marxists-from-canada

"I never believed, as many Marxists professed to do, that normative principles were irrelevant to the socialist movement, that, since the movement was of oppressed people fighting for their own liberation, there was no room or need for specifically moral inspiration in it. I thought no such thing partly for the plain reason that I observed enormous selfless dedication among the active communists who surrounded me in my childhood, and partly for the more sophisticated reason that the self-interest of any oppressed producer would tell him to stay at home, rather than to risk his neck in a revolution whose success or failure would be anyhow unaffected by his participation in it. Revolutionary workers and, a fortiori, bourgeois fellow-travellers without a particular material interest in socialism, must perforce be morally inspired."

"Every market, even a socialist market, is a system of predation. Our attempt to get beyond predation has thus far failed. I do not think the right conclusion is to give up."

"The natural tendency of the market is to increase the scope of the social relations that it covers, because entrepreneurs see opportunities at the edge to turn what is not yet a commodity into one. Left to itself, the capitalist dynamic is self-sustaining, and socialists therefore need the power of organized politics to oppose it: their capitalist opponents, who go with the grain of the system, need that power less (which is not to say that they lack it!)."

"Certain contemporary overenthusiastic market socialists tend, contrariwise, to forget that the market is intrinsically repugnant, because they are blinded by their belated discovery of the market's instrumental value. It is the genius of the market that it (1) recruits low-grade motives to (2) desirable ends; but (3) it also produces undesirable effects, including significant unjust inequality. In a balanced view, all three sides of that proposition must be kept in focus, but many market socialists now self-deceptively overlook (1) and (3). Both (1) and (2) were kept in focus by the pioneering eighteenth-century writer Bernard Mandeville, whose market-praising Fable of the Bees was subtitled Private Vices, Public Benefits. Many contemporary celebrants of the market play down the truth in the first part of that subtitle."

"The technology for using base motives to productive economic effect is reasonably well understood. Indeed, the history of the twentieth century encourages the thought that the easiest way to generate productivity in a modern society is by nourishing the motives of which I spoke earlier, namely, those of greed and fear. But we should never forget that greed and fear are repugnant motives. Who would propose running a society on the basis of such motives, and thereby promoting the psychology to which they belong, if they were not known to be effective, if they did not have the instrumental value which is the only value that they have?"

"Market socialism does not fully satisfy socialist standards of distributive justice, but it scores far better by those standards than market capitalism does, and is therefore an eminently worthwhile project, from a socialist point of view."

"Whereas many socialists have recently put their faith in market socialism, nineteenth-century socialists were, by contrast, for the most part opposed to market organization of economic life. The mainstream socialist pioneers favored something that they thought would be far superior, to wit, comprehensive central planning, which, it was hoped, could realize the socialist ideal of a truly sharing society. And the pioneers' successors were encouraged by what they interpreted as victories of planning, such as the industrialization of the Soviet Union and the early institution of educational and medical provision in the People's Republic of China. But central planning, at least as practiced in the past, is, we now know, a poor recipe for economic success, at any rate once a society has provided itself with the essentials of a modern productive system."

"I continue to find appealing the sentiment of a left-wing song that I learned in my childhood, which begins as follows: "If we should consider each other, a neighbor, a friend, or a brother, it could be a wonderful, wonderful world, it could be a wonderful world.""

"I believe that certain inequalities that cannot be forbidden in the name of socialist equality of opportunity should nevertheless be forbidden, in the name of community. But is it an injustice to forbid the transactions that generate those inequalities? Do the relevant prohibitions merely define the terms within which justice will operate, or do they sometimes (justifiably?) contradict justice? I do not know the answer to that question."

"The circumstances of the camping trip are multiply special: many features distinguish it from the circumstances of life in a modern society. One may therefore not infer, from the fact that camping trips of the sort that I have described are feasible and desirable, that society-wide socialism is equally feasible and equally desirable. There are too many major differences between the contexts for that inference to carry any conviction. What we urgently need to know is precisely what are the differences that matter, and how can socialists address them? Because of its contrasts with life in the large, the camping trip model serves well as a reference point for purported demonstrations that socialism across society is not feasible and/or desirable, since it seems eminently feasible and desirable on the trip."

"What was it, then, about the development of capitalism that gave rise to modern racial ideology?"

"Behind their fluffy rhetoric about free trade and free markets lurks a hostility toward freedom for ordinary people — and a love affair with police and prisons."

"Contrary to liberal myth, Smith was not an apologist for capitalists. He argued in fact, that capitalists always seek "to deceive and oppress the public" by conspiring to inflate their prices and profits."

"The neoliberal utopia of unrestrained capitalism is being created by a war against the poor and the commons. In fact, the "new enclosures" are a sign that the struggles that marked the birth of capitalism are still very much alive."

