty word in the U.S," noted the Guardians Arwa Mahdawi in a recent column highlighting the massive surge of interest in socialism over the past several months, which has translated into a record-breaking membership spike for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Previously hovering below ten thousand members, DSA's membership exploded past 20,000 in the months following Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential elections. Now, just over a month after Ocasio-Cortez trounced corporate Democrat Rep. Joe Crowley, DSA boasts more than 47,000 dues-paying members....It should perhaps come as no surprise that Americans—and millennials in particular—are seeking a bold and humane alternative to capitalism, a system that has produced staggering and ever-growing levels of inequality, rampant poverty, an existential environmental crisis, and, of course, soaring wealth for the few at the very top."

"The next generation of socialists believes that the intolerable cannot be tolerated. And if you believe that, you just might be a socialist yourself... The word “socialism” is becoming more and more mainstream. When Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders launched his 2016 presidential bid, only a fringe few dared to use the label. To call yourself a socialist was supposedly a political death sentence. Now, in part thanks to Sanders, many are wearing “socialism” as a badge of pride. Dozens of socialist candidates have won seats all over the country, including two members of Congress, and membership in the Democratic Socialists of America has exploded. According to a 2019 YouGov poll, 70 percent of millennials now say they would vote for a socialist. But what is socialism? How do you know whether you’re a socialist? Could you be one already without knowing it? In fact, it can be difficult to answer the question of what precisely socialism is, because socialists themselves disagree over it. That’s not surprising; Democrats disagree over what it means to be a Democrat, too."

"Neoliberalism is the guiding ideology of economic thought, political management, and occult magik of our times, and as such it is impossible to define. Though it accurately describes the policies pursued by every American president since Jimmy Carter, it’s essentially unnameable and indescribable. No one really knows what it means, and it is precisely because the term is so hard to define that it’s such an effective and poisonous epithet."

"The right wing in America is like Dracula: a grotesque avatar of inherited wealth who is unkillable, casts no reflection in mirrors, and lives off the blood of peasants. Ever since the modern conservative movement was birthed from William F. Buckley Jr.’s unholy womb, the American Right has mutated into more and more grotesque forms, reaching its logical apex in the election of Donald Trump."

"The essential problem is not that liberals are “as bad” as conservatives but rather that there is a giant sucking void at the core of their being."

"These days, there are two kinds of liberals: those who vote for Democrats because the alternative is worse, and those who get teary-eyed at the thought of supporting Cory Booker or some similarly phony slug. The latter are just moderate Republicans and should be written off completely. The former deserve better but probably have some misplaced attachment to the political tradition of “standing up” to the right wing."

"This is the beginning of a journey you will never forget. In this book, we’ll survey the blasted landscape of contemporary American politics and culture through our scientific ideology of irony, half-baked Marxism, revolutionary discipline, NoFap November, and posting on the Internet. You’ll become an initiate in the Chapo Mindset and take control of the neurons that govern your weak, fragile emotions. You will experience success, probably for the first time. You will learn to live your life on your terms. By buying this book and all its affiliated content, you’ll improve your health and fitness, have stronger relationships, straighten your posture, purify your brain chemistry, and gain more focus. Your children and ex-wife will respect you."

"It’s a well-known conservative tactic to attack liberals for hating—or insufficiently loving—the troops. But if those lizard-brained Rethuglicans had a clue, they would realize the American lib is a stalwart supporter of a different kind of soldier: the Celebrity Dumbass."

"Broadly speaking, neoliberalism is a political and ideological project that gained traction in the 1970s across the Western world that sought to return to the laissez-faire roots of “classical” or “economic” liberalism; it aimed to curtail the gains made by labor in the twentieth century and to restore upper-class power through “free” markets and unregulated capital."

"Lincoln was fascinated and disturbed by the writings of proslavery ideologues like George Fitzhugh. The southern critique of wage slavery catalyzed in Lincoln a defense of free society. Most northerners, he insisted, were "neither hirers nor hired," but worked "for themselves, on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor hirelings or slaves on the other." Wage earners were generally young "beginners," hired "by their own consent"; contrary to southern charges, they were not "fatally fixed in that condition for life." Yet even Lincoln's eloquent exposition could not escape free labor's inherent ambiguities. Was wage labor a normal, acceptable part of the northern social order or a temporary status, associated with the lack of genuine freedom?"

