Democratic Socialists

"Isn't all religions curious? If they weren't you wouldn't get anyone to believe them."

"If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea."

"It is an intolerable irony that societies that are anything but socialist should thus define what socialism is in the eyes of so many. It is an irony that has to be undone."

"The rise of Communist states - dictatorship with centrally planned, nationalized economies - did more to distort and confuse the meaning of socialism than any other event in history."

"The American system doesn't seem to work anymore. The nation's statesmen proclaim that they seek only to abolish war, hunger and ignorance in the world and then follow policies which make the rich richer, the poor poorer and incite the globe to violence. The Government says that it will conduct an unconditional war on poverty and three years later announces that life in the slums has become worse. And supposedly practical people propose that the country make a social revolution but without the inconvenience of changing any basic institution."

"The means are at hand to fulfill the age-old dream: poverty can now be abolished. How long shall we ignore this underdeveloped nation in our midst? How long shall we look the other way while our fellow human beings suffer? How long?"

"Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal has become a conservative force in American life. In saying this, I do not intent for a moment to dismiss the enduring significance of the social and political struggles of the Thirties. The old lassez-faire myths were decisively shattered, government recognized its duty to promote full employment, Social Security was accepted as a national principle, the mass-production workers created the CIO - and this is only the beginning of a list of accomplishments of those times. The welfare state which was begun then is manifestly imperfect and often unjust. Yet it took the United States a giant stride beyond the decade of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. Still, the Rooseveltian program did not solve the central problem of the Depression: mass unemployment."

"Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than to submit to the desolation of an empty abundance. It is a strange part of the other America that one finds in the intellectual slums."

"The laws against color can be removed, but that will leave the poverty that is the historic and institutionalized consequence of color. As long as this is the case, being born Negro will continue to be the most profound disability that the United States imposes upon a citizen."

"If, as is quite possible, America refuses to deal with the social evils that persist in the sixties, it will at the same time have turned its back on the racial minorities. There will be speeches on equality; there will be gains as the nation moves toward a constitutional definition of itself as egalitarian. The Negro will watch all this from a world of double poverty. He will continue to know himself as a member of a race-class condemned by heredity to be poor."

"If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment."

"Life is lived in common, but not in community."

"All the forces of conservatism in this society are ranged against the needs of the other America. The ideologues are opposed to helping the poor because this can be accomplished only through an expansion of the welfare state. The small businessmen have an immediate self-interest in maintain the economic underworld. The powerful agencies of the corporate farms want a continuation of an agricultural program that aids the rich and does nothing for the poor."

"The New Deal, for all its achievements and the popular idealism which inspired it, has become status quo. Its genuine gains, such as Social Security, must be defended and extended, of course. But the real task, for the democratic Left and for the nation, is now to go beyond the New Deal. Far beyond it."

"Clothes make the poor invisible.... America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known."

"To be sure, the other America is not impoverished in the same sense as those poor nations where millions cling to hunger as a defense against starvation. This country has escaped such extremes. That does not change the fact that tens of millions of Americans are, at this very moment, maimed in body and spirit, existing at levels beneath those necessary for human decency. If these people are not starving, they are hungry, and sometimes far with hunger, for that is what cheap foods do. They are without adequate housing and education and medical care."

"In attitude towards poverty, there is a considerable double standard. America more or less expects the Negro to be poor (and is convinced that things are getting better, a point to be dealt with in a later chapter). There is no emotional shock when people hear of the experience of these human beings in Chicago. The mind and the feelings, even of good-willed individuals, are so suffused with an unconscious racism that misery is overlooked."

"Negro poverty is unique is every way. It grows out of a long American history, and it expresses itself in a subculture that is buit up on an interlocking base of economic and racial injustice. It is a fact imposed from without, from white America."

"Beauty can be mask for ugliness."