"Common wealth is in the process of being transferred from the public domain to the private sector."

"Globalization is thus also about global commodification of labour; it is about — global proletarianization — the creation of a world working class for capital to exploit."

"In short, the rules of behaviour in capitalist society systematically produce irrational consequences."

"The fundamental truth about globalization — that it represents freedom for capital and unfreedom for labour — is especially clear where global migrants are concerned."

"The Greek philosopher Plato may have rejected the idea that "might makes right" some 2,500 years ago, but America and its allies today make it the cornerstone of foreign policy."

"In many respects, the Second World War was a continuation of the First, a conflict triggered by the mismatch between industrial power and imperial reach."

"Once capitalist classes learn to live with unions — which they generally do reluctantly, only after efforts to crush them have failed — they then attempt to co-opt organized labour. They do so by courting a "special relationship" with union leaders who, as their organizations become larger and more complex, typically assume the role of full time union functionaries."

"Genuine growth is always dialogical — it requires engagement in a dynamic, developing, and open-ended dialogue."

"A society that has moved beyond commodification is one that has embraced the most thoroughgoing radical democracy in all spheres of social life."

"Social movements will not develop if they refuse to name and define alternative possibilities."

"The suffering inflicted by this present order invariably produces a struggle to overcome it."

"At its heart, this book is about where this new left has come from, and where it might be going."

"When history moves — really moves — it does so in great convulsive jolts."

"To make history — to change the actual course of world events — is intoxicating, inspiring, and life-transforming."

"Corporate globalization and the economic agreements designed to entrench it have little to do with trade — and all but the most ignorant neo-liberal pundits surely know this too."

""Free trade" is a slogan used to attack practices designed by competitor economies to protect their own interests."

""Free trade" is a policy imposed on the weakest and evaded by the most powerful."

"Under , in other words, the right of corporations to bring thousands of tons of hazardous waste into local communities overrides the right of residents to protect their health."

"Put baldly, globalization has been nothing less than a mechanism for a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich — in other words, exactly what it is was designed to be."

"The Communist Party must be a revolutionary party or it will cease to be a Communist Party."

"I am proud that I have devoted all my life to the struggle for the triumph of Leninism."

"While speaking in Lloydminster Alberta/Saskatchewan, he was asked "Do you believe in God?" Tim Buck replied "Do you believe in Santa Claus?""

"[The Mac-Paps] covered the name of Canada with glory, from Jarama to the Ebro, in the greatest battles fought against fascism in the war."

"The key to the defeat and eventually the end of imperialism as a a whole is the unity of all socialist countries and progressive forces in capitalist countries."

"U.S. imperialism will be compelled to withdraw its troops, and to allow the people of Vietnam to settle their national affairs as they wish. Victory for the heroic people of Vietnam in their unwavering struggle to maintain their national independence will mark the end of the era during which great imperialist states were able to impose their will upon weaker peoples by brute force of arms. By virtue of that fact and the character of our epoch, it will open the floodgates for a great and widespread democratic advance all over the world."

"These men volunteered to fight against the German Kaiser's armies - not against Russian workers and peasants."

"For a time I gave the appearance of defending Stalin. I didn't defend what he had done; the fact is, nobody could defend the things that Khrushchev revealed."

"[Canada's ruling circles seek] to ally themselves more closely with American imperialism without giving up the economic advantages of membership in the British Empire."

"Now the battle for Canadian independence does have to be fought again, but against a new form of servitude. Our struggle today is different from that of the colonial peoples, fighting against national enslavement imposed upon them by the armed forces of foreign imperialists. We are threatened with complete national enslavement to a foreign power, but that power is not, at least not yet, imposing its control by the force of arms. Canada is being sold into United States control by "her own" ruling class; the parasitic, speculative, Canadian manipulators of stock market deals, politics and governmental concessions, who are enriching themselves by trading the national future of Canada for junior partnerships in the United States monopolies."

"In the course of waging that war, the people of Canada had shown that it was possible for them to maintain nearly a million men in uniform and at the same time expand all the facilities for production within Canada at an unprecedented speed, including building industries which had never existed in Canada before... and by and large the cost of production in Canada compared favourable with the cost of production anywhere else among the Allies... All of this was accomplished without any foreign investment, without and foreign loans... We were quite capable of self-development."

"Less than three months after Japanese capitulation... he discarded all the democratic concepts expressed by his predecessors wartime undertakings... He ditched the Roosevelt thesis and put in first place his declared determination to use the all the power of the government to enable United States imperialism to dominate the post-war world and organize it in its own image."

"It was clear to me that the invasion changed the whole possibilities of the outcome of the war."

"Fascist organizations were being generously financed by big business in various parts of the Country"