"Money is a new and terrible form of slavery, and like the old form of personal slavery it demoralizes both slave and slave-owner, only much more, for it frees the slave and the slave-owner from personal, human relations with one another."

"If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation."

"Slavery exists in full vigor, but we do not perceive it, just as in Europe at the end of the Eighteenth Century the slavery of serfdom was not perceived.People of that day thought that the position of men obliged to till the land for their lords, and to obey them, was a natural, inevitable, economic condition of life, and they did not call it slavery.It is the same among us: people of our day consider the position of the laborer to be a natural, inevitable economic condition, and they do not call it slavery. And as, at the end of the Eighteenth Century, the people of Europe began little by little to understand that what formerly seemed a natural and inevitable form of economic life-namely, the position of peasants who were completely in the power of their lords-was wrong, unjust and immoral, and demanded alteration, so now people today are beginning to understand that the position of hired workmen, and of the working classes in general, which formerly seemed quite right and quite normal, is not what it should be, and demands alteration."

"It is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life. Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed; nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless. ... A few men own capital, and those few avoid labor themselves, and, with their capital, hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class—neither work for others, nor have others working for them. ... In most of the Southern States, a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters; while in the Northern, a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families—wives, sons, and daughters—work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other. ... There is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. Many independent men everywhere in these States, a few years back in their lives, were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all."

"It is my firm conviction that the day is coming when the individual small merchant will cease to exist. In his place will be millions of persons working for wages and salaries whereas yesterday and today there were and are proprietors. In other words, I believe the time is coming when practically all mercantile and industrial affairs will be conducted by corporations."

"It must be acknowledged that our worker emerges from the process of production looking different from when he entered it. In the market, as owner of the commodity 'labour-power', he stood face to face with other owners of commodities, one owner against another owner. The contract by which he sold his labour-power to the capitalist proved in black and white, so to speak, that he was free to dispose of himself. But when the transaction was concluded, it was discovered that he was no 'free agent', that the period of time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the period of time for which he forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not let go 'while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited'."

"The times when Christian-Germanic robbers stole entire countries, deprived the inhabitants of the soil, and pressed them to feudal service, were indeed terrible enough. But the climax of infamy has been reached by our present "law and order" system, for it has defrauded more than nine-tenths of mankind of their means of existence, reduced them to dependence upon an insignificant minority, and condemned them to self-sacrifice. At the same time it has disguised this relation with all sorts of jugglery that the thralls of today - the wage slaves - but partially recognize their serfdom and outlawed position, they rather incline to ascribe it to the caprices of fortune."

"If the slave-owner of our times has no slave, John, whom he can send to the cesspool, he has five shillings, of which hundreds of such Johns are in such need that the slave-owner of our times may choose any one out of hundreds of Johns and be a benefactor to him by giving him the preference, and allowing him, rather than another, to climb down into the cesspool."

"Reading Blood In My Eye I discovered that capitalist-private property relations are the source of class inequalities, which is the primary factor in my being a member of a class that bears all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages. Under the influence of illegitimate-capitalist values, I was pursuing the alleviation of social-economic hardship through individual advancement. This is a wholly inadequate remedy to social problems because it doesn’t challenge the fundamental injustice of class-exploitation and class-oppression, which are responsible for creating the socio-economic ills in the first place. Unaware of my class interest, I was perpetuating my own oppression by engaging in competitive capitalist practices that ensure the smooth functioning of the system as the exploiting minority profits in more ways than one off the division and disunity engendered by competition, so prevalent amongst the exploited. Look around: competition, euphemistically called “individuality,” permeates and is systematically promoted to the masses of people while the corporate conglomerations and Fortune 500 are busy “merging and monopolizing.”"

"Man is a slave in so far as between action and its effect, between effort and the finished work, there is the interference of alien wills. This is the case both with the slave and the master today. Never can man deal directly with the conditions of his own action. Society forms a screen between nature and man."

"Formerly the master selected the slave; today the slave selects his master, and he has got to find one or else he is carried down here to my friend, the gaoler."

"How many of the wage class, as a class, are there who can avoid obeying the commands of the master (employing) class, as a class? Not many, are there? Then are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery."

"You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain."

"Ignorance alone stands in the way of socialist success. The capitalist parties understand this and use their resources to prevent the workers from seeing the light. Intellectual darkness is essential to industrial slavery."