James Petras

"The future of popular-based social and economic changes does not he in parliamentary elections, given their elitist structure and the control exercised over the process. Movement politics linked to electoral campaigns has no future; nor does simple direct action in defense of particular local terrain. The future of movements must be rooted in creating autonomous electoral power anchored and coordinated with regional or national movements of direct action—dress rehearsals for creating a new state power response to civil society."

"The inefficiency of the state is directly related to its subordination to private interests."

"Most dictatorships have been anti-statist and pro-free market, today and in the past and probably in the future."

"...The counter-position of “civil society” to the state is also a false dichotomy. Much of the discussion of civil society overlooks the basic social contradictions that divide “civil society”. Civil society or, more accurately, the leading classes of civil society, while attacking the “statism” of the poor have always made a major point of strengthening their ties to the treasury and military to promote and protect their dominant position in “civil society”. Likewise, the popular classes in civil society when aroused have sought to break the ruling classes’ monopoly of the state. The poor have always looked to state resources to strengthen their socio-economic position in relation to the rich. The issue is and always has been the relation of different classes to the state."

"...The problem, we are told, is not foreign investments or foreign aid but their absence and they ask for more imperial aid. The political and economic myopia that accompanies this perspective fails to understand that the political conditions for the loans and investment is the cheapening of labour, the elimination of social legislation and the transformation of Latin America into one big plantation, one big mining camp, one big free trade zone stripped of rights, sovereignty and wealth."

"By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectors of the neo-liberal ruling classes realised that their policies were polarising the society and provoking large-scale social discontent. Neo-liberal politicians began to finance and promote a parallel strategy of “from below”, the promotion of “grassroots” organisation with an “anti-statist” ideology to intervene among potentially conflicting classes, to create a “social cushion”. These organisations were financially dependent on neo-liberal sources and were directly involved in competing with socio-political movements for the allegiance of local leaders and activist communities. By the 1990s these organisations, described as “non-governmental”, numbered in the thousands and were receiving close to US$4 billion world-wide."

"In fact, the industrial workers and in particular their trade unions have been the least active and least militant component of the anti-imperialist movements…"

"Anti-imperialist movements are no longer middle class dominated nationalist movements, they are class-based because imperialism is embedded in everyday work and household survival."

"Proclaiming 19th Century ‘liberalism’, British opium addicted over 50 million Chinese in less than a decade."

"Competition over shrinking resources intensifies conflict over shares of a shrinking pie."

"The trade unions, narrowly focused on everyday issues and their immediate membership, ignored the mass of unemployed, especially the young unemployed, workers."

"Class struggle according to the most up-to-date speeches of the labor bureaucrats was superseded by modern pragmatic understandings of the common interests of labor and capital."

"The so-called Eurozone is, in reality, a mini-empire of tributary vassals and imperial states reforming empires has been historically demonstrated to be a futile enterprise."

"In the short run there can only be international solidarity among the workers in the vassal states: the workers in the imperial states – the U.S., Germany, the Nordic states and the UK are still bound and tied to their respected ruling classes."

"James Petras is the undisputed foremost authority on the global and regional dynamics of US imperialism."

"...As always with Petras, there is much repetition/recycling of articles/ideas,much polemic and hot air but also a genuine engagement with the issues of revol-utionary transformation in Latin America, albeit from the perspective of the privi-leged peripatetic professor from the North."