emigrants

"While the capitalist mode of production grew up historically on the basis of individual ownership of the means of production, the Russian revolution has shown that under certain conditions the capitalist mode of production can continue to exist even though the individual proprietors are eliminated and replaced by a collective exploiting apparatus where factories are not owned by capitalist ‘X’ or ‘Y’ but are ‘controlled’ (i. e. owned) by the State (i. e. the controlling classes)."

"The solution, according to Trotsky, lies in the replacement of the present parasitical bureaucracy by a non-parasitical apparatus. Nothing else in his opinion needs to be changed as the Soviet economic system is fully qualified to proceed toward socialism in combination with the world-revolutionary trend. This new bureaucracy, essential in Trotsky’s transitional stage, will, according to Trotsky, introduce a greater equality of income. But Trotsky must remember that the present bureaucracy started out with the same idea, originally limiting salaries to Communists, etc. It was the circumstances enveloping the economy which not only enabled but obliged the present bureaucracy to adopt a program of ever increasing economic inequality in its favor."

"Russian state capitalism has become the example for other nations as indicated in the rise of fascism and the growth of governmental control in all countries. However, this trend is no sign of ‘progress,’ as many people believe. It does not correspond to a ‘higher stage’ of capitalism, but indicates the decline of world capitalism. The trend toward bolshevization and fascization is only the political expression of the stagnation and decline of the capitalist system; it is barbarism."

"Certainly, the Russian state-capitalism, in which class relations are continued, cannot employ the Marxian science, for this science consists of nothing but the critique of those selfsame capitalistic conditions, which characterize Russia and every other capitalistic country. For the purpose of justifying the exploitation of the workers, the inequalities of income, and the accumulation of capital that exists there, the Marxian economic theories are certainly useless."

"In Russia, as elsewhere, the means of production are not controlled by the workers but are the monopoly of a special group in society. In the relations of the workers to the means of production, no difference exists between a private property society and a state-capitalist system. The position of the Russian bureaucracy to its workers is exactly the same as that of the individual entrepreneur to his. The first need of that bureaucracy is to safeguard its own position in order to develop industry and agriculture. Whatever else this bureaucracy may do, it has first of all to ‘plan’ its own security, and then to proceed to ‘plan’ life for the rest of the population. This is recognized not only by the present and supposedly “degenerated” Russian bureaucracy, but was clear also to the ‘founders’ of the Russian state-capitalist system."

"Thus, to mention just a few facts, not the social democracy but Hitler fulfilled the long desire of the socialists, the Anschluss of Austria; not social democracy but fascism established the wished — for state control of industry and banking; not social democracy but Hitler declared the first of May a legal holiday. A careful analysis of what the socialists actually wanted to do and never did, compared with actual policies since 1933, will reveal to any objective observer that Hitler realised no more than the programme of social democracy, but without the socialists."

"Like Hitler, the social democracy and Kautsky were opposed to both bolshevism and communism. Even a complete state-capitalist system as the Russian was rejected by both in favour of mere state control. And what is necessary in order to realise such a programme was not dared by the socialists but undertaken by the fascists. The anti-fascism of Kautsky illustrated no more than the fact that just as he once could not imagine that Marxist theory could be supplemented by a Marxist practice, he later could not see that a capitalist reform policy demanded a capitalist reform practice, which turned out to be the fascist practice… The life of Kautsky can, in all truth and without malicious intent, be summed up in the words: From Marx to Hitler."

"Rather, the war, and even the period preceding the war, will be marked by a general and complete military dictatorship in fascist and anti-fascist countries alike. The war will wipe out the last distinction between the democratic and the anti-democratic nations. And workers will serve Hitler as they served the Kaiser; they will serve Roosevelt as they served Wilson; they will die for Stalin as they died for the Tsar."

"‘People love today to speak disdainfully about the liberalistic economy,’ [Kautsky] wrote in his last work; ‘however, the theories founded by Quesnay, Adam Smith and Ricardo are not at all obsolete. In their essentials Marxhad accepted their theories and developed them further, and he has never denied that the liberal freedom of commodity production constituted the best basis for its development.’"