"America needs a majority party of the democratic Left. This is not a proposal for a tightly disciplined party on the old European model (I see no reason to add to the amusement of the politcal scientists who have been setting up, and shredding, that straw man for a generation). It is simply a recognition of the fact that, to solve problems which the Government passively records, there must be radical departures and a political movement capable of initiating them. The real ideologues in this period are those utopian pragmatists who believe that the society can bumble its way through a revolution. They are fanatics of moderation."

"Socialism, I want to propose, is the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face in the twenty-first century."

"We are going to build the Tories out of London."

"The fact that the House of Lords has many irrational features is not, in itself, fatal in British eyes for we have a capacity for making the irrational work, and if a thing works, we tend to like it, or at any rate to put up with it."

"Socialism is what a Labour government does."

"Of all the colleagues I have lost, he is the one I am least sorry to see the last of. I hope that Lewisham will throw the intruder out. He only came here because he ran away from a communist."

"Our own British Communist Party – if it is our own and British – might at any time suffer a change of heart and go back to bloody revolution. For all I know it may there already, underground. Anything is possible for a party which at one and the same time shouts for a United Front and puts up candidates against us with a view to splitting the Labour vote. All this is alien to our honest, straightforward, native, Socialist thought. ... But you can't all the time say 'No, No, No' to the Communists. The real answer to the Communists is a positive answer. We have to show more vigorous fighting enthusiasm, more faith, more sense of high adventure."

"It is because I have confidence in the reasoned appeal the Socialist Party can make to all sections of the community – manual workers and black coats alike – that I have decided to go to East Lewisham, if I am selected, emphasizing by this action my conviction that the soundest socialist appeal is that which is most universal in its scope."

"We must not be rigid. We must not become conservative as is the unhappy state of some of our Liberal leaders to-day, as did the French Revolution of 1789, as has, in many respects, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We need the fresh air and free challenging thought of my favourite poet, Robert Burns, who was, I think, a Socialist agitator before an organised Socialist movement was born."

"Never again while the risk of war remained must we allow ourselves to neglect our land weapon."

"You will see, therefore, that Socialism does not consist of nationalisation alone, important though that element is. It has other and very important aspects... The alternative is Tory reaction. And Tory reaction—as we have seen in other countries—breeds depression, muddle, Communism, and Fascism."

"The bridge was not of such great importance or social significance, but it was symbolical that Labour was capable of decision, that the machinery of democratic public administration would work if the men and women in charge were determined that it should work."

"He would be prepared to say himself that no individual state should have Crown Colonies at all, and that French, Italian, and British colonies should be handed over to the League to administer under mandates controlled by the League itself. It did not follow that British Crown Colonies would no longer be under British administration. He hoped he was not a Jingo, but he still felt that the British were the best Colonial administrators of any government in the world. It would make a vital difference, however, if instead of being governed as Crown Colonies the possibility should be removed of their exploitation by British capitalism."

"A vote for the Tories is a vote for war."

"The Government leaders were all urging a policy of rearmament, and Mr. Chamberlain was ready and anxious to spend millions of pounds on machines of destruction. He had not money, however, for the unemployed, the depressed areas, and social services. He would spend on the means of death, but not on the means of life, and that was the sort of fellow he looked like, too."

"What the resolution does not contemplate being done is the lining up behind the government and voting for its rearmament programme."

"Work is the call. Work at war speed. Good-night—and go to it."

"The good Socialist works with religious zeal for the redemption of mankind from the evils of poverty and ignorance. ... He is conscious of the beauty of the ideal ... he works on ... for the deliverance of the human spirit from the enslavement of material things."

"Some of you would prefer a Tory Government. We know our enemies. I have come across a coalition of Conservatives and Communists before. Tories have a very warm place in their hearts for Communists and so have the Communists for the Tories."

