Socialists From The United States

"Until my imprisonment I had believed that except for Albert Parsons, Dyer D. Lum, Voltairine de Cleyre, and a few others America was barren of idealists. Her men and women cared only for material acquisitions, I had thought. John Swinton's account of the liberty-loving people who had been and still were in every struggle against oppression changed my superficial judgment."

"Man's legal rights are everywhere in collision with man's natural rights; hence the deep-rooted and wide-spread unrest of modern civilization. The only sacred right of property is the natural right of the working man to the product, which is the creation of his labor. The legal right of the capitalist to rent and interest and profit is the absolute denial of the natural right of labor."

"Anarchy is a free society where there is no concentrated or centralized power, no State, no king, no emperor, no ruler, no president, no magistrate, no potentate of any character whatever. Law is the enslaving power of man."

"Anarchy is the natural law, instead of the man-made statute, and gives men leaders in the place of [slave] drivers and bosses."

"This capitalistic system that we have to-day would not exist twenty-four hours if it were not held together by the bayonets and the clubs of the militia and police."

"The capitalistic system originated in the forcible seizure of natural opportunities and rights by a few, and then converting those things into special privileges which have since become vested rights, formally entrenched behind the bulwarks of statute law and government."

"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."

"Jefferson Davis admitted in his statement that the leather thong dipped in salt brine, for the chattel slave, had been exchanged under the wage slave system for the lash of hunger, an empty stomach and the ragged back of the wage-slave."

""Let the voice of the people be heard!" cried Parsons, as the noose tightened around his neck. It has been, it ever Will be on May Day, brave martyred hero of yesterday! This year the newly organized, victorious strikers of the International Harvester Works in Chicago will hallow your names on May first."

"First and foremost it is our opinion, or the opinion of an Anarchist, that government is despotism, government is an organization of oppression, and law, statute law is its agent. Anarchy is anti-government, anti-rulers, anti-dictators, anti-bosses and [slave] drivers. Anarchy is the negation of force; the elimination of all authority in social affairs; it is the denial of the right of domination of one man over another. It is the diffusion of rights, of power, of duties, equally and freely among the people."

"At this (IWW) convention I was thrilled to meet Mrs. Lucy Parsons, widow of Albert Parsons, who had been executed 20 years before in the yard of the Cook County Jail in the heart of Chicago. While he was hanged she was held a prisoner in the Clark Street Station House, not far from where we were then meeting... I remember Mrs. Parsons speaking warmly to the young people, warning us of the seriousness of the struggles ahead that could lead to jail and death before victory was won. For years she traveled from city to city, knocking on the doors of local unions and telling the story of the Chicago trial. Her husband had said: "Clear our names!" and she made this her lifelong mission."

"Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier turned anarchist firebrand"

"Albert Parsons, who was an important leader of the anarchist and labor movement in Chicago, and who actually had fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. He was a Southerner, but somehow he became radicalized as a labor leader and anarchist."

"I, with my comrades, heartily subscribe to the last words written by Albert R. Parsons, in his letter to me a few hours before his unforgotten death: “Hail to the Social Revolution!”"

"One explanation for the neglect of women's part in shaping The Masses and its content may lie in an image of the magazine constructed by its chroniclers. Indeed, the extent to which historians have neglected discussion of Masses women is quite remarkable. Daniel Aaron, in his Writers on the Left (1961), devotes some twenty pages to The Masses. He deals with Max Eastman, [[Floyd Dell, and Reed at considerable length, while mentioning the founding members Inez Haynes Irwin and Mary Heaton Vorse in a single line...More recent histories redress the balance somewhat-notably Judith Schwartz's study of women of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy club, many of whose members had ties with The Masses, and Art for The Masses, Rebecca Zurier's 1987 anthology of the work of Masses artists. Nancy Cott's frequent allusions to Masses women in The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987) indicate how very central to that grounding, to the shaping of turn-of-the-century feminist discourse, Masses women were. But in many imaginations, The Masses remains the project of Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed, Art Young, and Charles Winter."

