"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."
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Academics from CanadaPhilosophers from CanadaJews from CanadaPeople from MontrealMarxists from Canada
Original Language: English
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G. A. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerald_Cohen
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Gerald Cohen
Gerald Allan "Jerry" Cohen (April 14, 1941 – August 5, 2009) was a Canadian Marxist political philosopher.
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