"In order that some may lead, others must be powerless. To be the vanguard of the workers, the elite has to usurp all social key positions. Like the bourgeoisie of old, the new leaders had to seize and control all means of production and destruction. To hold their control and keep it effective, the leaders must constantly strengthen themselves by bureaucratic expansion, and continually divide the ruled. Only masters can be leaders. Trotsky was such a master."

"Today, great men are no longer necessary. Modern propaganda instruments can transform any fraud into a hero, any mediocre personality into an all-comprehending genius. Propaganda actually transforms through its collective efforts any average, if not stupid, leader, like Hitler and Stalin, into a great man. The leaders become symbols of an organized, collective, and really intelligent will to maintain given social institutions. Outside of Russia, Trotsky was soon reduced to the master of a small sect of professional revolutionists and their providers. He was ‘the Old Man,’ the indisputable authority of an artificial growth upon the political scene, destined to end in absurdity."

"Coming to power with the help of a russified Marxian ideology, Trotsky, after he lost power, had no choice but to maintain the revolutionary ideology in its original form against the degeneration of Marxism indulged in by the Stalinists."

"Leadership remained after Lenin’s death; there was not yet the Leader. Though Trotsky was forced into exile, the unripeness of the authoritarian form of government spared his life for fifteen years. Soon both old and new oppositions to Stalin’s rule could easily be destroyed. Hitler’s overwhelming success in the “night of the long knives,” when he killed off with one bold stroke the whole of the effective opposition against him, showed Stalin the way to handle his own problems… This was done not in the Nibelungen manner in which the German fascists got rid of Roehm, Strasser and their following, but in the hidden, scheming, cynical manner of the Moscow Trials, to exploit even the death of the potential oppositionists for the greater glory of the all-embracing and beloved leader, Stalin. The applause of those taking the offices emptied by the murdered was assured. To make the broad masses happily accept the miserable end of the ‘old Bolsheviks’ was merely a job for the minister of propaganda. Thus the whole of Russia, not only the leading bureaucratic group, finished off the ‘traitors to the fatherland of the workers.’"

"The laissez faire theory was opposed by theories favoring state interventions in the economy."

"Long before the rise of fascism, competitive capitalism was replaced in each capitalist nation by monopoly capitalism. The markets were controlled by trusts and cartels. The development from laissez faire to monopoly capitalism led to the creation of the world market, the international division of labor, the concentration of capital, and the increase of the productivity of labor. They are all interdependent; one is unthinkable without the others."

"There is, however, an apparent contradiction here; for if fascism must be regarded as the direct outcome of the previous capitalist development it should appear first in the oldest and most advanced nations. But this is not the case. Russia, in which we find the most complete totalitarian system, was one of the most backward nations, as was Italy which experienced the first ‘fascist revolution.’"

"So far as this fundamental capitalistic relationship is concerned nothing has changed in the totalitarian systems. What has been altered is the relationship between government and individual capitalists. In the democracies, individual ownership predominates over governmental control; in the fascist states, governmental control over individual ownership. In Russia, alone, individual ownership has been done away with altogether and the state has complete control of the productive apparatus and natural resources. The trends of development indicate that the democracies travel in the direction of fascism and the fascist nations in the direction of the Russian system."

"It is now quite clear that only those in the traditional labour movement who opposed its undemocratic organisations and their tactics can properly be called socialists. The labour leaders of yesterday and today did not and do not represent a workers' movement but only a capitalistic movement of workers."

"To be sure Rühle had no doubt that totalitarianism was worse for the workers than bourgeois democracy. He had fought against Russian totalitarianism since its inception. He was fighting German fascism, but he could not fight in the name of bourgeois democracy because he knew that the peculiar developmental laws of capitalist production would change bourgeois democracy sooner or later into fascism and state-capitalism."

