socialists-from-the-united-states

"Aye, think! Since time and life began, Your mind has only feared and slept; Of all the beasts they called you man Only because you toiled and wept."

"Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as “wealth building” public policy."

"Elect more communists."

"I think that some of those things are certainly not how I would say things today and are regretful. But I do think my decades of experience fighting for more affordable housing stands on its own. [...] I’m proud to be in this role fighting for stronger tenants rights, and I think that, for many years, people have been locked out of the property market. That has produced a lot of systematic and racial inequalities in our system. And I want to make sure that everybody has a safe and affordable place to live, whether they rent or own, and that is something I am laser-focused on in this role."

"There is no such thing as a “good” gentrifier, only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and people who aren't."

"Impoverish the *white* middle class. Homeownership is racist / failed public policy."

"Really needing to repress the desire for revenge rn. I wish I believed in god so I could believe that all men who take credit for women's work and all white men who take credit for the work of women of color would one day burn."

"Seize private property!"

"Rights, contrary to the handicapitalist opinion, are not "altruistic." Civil rights laws, though certainly not a complete remedy for the inequality described here, are an important element in the struggle in building oppressed groups' economic parity under capitalism."

"Disabled people (an eighth of the world population) remain the most impoverished, the least likely to rise above subsistence in every nation in the world. The wee middle class of disabled persons in the US does not exist in many countries. In the underdeveloped nations disabled people have no rights, no ADA. They can be found sleeping on sidewalks without wheelchairs, crutches, or other goods they need to live a life with dignity (not that we don't have this in the US, too). There are no curb cuts in Africa or Asia and very few in Western Europe. There are no accessible buses to provide transport to a job. Disabled people in the US only have what little we have now because we have struggled for our rights. Holding up yuppie lifestyle consumerism-handicapitalism-as a solution to disabled people" problems in the face of such reality is a terrible hoax."

"disabled peoples' movements seek to overturn the assertion that disability is pathological in health terms and a social problem in welfare terms. Disabled persons want to be citizens with human rights."

"There can be no democracy without economic democracy"

"Discounting the value of rights, the handicapitalists hold that in order for disabled people to be tolerated by our capitalist society, rights must be subsumed to the profit motive. Under this philosophy, social success will be ours when disabled persons gain status as consumers with enough buying power to command it. But where does the buying power reside; who really controls it and who benefits?"

"Today the journey is ended, I have worked out the mandates of fate; Naked, alone, undefended, I knock at the Uttermost Gate. Behind is life and its longing, Its trial, its trouble, its sorrow, Beyond is the Infinite Morning Of a day without a tomorrow."

"The ADA and equal opportunity is a non-solution for a capitalist society wherein the disabled workers and would-be workers, by definition, do not have the social or political power to realize their economic wants. Power lies at production, with the owners of capital, and the Supreme Court is one manifestation of that power."

"Let the market rule? Unless disabled people see ourselves as active creators of equality (which means undoing capitalism, which can never be made equitable) we will be doomed to be tools of the owning class, and our people, like other oppressed groups, will remain impoverished."

"It is one thing to commit crimes against property, and a vastly different thing to commit crimes in behalf of property. Such is the edict of a system inspired by the sway of property."

"I am a real representative of the working class because I earn my living by my actual manual labor."

"In a thoughtful request, Johns’s fellow Comrade Stromquist asked that the funeral service be held at the public library. He said of the unusual appeal "the library is a temple of knowledge; it was to this place that Comrade Johns often came not only in his capacity of a teacher of science in the lecture rooms, but to seek knowledge. I can think of no place so appropriate to bury him from.""

"For weeks afterward, memorials flooded into the offices of The Weekly People from around the country. "Now Johns has left us — left under circumstances so heroic, so humane, and so dramatic that, however much we may futilely rebel at the combination of events that conspired to snatch him away, we still dare not regret the event itself," wrote a contributor to one such memorial. "To wish that Frank had in that moment done otherwise than he did would be to wish he had been another than he was. Being the Johns we knew, fearless, noble, unselfish, and self-sacrificing for humanity’s sake to the very depth of his being, he could not have done otherwise.""