"As one looks back across the shambles of the intervening decades, it is hard not to envy them: the fierce young Reed making his prose into a lyric of revolt, the handsome young Eastman mediating among a raucus of opinions, the cherubic Art Young drawing his revolutionary cartoons with the other worldly aplomb of a Bronson Alcott. History cannot be recalled, but in this instance at least, nostalgia seems a part of realism. For who among us, if enabled by some feat of imagination, would not change places with the men of The Masses in their days of glory?"

"Ch.1, p.19"

"I was probably the only person with whom she (Louise Bryant) talked freely and bitterly of Jack's experiences in Russia and his disillusion. She was convinced that this disillusion had robbed him of that will to live which might have saved his life."

"Sad news clouded our joy. In a Soviet paper we read of the death of John Reed. Both Sasha and I had been very fond of Jack and we felt his demise as a personal loss."

"When the land belongs to the peasants, and the factories to the workers, and the power to the Soviets, then we'll know we have something to fight for, and we'll fight for it!""

"Carlyle, in his French Revolution, has described the French people as distinguished above all others by their faculty of standing in queue. Russia had accustomed herself to the practice, begun in the reign of Nicholas the Blessed as long ago as 1915, and from then continued intermittently until the summer of 1917, when it settled down as the regular order of things."

"The ladies of the minor bureaucratic set took tea with each other in the afternoon, carrying each her little gold or silver or jewelled sugar-box, and half a loaf of bread in her muff, and wished that the Tsar were back, or that the Germans would come, or anything that would solve the servant problem…. The daughter of a friend of mine came home one afternoon in hysterics because the woman street-car conductor had called her "Comrade!"

"John Reed had burst into my room like a sudden ray of light, the old buoyant, adventurous Jack that I used to know in the States. He was about to return to America, by way of Latvia. Rather a hazardous journey, he said, but he would take even greater risks to bring the inspiring message of Soviet Russia to his native land. "Wonderful, marvellous, isn't it, E.G.?" he exclaimed. "Your dream of years now realized in Russia, your dream scorned and persecuted in my country, but made real by the magic wand of Lenin and his band of despised Bolsheviks. Did you ever expect such a thing to happen in the country ruled by the tsars for centuries?" "Not by Lenin and his comrades, dear Jack," I corrected, "though I do not deny their great part. But by the whole Russian people, preceded by a glorious revolutionary past. No other land of our days has been so literally nurtured by the blood of her martyrs, a long procession of pioneers who went to their death that new life may spring from their graves." Jack insisted that the young generation cannot for ever be tied to the apron-strings of the old, particularly when those strings are tightly drawn around its throat. "Look at your old pioneers, the Breshkovskayas and Tchaikovskys, the Chernovs and Kerenskys and the rest of them," he cried heatedly; "see where they are now! With the Black Hundreds, the Jew-baiters, and the ducal clique, aiding them to crush the Revolution. I don't give a damn for their past. I am concerned only in what the treacherous gang has been doing during the past three years. To the wall with them! I say. I have learned one mighty expressive Russian word, 'razstrellyat'!" (execute by shooting)."

"A soldier was speaking - from the Five Hundred and Forty-eight Division, wherever and whatever that was: "Comrades," he cried, and there was real anguish in his drawn face and despairing gestures. "The people at the top are always calling upon us to sacrifice more, sacrifice, while those who have everything are left unmolested. We are at war with Germany. Would we invite German generals to serve on our Staff? Well we're at war with the capitalists too, and yet we invite them into our Government...""

"In the struggle my sympathies were not neutral. But in telling the story of those great day I have tried to see events with the eye of a conscientious reporter, interested insetting down the truth."

"So, with the crash of artillery, in the dark, with hatred, and fear, and reckless daring, new Russia was being born."

"For a brief time, roughly between 1912 and 1918, The Masses became the rallying center-as sometimes also a combination of circus, nursery, and boxing ring-for almost everything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture. In its pages you could find brilliant artists and cartoonists, like John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Art Young; one of the best journalists in our history, John Reed (journalist), a writer full of an indignation against American injustice that was itself utterly American; a shrewd and caustic propagandist like Max Eastman; some gifted writers of fiction, like Sherwood Anderson; and one of the few serious theoretical minds American socialism has produced, William English Walling. All joined in a rumpus of revolt, tearing to shreds the genteel tradition that had been dominant in American culture, poking fun at moral prudishness and literary timidity, mocking the deceits of bourgeois individualism, and preaching a peculiarly uncomplicated version of the class struggle. There has never been, and probably never will again be, another radical magazine in the U. S. quite like The Masses, with its slapdash gathering of energy, youth, hope."