"By fighting as true social-democrats for predominance in the socialist world movement, by identifying the narrow nationalistic interests of state-capitalistic Russia with the interests of the world proletariat, and by attempting to maintain at all cost the power position they had won in 1917, they were merely preparing their own downfall, which was dramatised in numerous factional struggles, reached its climax in the Moscow trials, and ended in the Stalinist Russia of today – one imperialist nation among others."

"The meaning of Bolshevism was completely revealed only with the emergence of fascism. To fight the latter, it was necessary, in Otto Rühle’s words, to recognise that ‘the struggle against fascism begins with the struggle against Bolshevism.’"

"Not long before his death, Rühle, in summing up his findings with regard to Bolshevism, did not hesitate to place Russia first among the totalitarian stares. ‘It has served as the model for other capitalistic dictatorships. Ideological divergences do not really differentiate socioeconomic systems. The abolition of private property in the means of production (combined with) the control of workers over the products of their labour and the end of the wages system.’"

"To make clear the fascist character of the Russian system, Rühle turned once more to Lenin’s Left Wing Communism – An Infantile Disorder, for ‘of all programmatic declarations of Bolshevism it was the most revealing of its real character.’ When in 1933 Hitler suppressed all socialist literature in Germany, Rühle related, Lenin’s pamphlet was allowed publication and distribution. In this work Lenin insists that the party must be a sort of war academy of professional revolutionists. Its chief requirements were unconditional leader authority, rigid centralism, iron discipline, conformity, militancy, and the sacrifice of personality for party interests - And Lenin actually developed an elite of intellectuals, a centre which, when thrown into the revolution, was to capture leadership and assume power."

"There is no longer any need to point to the many ‘misdeeds’ of Bolshevism in Germany and in the world at large. In theory and in practice the Stalinist regime declares itself a capitalistic, imperialistic power, opposing not only the proletarian revolution, but even the fascist reforms of capitalism. And it actually does favour the maintenance of bourgeois democracy in order to utilise more fully its own fascistic structure. Just as Germany was very little interested in spreading fascism over her borders and the borders of her allies since she had no intention of strengthening her imperialistic competitors, so Russia concerns herself with safeguarding democracy everywhere save within her own territory. Her friendship with bourgeois-democracy is a true friendship; fascism is no article for export, for it ceases to be an advantage as soon as it is generalised. Despite the Stalin-Hitler pact, there are no greater ‘anti-fascists’ than the Bolsheviks on behalf of their own native fascism. Only so far as their imperialistic expansion, if any, will reach, will they be guilty of consciously supporting the general fascistic trend."

"Ideological conformity depends on conditions of prosperity; it has no staying-power of its own."

"Although there are so many barriers when it comes to the publishing industry – for young people, people of color, and queer people – the large majority of the community is kind and wonderful. It’s so easy to get jaded, and I’m oftentimes jaded, but at the end of the day, my time in this industry has not only given me some of my best friends but introduced me to people that hardly know me, yet don’t hesitate at all to offer help when it’s needed. As a whole, we need a lot of work, and I hope that we never stop improving, but my experience so far has shown me we have such good people working toward it and so many young people ready to spring up and transform the scene for the better."

"…It feels like leading a double life sometimes because it’s not like I wear my Twitter bio around when I’m walking about campus or going to class, so Student Chloe and Author Chloe are very much two separate people. I think the closer I get to publication, the more that these two sides of me start to merge into one, especially when my college friends find out about my books. It’s definitely something I struggle to get used to, to stop myself from brushing off my books and be all “oh, it’s nothing, just a hobby” if it comes up among the college crowd and on the other end, to not invalidate myself as a student like “oh, I just go to class” among the author crowd."

"One of my ultimate pet peeves is when people falsely equate experience with age, and nothing drives me up the wall more than established authors declaring all young writers are trash because they themselves were trash when they were younger. That may be true for them – I don’t know everyone’s life stories! But I think waiting to take the plunge into publishing isn’t about the writer’s age but the writer’s experience. If someone starts writing at age 20 and immediately tries to get published, chances are they’re going to meet some failure – but not because of age because of experience..."