"I believe in the use of the ballot, but, if the will of the people who are workers cannot prevail, then let us apply force. By force I do not mean physical force, such as shooting or mob attacks, but rather the use of industrial pressure by means of one big union."

"The young presidential candidate, representing an obscure branch of socialism, died in a failed effort to save a drowning boy in the cold waters. While Johns’s political party, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) — a distinct and separate entity from the better-known Socialist Party of America (SPA) — is little more than a footnote in American political history, the man died a hero and was posthumously awarded the Carnegie Medal."

"Between June 1945 and September 1946, fifty-six African American veterans were lynched. The actual death toll was far greater. The Klan, as part of and in league with the police, had developed a terrible new weapon. Outspoken Blacks simply disappeared."

"The myth of Minnesota liberalism made the reality of rigid segregation in the city all the more unbearable, but since they knew very little of the fight for freedom raging through China, India, the East Indies, Indochina and the Philippines, they could only imagine a fight within the system."

"After we have taken over the United States Steel Corporation, Mr. Gary, if he wants to keep his job, might possibly do so, but we would not pay him $800,000 a year."

"According to my idea, we shall never reach the millenium. We shall never have any heaven on earth. We shall always have great problems to solve. But we shall have an infinitely higher civilization than we have now."

"American Magazine declared in 1912 that he was "The sanest and most influential Socialist in this country.""

"It is true that interesting historical document, the Declaration of Independence, says that "all men are born free and equal." But that was not so, even at the time when the sentence was written. It is less so now."

"Victor Luitpold Berger, the first member of the Socialist party ever to sit in a United States Congress, was a disappointment to those who imagined a man of his views to be a bearded, bomb-tossing anarchist haunting the bourgeois world. His life was a model of respectability. It included such unlikely vocations as punching cattle and high-school teaching. As a member of the Sixty-second Congress, 1911-1913, Berger peered at his colleagues in the House of Representatives from behind thin-rimmed spectacles with a bearing that was courteous and dignified to the point of stodginess. The end for Berger was equally respectable: instead of falling behind the barricades clutching the red flag of the proletariat, he was run over by a Milwaukee streetcar!"

"Socialism is the next phase of civilization, if civilization is to survive."

"It is foolish to expect results from riots and dynamite, from murderous attacks and conspiracies, in a country where we have the ballot, as long as the ballot has not been given a full and fair trial."

"Unless plutocracy can persuade the majority of the people to close up the public schools and make illiterates of the next generation, and unless it can also persuade them to give up the electoral franchise, plutocracy is doomed. So much is clear. And that is the reason why we Socialists can look with such equanimity and complacence into the future. The future belongs to some form of Socialism."

"The Socialists expect to keep all that is good or useful in the capitalist system and leave it as a heritage to the next generation. And the Socialists will destroy nothing that they can not replace by something better or more beneficial."

"It will depend on our rulers whether we shall have an orderly evolution, which I have always preached and propagated, or a violent revolution, which we Socialists have always tried to avoid."

"I would rather use a hundred years to bring about a new world, a better world, by evolution, with all the blessings of civilization, than bring it about by a bloody revolution, as they have in Russia, by shooting down about 30,000 men and women."

"This is the first instance in the history of the world that the oppressed class has virtually the same political basis as the ruling class."

"This country is divided into classes as much as any monarchial country. Therefore, the working class—the men and women who work either with their brains or their hands—must have a party of their own to take care of their interests of their own class."

"Like every new phase of civilization, Socialism thus far has received the attention only of the oppressed and the lowly. The opulent and the rich have no reason to wish for a change of the present system. They do not, as a rule, want to hear anything about it. Until of late, outside of the working class, only students of history, of political economy, and a few advanced thinkers have given any attention to the principles of Socialism. Most other persons have only a very vague idea even of its basis."