"I suddenly realized that the devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer, and for which it was a glory to die…."

"Among the most important allies of the American working class are the Negro people. There can be no proletarian revolution unless it is accompanied by the liberation of the Negro people who, more than any other section of the population, are doubly oppressed and exploited by capitalism."

"The close connection between local political machines and control of election machinery by gunmen, is an organic part of the political set up. The murder and wounding of hundreds of strike pickets in the last three years are another feature of the same development. The lynching of Negroes, especially in the South, is part of the whole menacing complex of political reaction. The assassination of Huey Long is thus the eruption of this underworld into the upper circles of the ruling class which has long made organized use of it as a daily part of their rule over masses."

"The revolutionary tradition is the heart of Americanism. That is incontestable, unless we are ready to agree that Americanism means what Hearst says - slavery to outlived institutions, preservation of privilege, the degradation of the masses. We Communists claim the revolutionary traditions of Americanism. We are the only ones who consciously continue those traditions and apply them to the problems of the day."

"In a situation of deepening misery, when a great population becomes restless and anxious for change, the door is open not only to struggles against the capitalists who are responsible for their sufferings, but also to a mobilization of the masses against their own interests, and in the interests of the most predatory section of the capitalist class. this is the danger that we face in the United States today. It would be foolish to think that the monopolists and bankers in the Liberty League, with their tremendous resources, cannot win a mass following for fascism. Already reaction has produced a whole series of semi-fascist demagogues , and has even, in fear of its own creation, assassinated one of them. These demagogues make the wildest promises to the toilers and by playing on their discontent hope to rally them behind the black banner of reaction. To underestimate this grave danger is to commit a crime against all toilers, since it would mean failing to warn and organize them against the fascist menace which would destroy their living standards, their civil liberties, and all their organizations - economic, social and cultural, which would, in short throw humanity back into the dark ages."

"We in America are a mongrel breed and we glory in it. We are the products of he melting pot of a couple hundred nationalities. Our origin as a nation acknowledged is debt to a Polish Kosciusko, a German Von Steuden,, a French Lafayette and countless other "foreigners"."

"We are determined to save our country from the hell of capitalism."

"The greatest figure of them all in the American tradition, Abraham Lincoln, became great because he, despite his own desire to avoid or compromise the struggle, was forced by history to lead to victory a long and bloody civil war whose chief historical significance was the wiping out of chattel slavery, the destruction of private property rights in persons, amending the Constitution in the only way it has ever been fundamentally amended."

"It is obvious to everyone that the capitalist system is breaking down, that millions of people are condemned to a life of slow starvation because the capitalists can profitably operate only a small part of the existing means of production. But it would be a fatal mistake to conclude that the capitalist social order will simply collapse under its own weight, or that the capitalists will peacefully surrender their present power and then all of us will join together in the building of a new social system. No ruling class group has ever behaved in such peaceful fashion. As the crisis becomes worse, the more desperately will the capitalists cling to their property and their power, the more murderous will become their attacks on the masses of the people. It must be emphasized that capitalism will not simply come to an end; it can only be ended by the organized actions of the working class in collaboration with its allies from other sections of the population."

"If one wants to fight against fascism and war, the first battle that must be Won is to drive out Trotskyism and its influence from the ranks of the workers, farmers, and intellectuals. Without this victory over every Trotskyist influence, unity in the fight against fascism and war-unity which is the condition for any success is impossible."

"This ego-maniac firebrand is running through a world full of war-explosives, applying his torch wherever he may, hoping for nothing so much as a new world war from which alone he sees his hopes of glory and power."