"…I think a lot of professionals in this industry genuinely believe young people can’t write, and others believe that if we’ve made it, it’s only because our age is so shiny and interesting, and that alone is what pushes us through. I hesitate to say that it’s been a complete barrier because for marginalized writers there are certainly other barriers that are a lot worse. But when it comes to age, I’ve seen agents openly declare they would never sign a college or high school student. I’m really happy to have an agent and editors who believe in me regardless of my age and furthermore take my age into account as just another facet of who I am as a person – like how other authors are full-time mothers/fathers/caregivers…"

"A lot has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it’s because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened? There is a that, historically, have been more likely to occur at times of social inequality and discord. As the poor get poorer, the thinking goes, their baseline health suffers, making them more prone to infection. At the same time they are forced to move more, in search of work, and to gravitate to cities. The rich, meanwhile, have more to spend on luxuries, including products that hail from far-flung places. The world becomes more tightly connected through trade, and germs, people and luxury goods travel together along trade routes that connect cities. On paper, it looks like a perfect storm."

"In India there have been reports of deaths among unemployed returning home in search of food; many countries, including the US, have seen workers taking industrial action, and anger has been expressed in rural communities over wealthy city-dwellers retreating to their second homes for the duration. Governments should keep an eye on these developments, in weighing up when and how to lift the lockdown, because even if it’s difficult to argue today that the cure is worse than the disease, the cure might provoke an entirely different malaise – and history teaches us that no society is immune to that. That’s the . In the long term, of course, they – and we – should address the dreadful inequality in our societies, which this pandemic is picking apart with a lethal scalpel."

"Pandemics don’t always trigger , but they can do, by throwing into relief the very inequalities that caused them. That’s because they hit the poor hardest – those in low-paid or unstable employment, who live in crowded accommodation, have underlying health issues, and for whom healthcare is less affordable or less accessible. This was true in the past and remains so today. During the the death rate was three times higher in the poorest fifth of England’s population than in the richest. Covid-19 is showing no signs of departing from the pattern, which, because of the way the socioeconomic dice fall, also has a racial dimension. But there is something brand new about this pandemic, which has never been seen before in the history of humanity – and that is our unprecedented global experiment in . These lockdown measures are designed to slow the spread of the disease, relieve the burden on s and ultimately save lives – and it looks as if they may be doing that. But they may also be exacerbating social inequalities themselves."

"Why does it matter whether a country is defined as developing or not? Because it means that policymakers here can distract voters into thinking that crises are constantly diplomatic, military or trade based when actually the problems that America needs to fix most urgently are right here – they’re the crises of health and education. Had those problems been better addressed, the nation would not be struggling as desperately as it is right now."

"The facts are as exhaustive as they are exhausting. There’s one simple conclusion from all of this. We’ve been tricked. We’ve been told that America, like most other majority-white countries, deserves the title “developed economy”. It does not. You cannot charge a woman $39.95 to hold the baby that she has just given birth to. You cannot constantly operate hospitals at close to capacity in order to maximize profits. The pursuit of in systems built for public good has not worked ethically or practically."

"So why does the United Nations consider the US as a developed economy when its own statistics so clearly suggest otherwise? One might argue that it’s about simple wealth, or gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of the economy, per capita. But if that were the measure of development then European countries such as Romania, Hungary and Slovakia should not qualify for the term “developed economy” while Bermuda, Qatar, Singapore and China should all make the list. Besides, GDP per capita is no reliable measure of wellbeing in a country like the US where the richest 5% of people own two-thirds of the national wealth."