"In Berger's analysis the old Russian order had refused to reform democratically. The result was violent revolution instead of peaceful evolution."

"And even that violent upheaval was only due to the fact that in Russia the autocracy was stupid, ignorant, and corrupt. In Russia the ruling class looked upon government and public trust as nothing but huge sources of profits and plunder. This is also a warning for other countries where the ruling class is ignorant, more or less stupid, and corrupt: where there is constant profiteering, based upon bribery, direct or indirect, by hiring ex-Cabinet members as "attorneys" for big corporations."

"Political parties are simply the expression of economic interests."

"The working class has nothing to hope from either the Republican party or the Democratic party. It is true that the representatives of these parties may be, and very often are, very cultured and accomplished gentlemen. Most of them are honest. However, they represent the capitalistic system, and the more honest and consistent they are—the more loyal they are to their class."

"They’ve been defining authenticity for so long, but they’re outside the sphere of mainstream political opinion. My fantasy is to flip the script. Why don’t we start admitting the obvious? That we are the authentic Jews. We embody the Jewish values of the past several hundred years of post-enlightenment Jewish history. These neo-cons are the aberration. They should stop speaking for us, but maybe it’s time to stop including them in the community. There’s so much focus in the Jewish world on Klal Yisrael, which basically means peoplehood. Under the guise of Klal Yisrael, we‘ve been conversing endlessly with each other in the spirit of inclusion, all while apartheid was being codified in the West Bank. Over how many years, decades, or centuries are we supposed to be in dialogue with people who not only refuse to acknowledge our authenticity but who are all-in in a project of ethnic-cleansing?"

"(Is Israel a particularly prescient example for the rise of right-wing politics across the world?) Yes, especially because of the ethno-nationalist aspect. It’s one of the reasons Israel has made these horrifying alliances with right-wing and sometimes even overtly anti-Semitic movements throughout the world. Including in America, but also in Europe. It was such a shanda when Netanyahu acquiesced to the Hungarian government’s extremist, right-wing, anti-Soros, anti-Semitic campaign — but really it just showed his true colors. Can we start calling Netanyahu an anti-Semite? Are we allowed to do that yet? Or is that going too far?... He certainly prefers Evangelicals to Jews."

"It’s outrageous that they claim the mantle of Judaism, while in my view they trespass some of the most basic post-enlightenment Jewish values. I come at it from a fierce Jewish-pugilistic perspective."

"(What would it mean to have a leftist Jewish community that doesn’t always have to be so reactive — one that’s not always on the defense against conservative Jewish gatekeepers?) It would be as diverse as the Jewish community is today, with all the different strands, fluid identities, and multicultural expressions. Some of it would be nostalgic, reinventing nostalgia, some would explore inter-generational tensions, some would be based on new Jewish experiences and encounters."

"What’s happening in Israel and what we’ve been ignoring and normalizing for the past ten years has now suddenly hit our own shores."

"(On the question of authenticity there is also a leftist Jewish trend to try and go back to a time before assimilation. For example learning Yiddish and reconnecting to a culture that existed before the holocaust. Is this trend trying to uphold a romantic idealized version of Judaism that cannot exist anymore?) I don’t think learning Yiddish and whatever else they’re doing is pre-assimilation. Jews were speaking Yiddish when they were assimilated. The problem today is that the main Yiddish speakers are Hasidic, but we forget that in New York and Warsaw before the war there were tons of Yiddish speakers who were assimilated. It was more the language of cultural autonomy. The larger debate is something I grapple with too, and it goes back to your question about living off the fumes of a dead culture. But for most cultures, in order to create something new you need to be well steeped in the roots and branches of what came before. So I don’t think it’s simply nostalgia. I think they‘re learning Yiddish as a galvanizing point in order to bound forward with something new, whatever that might be."

"thirty years ago, alt-weeklies were the lifebloods of communities. Now, you can count them on one hand."

"I am inspired by grotesque art. I like it."