"The Soviet Union has come forward in truth as the helper and inspirer of all the oppressed, because it has never wavered in its loyalty to the great teachings of Marx and Engels, because it has Lenin as its founder, and because after Lenin's death it found in Stalin a worthy successor and continuer of Lenin's work, who could not only guide the actual construction of socialism but also protect it against every enemy, at home and abroad."

"On every issue, Trotskyism enters as the poison to block unity among the workers and their organizations, to break- up the People's Front, to help the reactionaries and fascists, and, above all, to prepare the ground for war."

"This book is a slice of intensified history - history as I saw it. It does not pretend to be anything but a detailed account of the November Revolution, when the Bolsheviki, at the head of the workers and soldiers, seized the sate power of Russia and placed it in the hands of the Soviets."

"The truth is, if you insist on knowing, Mr. Hearst, we Communists like this country very much. We cannot think of any other spot on the globe where we would rather be than exactly this one. We love our country. Our affection is all the more deep in that we have watered it with the sweat of our labor- labor which made this country what it is: our mothers nourished it with the tears they shed over the troubles and tragedies of rearing babies in a land controlled by profit and profit makers. If we did not love our country so much, perhaps we would surrender it to Wall Street."

"Instead of being a destructive force, it seems tome that the Bolsheviki were the only party in Russia with a constructive program and the power to impose it on the country. If they had not succeeded to the Government when they did, there is little doubt in my mind that the armies of Imperial Germany would have been in Petrograd and Moscow in December, and Russia would again be ridden by a Tsar."

"No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism, it is undeniable that the Russian Revolution s one of the great events of human history, and the rise of the Bolsheviki a phenomenon of worldwide importance."

"I look inside myself and ask, do I feel like a man, or a woman, and the answer is that I feel like shit."

"To be a famous woman is to constantly have every part of your body and soul subjected to endless critique. You know, if you're one pound overweight they call you "fatty". If you're one pound underweight they say you have an eating disorder. And if you're exactly the right weight? They call you a fatty with an eating disorder!"

"Men often slut-shame because they want to control female sexuality. And by female sexuality, I do mean male sexuality. Because often what they're really struggling to control is their own desire."

"What is the connection between alpha and racism? Well, here's one idea. Calling yourself "alpha" basically means that you fetishize male dominance, which likely means that you're extremely anti-feminist, and extreme anti-feminism is often coupled with racism because these beliefs are not as separate as they seem. In fact they form two parts of the white nationalist world-view where the third part is anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism is important because it helps explain why the supposedly naturally dominant white males are losing power to women and minorities. See, the core of the white nationalist world-view is concerned for the purity of white women. This leads to anti-feminism on the one hand because feminism is seen as a threat to traditional gender roles, that make white women subservient and loyal to white men. Non-white races are viewed as a threat to the purity of white women because they're often viewed as barbaric, dangerous, unclean and brutish. This is why xenophobes place so much emphasis on the sexual danger non-white immigrants pose to white women and it's why you'll see endless discussion of news events that validate this fear in white nationalist circles. But notice that this world-view is in need of an explanation for why the supposedly inferior races pose such a serious threat to the supposedly superior whites. Well, this is where the Jews come in. Anti-Semitism is different from other forms of racism in that, instead of being resented for being supposedly brutish and stupid, the Jews are resented for being smart, but in an evil duplicitous cunning sort of way. So the idea is that a Jewish elite is poisoning white society with ideas like multiculturalism, feminism and "Cultural Marxism", thereby leaving it vulnerable to the so-called third world invasion and it seems to me that this world-view is becoming increasingly common which is worrying since, funny though it may be on the fringe, with the wrong mix of power and desperation, the conclusion of these peoples' world view is genocide."

"We have a psychological incentive to believe that people whom we envy are immoral monsters because then we get to label our hatred and violence towards them "justice"."

"This catalogue aria [from Mozart’s Don Giovanni] is what a boring white weirdo named Kierkegaard called the most epic moment of the opera. It’s the moment that we learn that Don Giovanni is not just a predator, but that he’s actually fucking insane. He doesn’t care whether the women are young or old, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor, he seduces them all the same, just to satisfy his manic urge to add them to the list. In the 21st century there are men who are really like this. They’re called Pick-Up Artists, and they want you to buy their erotic memoirs."