"It’s not just health. Access to the internet is better in Bahrain and Brunei (two countries the UN does not consider developed economies) than it is in the US. Inequality scores are higher in America than they are in Mali and Yemen. A closer country to America in inequality is Israel, a country which functions as an apartheid state. And the US ranks 81st in the world in terms of women’s political representation. So, you’ve got a better chance of making it into office as a woman if you live in Vietnam, or Albania. Sub-Saharan Africa is most comparable to America – 24% of seats in the region’s parliaments are held by women, the same figure as in the US. In the United States, 83% of students graduate high school. That figure is higher in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Barbados, Armenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro. None of those countries are considered “developed economies” by the United Nations."

"When Susan Finley developed flu-like symptoms, she didn’t go to the doctor because she was frightened about the cost. Finley’s grandparents later found her dead in her apartment. She was 53. Finley did not die as a result of Covid-19. She died in 2016 as a result of America’s healthcare system – a system that led her to avoid treatment for the common flu in order to avoid debt. It is that same system that is currently creaking under the pressure of a pandemic that experts warned was coming but governments failed to prepare for. It is a system that does not qualify for the term “developed”. The United States of America, we are told by everyone from the president to the United Nations, is a . That term, “developed economy”, sounds like an endpoint, like the man standing upright after a series of hunched and hairy iterations. It’s the contrast that makes the definition – developed economies can only really exist if they are compared to their poorer “developing” counterparts. Covid-19 has merely shown the cracks in a very successful marketing campaign about which category the US falls into."

"There are 2.9 hospital beds for every 1,000 people in the United States. That’s fewer than Turkmenistan (7.4 beds per 1,000), Mongolia (7.0), Argentina (5.0) and Libya (3.7). In fact, the US ranks 69th out of 182 countries analyzed by the World Health Organization. This lack of hospital beds is forcing doctors across the country to ration care under Covid-19, pushing up the number of preventable deaths. America’s numbers are similarly unimpressive when it comes to medical doctors. The United States has 2.6 doctors per 1,000 people, placing it behind Trinidad & Tobago (2.7), and Russia (4.0 doctors per 1,000, for a country that is described as being “in transition”). Life expectancies at birth are lower in the US than they are in Chile or China. The US has a higher maternal mortality rate than Iran or Saudi Arabia."

"[B]eing an ally means you need to be active. It’s not enough to be non-racist. You need to be anti-racist. It may not be easy, but you need to use your voice and your privilege in the moment to speak up when you see something wrong being done. Even if it is “only” a microaggression…"

"A child always grows away from their parents. That is the job of a parent — to give their child the tools to be independent. But for the immigrant family, there’s a different cost to it, an inevitable cultural loss that happens as the first generation gives way to the second and then the third, as this once-new nation becomes (hopefully) fully your own…"

"Writing for young adults is writing into the realm of possibility…I always say that middle age novels are about doors closing, and young adult novels are about doors opening."

"We live in an age of internment right now…and it’s not just in the United States. These things are happening globally…Silence is complicity. It’s so important for those of us who have any kind of privilege, power or platform to always speak up. That’s the very first step to take when we see oppression in our country, when we see acts of bigotry, hatred, homophobia, xenophobia—any institutionalized prejudices."

"In the same way, it is not necessarily paternalistic to advocate the restriction of air pollution. Individual citizens and firms may produce more air pollution than any of them actually want because they know that there is little to be gained from uncoordinated individual restraint. If I avoid driving a gas-guzzling car, the impact on the overall level of air pollution w ill be utterly insignificant. So I have no incentive to take it into account in making my driving decisions even if I care greatly about reducing air pollution. Widespread public ignorance is a type of pollution that infects the political system rather than our physical environment."

"There is only one type of decadence which is dangerous in art and literature, and unfortunately critics seldom scourge it as it deserves: it consists in being conventional and imitative, in tritely expressing cheap and superficial emotions."

"One of the most considerable achievements of Surrealism was its discovery that many writers and painters of the past had been Surrealists without knowing it."

"The primary condition for being sincere is the same as for being humble: not to boast of it, and probably not even to be aware of it."

"Writing a novel is not very difficult: you simply write ten pages a day for a month and then you have a novel."

"To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills."

"What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?"

"The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform."