Politik

"No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: "No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into.""

"Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children."

"This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor."

"I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic."

"The socialist economy has become so strong, so vigorous that from the summits we have reached we can issue an open challenge of peaceful economic competition to the most powerful capitalist country—the United States of America."

"The failure of capitalism is still much better than the success of socialism."

""Socialism with a human face"? ... Frankenstein also had a human face."

"‘Socialism’ is a 19th century idea with a 20th century history."

"We have to say yes to socialism — to the word and everything ... Medicare for all, ending student debt, a different approach to the war on terror, ending mass incarceration."

"China's success proves that socialism is not dead. It is thriving. Just imagine this: had socialism failed in China, had our communist party collapsed like the party in the Soviet Union, then global socialism would lapse into a long dark age. And communism, like Karl Marx once said, would be a haunting spectre lingering in limbo."

"This isn't new. Those who favor socialism always make the moral case for it. The truth is, maybe they actually believe in it, but in the real world, socialism harms, it weakens the economies of countries that have tried it. It just does. Weaker economies hurt everybody in them. Socialism kills incentive, opportunity, freedom. It is the opposite of what America is all about. Look, socialism always harms the people it claims to help the most. It handicaps them, leaving them weaker, less self-determined, less free. We should have this debate out in the open."

"Today, the reading of Lenin shows that he never at any time allowed himself to slip from seeing socialism as proletarian power, using all necessary and objective forms but carefully distinguishing the fundamental universal of proletarian power from the concrete molds into which history had forced that specific revolution. For Lenin the readiness of Russia for socialism was the appearance of the Soviet, a new form of social organization."

"Often intellectuals turn toward Marx and Lenin and Hegel. They meet Stalinism which spends incredible time, care, energy and vigilance in holding Marx and Lenin within the bounds of their private-property state-property philosophy. The Stalinists repeat interminably that dialectics is the transformation of quantity into quality, leaps, breaks in continuity, opposition of capitalism and socialism. It is part and parcel of their determination to represent state-property as revolutionary. In 1917, when the struggle in the working class movement was between reform and revolution, these conceptions may have been debatable. Today all arguments fade into insignificance in face of the actuality. The critical question today, which the Stalinists must avoid like the revolution, is how was the October Revolution transformed into its opposite, the Stalinist counter-revolution, and how is this counter-revolution in turn to be transformed into its opposite. This is the dialectical law which Lenin mastered between 1914 and 1917, the negation of the negation, the self-mobilization of the proletariat as the economics and politics of socialism."

"The steps of Hegel’s decline are here undeviatingly retraced. Hegel, who did not know the socialized proletariat, began by regarding all history as the history of the philosopher, of consciousness and self-consciousness, and ended with the state bureaucracy. The Stalinists use almost the identical phrases. The proletariat’s role in the struggle for socialism is to work harder and harder, while the leadership and organization are left to the "criticism and self-criticism” of the elite, the bureaucracy, the party. Everything depends on the party, on the bureaucracy’s consciousness and self-consciousness of correctness and incorrectness, its direction, its control, its foresight. The masses are merely at the disposal of the party as they are at the disposal of capital."

"Marxism is not only the theory of Socialism, but also an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism."

"The true Anarchist decries all influences save those of love and reason. Ideas are his only arms.Being an Anarchist I am also a Socialist. Socialism is the antithesis of Anarchy. One is the North Pole of Truth, the other the South. The Socialist believes in working for the good of all, while Anarchy is pure Individualism. I believe in every man working for the good of self; and in working for the good of self, he works for the good of all. To think, to see, to feel, to know; to deal justly; to bear all patiently; to act quietly; to speak cheerfully; to moderate one's voice—these things will bring you the highest good. They will bring you the love of the best, and the esteem of that Sacred Few, whose good opinion alone is worth cultivating. And further than this, it is the best way you can serve Society—live your life. The wise way to benefit humanity is to attend to your own affairs, and thus give other people an opportunity to look after theirs.If there is any better way to teach virtue than by practicing it, I do not know it."

"Misesian economics shows that socialism fails because it violates the irrefutable laws of economics-among them the law of exchange, the law of diminishing marginal utility, the Ricardian law of association, the law of price controls, and the quantity theory of money-which can be deduced from the axiom of action by means of applied logic. And thus we can know-beforehand and absolutely-what the consequences of socialism will be wherever it is tried."

"The empirical evidence shows that socialism is an obvious failure. And the cause of socialism's failure is crystal clear: there is almost no private ownership of the means of production, and almost all factors of production are owned in common in precisely the same way that Americans own the Postal Service."

"Only in a socialist system are the interests of the individual, the state and the collective at one."

"As we have seen, the historical record is clear that public planning and socialist policy can be effective at delivering rapid economic, technological, and social development. Rediscovering the power of this approach will be essential if Global South governments are to increase their economic sovereignty and mobilize production to ensure decent lives for all. Achieving this objective requires building political movements of the Southern working classes and peasantries powerful enough to replace governments that currently are captured by political factions aligned with national or international capital; reducing reliance on core creditors, currencies, and imports; and establishing South-South alliances capable of withstanding any retaliation. Progressive formations in the core should be prepared to support and defend these movements."