"It is a bright idea that when you get a National Government in office, a mixed and assorted Government, it is to be assumed that the opposition must suddenly cease to function, and that it must discharge the duties of the Opposition and carry the burden of the baby of the Government as well. This Bill is the Government's business, and it is for us to attack it and to tear it to pieces if we like, and we are going to do what we think proper in this respect."

"The pro-Western policies of Clement Attlee’s Labour government (1945–51) were supported by the vast majority of the Labour Party and trade union movement. Communist and Soviet sympathisers within both were isolated, and the Communist Party was kept at a distance. This helped prevent the development of a strong radical Left, and was linked to the alliance between labour and capital that was to be important in the post-war mixed economy in Britain; although the emphasis on state control and regulation was damaging to entrepreneurial ethos. The Attlee government also decided by January 1947 to develop a British nuclear bomb. This policy was regarded as necessary for Britain’s independent security and independence. Throughout, the British government sought to play more than a secondary role to the USA. As a result, at considerable cost, Britain became the third nuclear power: the bomb was ready by 1952."

"Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim."

"Labour's programme of free public services financed out of taxation depended crucially upon a prolongation of the wartime spirit of social solidarity... What got us through the war, the Prime Minister [Attlee] insisted, was "unselfishness and an appeal to the higher instincts of mankind". These higher instincts could not, unfortunately, survive the pressures of consumerism and individualism created by the affluent society of the 1950s... Nevertheless, successive Conservative and Labour governments continued to...leave the central citadel of the Attlee regime untouched... The decaying monuments to that regime can now be seen around us in a collapsing NHS, a rotting Underground system and, in the words of one government spokesman, "bog-standard comprehensives". The state of our public services is a consequence not of failing to build on the Attlee legacy, but of a refusal to repudiate it... The Attlee Government led Britain firmly and resolutely, and from the best of motives, in the wrong direction. It continues to exert its influence even from beyond the grave, and the twin illusions which it engendered—that we can enjoy "free" public services while remaining isolated from the Continent—are still costing us dear."

"My direct question to Attlee was that since Gandhi's Quit India movement had tapered off quite some time ago and in 1947 no such new compelling situation had arisen that would necessitate a hasty British departure, why did they had to leave?" "In his reply Attlee cited several reasons, the principal among them being the erosion of loyalty to the British crown among the Indian army and Navy personnel as a result of the military activities of Netaji."

"He was a far abler man than Winston Churchill's description of him as "a sheep in sheep's clothing" would imply, but persistently depressing. He spoke, as John Jay Chapman said of President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, with "all the passion of a woodchuck chewing a carrot." His thought impressed me as a long withdrawing, melancholy sigh."

"Toward the end of our discussion I asked Attlee what was the extent of Gandhi's influence upon the British decision to quit India. Hearing this question, Attlee's lips became twisted in a sarcastic smile as he slowly chewed out the word, m-i-n-i-m-a-l!"

"His socialism was certainly more Toynbee Hall than Marx. Yet he presided over what is now agreed was the most revolutionary of all Labour's governments and he did it without benefit of the usual tricks of the political trade... The key to the enigma of his personality lies, I believe, in the fact that he was a decent man who wanted to build a decent society."

"I move previous face!"

"Can't publish. Don't rhyme, don't scan."

"Not up to the job."

"In the circumstances it is much to be regretted that the men have not as yet responded generally to the call to return to work. A hold up of the food supplies of London will inevitably cause hardship and grave inconvenience to millions of ​householders; but this is by no means the end of the damage. The handling of the country's overseas trade normally stretches to the limit the capacity of our available shipping. A hold up of any length delays the turn-round of ships and cannot be made up subsequently. The stoppage cuts millions of dollars and other needed foreign currency off our earnings—and cuts them off finally. Already the prospect of attaining this month's export target is affected, the gap in the balance of our payments is widened and the pace of national recovery slowed down. I cannot believe that the general body of strikers have hitherto realised the true consequences of their action. They should return to work and allow any grievances they may feel to be dealt with by the proper machinery."