"Socialism and rationalism are to this day the touchstones of humanity, the rocks which lie in the course of revolution and science."

"Our captured institutions, subservient to the rich and the powerful, are capitulating to Trump’s authoritarianism. All we have left is sustained non-violent, disruptive civil disobedience. Mass movements. Radical politics. Rebellion. A socialist vision that counters the poison of unfettered capitalism. This alone can thwart Trump’s police state and rid us of the feckless liberal class that sustains it."

"Socialism has taught many people that they possess claims irrespective of performance, irrespective of participation. In the light of the morals that produced the extended order of civilisation, socialists in fact incite people to break the law."

"Socialism assumes that all the available knowledge can be used by a single central authority. It overlooks that the model society which I now prefer to call the extended order which exceeds the perception of any individual mind is based on the utilization of widely dispersed knowledge, and once you are aware that we can achieve that great utilization of available resources only because we utilize the knowledge of millions of men, it becomes clear that the assumption of socialism is that a central authority in command of all this knowledge is just not correct!"

"I've always doubted that the socialists had a leg to stand on intellectually. They have improved their argument somehow, but once you begin to understand that prices are an instrument of communication and guidance which embody more information than we directly have, the whole idea that you can bring about the same order based on the division of labor by simple direction falls to the ground. Similarly, the idea [that] you can arrange for distributions of incomes which correspond to some conception of merit or need. If you need prices, including the prices of labor, to direct people to go where they are needed, you cannot have another distribution except the one from the market principle. I think that intellectually there is just nothing left of socialism."

"History is one long record of like illustrations. Must our modern civilisation with all its teeming wonders come to a like end? We are reproducing in faithful detail every cause which led to the downfall of the civilisations of other days—Imperialism, taking tribute from conquered races, the accumulation of great fortunes, the development of a population which owns no property, and is always in poverty. Land has gone out of cultivation and physical deterioration is an alarming fact. An so we Socialists say the system which is producing these results must not be allowed to continue. A system which has robbed religion of its saviour, destroyed handicraft, which awards the palm of success to the unscrupulous, corrupts the press, turns pure women on the streetsm and upright men into mean-spirited time-servers, cannot continue. In the end it is bound to work its own overthrow. Socialism with its promise of freedom, its larger hope for humanity, its triumph of peace over war, its binding of the races of the earth into one all-embracing brotherhood, must prevail. Capitalism is the creed of the dying present; socialism throbs with the life of the days that are to be. It has claimed its martyrs in the past, is claiming them now, will claim them still; but what then? Better to "rebel and die in the twenty worlds sooner than bear the yoke of thwarted life.""

"Socialism proposes to dethrone the brute-god Mammon and to lift humanity into its place."

"Socialism cannot exist without a change in consciousness resulting in a new fraternal attitude toward humanity, both at an individual level, within the societies where socialism is being built or has been built, and on a world scale, with regard to all peoples suffering from imperialist oppression."

"For us there is no valid definition of socialism other than the abolition of the exploitation of one human being by another."

"[W]herever socialism has teeth, it veers closer to gangsterism because it depends on the use of arbitrary power, either by the state or, in essence, the mob."

"Marxist socialism was degraded to a concern only with pay or the stomach. The bourgeoisie degraded nationalism into barren hyper-patriotism. Both concepts, therefore, must be cleansed and shown to the people anew, in a crystal-clear form. The nationalism of our worldview arrived at the right moment. Our movement seized the concept of socialism from the cowardly Marxists, and tore the concept of nationalism from the cowardly bourgeois parties, throwing both into the melting pot of our worldview, and producing a clear synthesis: German national Socialism. That provided the foundation for the rebuilding of our people. Thus this revolution was National Socialist."

"Just as nationalism protects a people from outside forces, so socialism serves a people's domestic needs. We want the people's strength to be released within the nation, forging the people once more into a strong block. The individual citizen must again have the sense that, even if he is finds himself in the simplest and lowest position, that his life and opportunities are assured."

"We are living through a National Socialist revolution. We emphasize the term “socialist” because many speak only of a “national” revolution. Dubious, but also wrong. It was not only nationalism that led to the breakthrough. We are proud that German socialism also triumphed. Unfortunately, there are still people among us today who emphasize the word “national” too strongly and who do not want to know anything about the second part of our worldview, which shows that they have also failed to understand the first part. Those who do not want to recognize a German socialism do not have the right to call themselves national."

"Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life."

"What does anti-Semitism have to do with socialism? I would put the question this way: What does the Jew have to do with socialism? Socialism has to do with labor. When did one ever see him working instead of plundering, stealing and living from the sweat of others? As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation’s goods."

"The value of labor under socialism will be determined by its value to the state, to the whole community. Labor means creating value, not haggling over things."

"Socialism is possible only in a state that is united domestically and free internationally. The bourgeoisie and Marxism are responsible for failing to reach both goals, domestic unity and international freedom. No matter how national and social these two forces present themselves, they are the sworn enemies of a socialist national state."

"The sin of liberal thinking was to overlook socialism’s nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions. The sin of Marxism was to degrade socialism into a question of wages and the stomach, putting it in conflict with the state and its national existence. An understanding of both these facts leads us to a new sense of socialism, which sees its nature as nationalistic, state-building, liberating and constructive."

"Socialism is the doctrine of liberation for the working class. It promotes the rise of the fourth class and its incorporation in the political organism of our Fatherland, and is inextricably bound to breaking the present slavery and regaining German freedom. Socialism, therefore, is not merely a matter of the oppressed class, but a matter for everyone, for freeing the German people from slavery is the goal of contemporary policy. Socialism gains its true form only through a total fighting brotherhood with the forward-striving energies of a newly awakened nationalism. Without nationalism it is nothing, a phantom, a mere theory, a castle in the sky, a book. With it it is everything, the future, freedom, the fatherland!"

"Socialism will become reality when the Fatherland is free."

"Throughout much of the twentieth century, state socialism presented an existential challenge to the worst excesses of the free market. The threat posed by Marxist ideologies forced Western governments to expand social safety nets to protect workers from the unpredictable but inevitable booms and busts of the capitalist economy. After the Berlin Wall fell, many celebrated the triumph of the West, consigning socialist ideas to the dustbin of history. But for all its faults, state socialism provided an important foil for capitalism. It was in response to a global discourse of social and economic rights—a discourse that appealed not only to the progressive populations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America but also to many men and women in Western Europe and North America—that politicians agreed to improve working conditions for wage laborers as well as create social programs for children, the poor, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled, mitigating exploitation and the growth of income inequality. Although there were important antecedents in the 1980s, once state socialism collapsed, capitalism shook off the constraints of market regulation and income redistribution. Without the looming threat of a rival superpower, the last thirty years of global neoliberalism have witnessed a rapid shriveling of social programs that protect citizens from cyclical instability and financial crises and reduce the vast inequality of economic outcomes between those at the top and bottom of the income distribution."

"I was gradually beginning to understand how society works. Up until then the true shape of reality had been thinly veiled, but now it all began to become clear. I understood why someone poor like myself could never study and get ahead in this world, why, too, the rich got richer and the powerful were able to do anything they liked. I knew that what socialism preached was true. But I could not accept socialist thought in its entirety. Socialism seeks to change society for the sake of the oppressed masses, but is what it would accomplish truly for their welfare? Socialism would create a social upheaval “for the masses,” and the masses would stake their lives in the struggle together with those who had risen up on their behalf. But what would the ensuing change mean for them? Power would be in the hands of the leaders, and the order of the new society would be based on that power. The masses would become slaves allover again to that power. What is revolution, then, but the replacing of one power with another?"

"I had imagined that socialists were people that rose above the meaningless customs and morality of the society. I imagined them to be courageous fighters with no interest in so-called fame and honor and social reputation. I thought they were warriors fighting to destroy the perverted society of today and striving to create an ideal society. However, even though the denounce the irrational and hypocritical aspects of the society, and pretend that they are indifferent to s and to fame and reputation, they in fact governed by and are concerned about the standards of the mundane society. They seek to adorn themselves with conventional ornaments, and take upon themselves conventional values. Just as generals take pride in the medals on their chests, socialists covet records of arrests in order to earn their bread. They take pride in this. When I realized this fact I gave up on them."

"[A] society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom."

"In the ideal , power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias towards their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own ends. And the rivers will run uphill."

"Marx argued that all human history was dominated by a tussle for the wealth between classes, one of which took the wealth, and used it to exploit the others. As science and technology developed, so one exploiting class was replaced by another that used the resources of society more efficiently. The necessity for exploitation, he observed, had ended with capitalism. If the working class, the masses who cooperate to produce the wealth, could seize the means of production from the capitalist class, they could put an end to exploitation forever and run society on the lines of the famous slogan: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’"

"Louis Napoleon] is a socialist and socialism is the new fashionable name of slavery. ... [His] Queen is providing nurseries and nurses for the children of working women, just as we Southerners do for our negro women and children. It is a great economy."

"The first thing that happened when the European powers went to war was the collapse of the Socialist International. No European socialist party had called the working class out in a general strike against the war and the SPD (by far Europe’s most powerful socialist party) had in early August 1914 unanimously voted its government war credits; the French followed suit. Socialist workers were aligned by their parties behind the war effort of each European government and socialist internationalism revealed itself to be a myth. But the situation in Italy proved to be radically different."

"Slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism."

"The lies peddled about Venezuela’s past make US US aggression against it possible in the present. It is worth summing up some of these key lies: Venezuela was once prosperous and ruined by socialism. In fact, Venezuela was an unequal country in which most people were poor despite the country’s oil wealth, which had generated huge export revenues since the 1920s. Venezuela was a democracy before Chavismo. In fact, Venezuela’s democracy was a gravely flawed system in which politicians alternated holding power according to an undemocratic agreement, and rammed austerity down the throats of Venezuela’s poor by committing massacres, such as the Caracazo...Chávez... came to power through an election in 1998, and afterward made changes through extensive democratic processes."