marxists

"...The woman today is not simply a man's wife, she is a social worker, she wants to educate her children in the new way, she wants her whole day-to-day life to be rearranged of new lines. At every step she feels she lacks knowledge."

"The bourgeoisie of all countries understands to a nicety what a great power the experiences of childhood have over people, and for this reason it endeavours to bring the children up in the bourgeois spirit from their earliest years. The clergy, the teachers servile to the bourgeois Government, the unprincipled penny-a-line children’s authors and the grasping cinema proprietors all work feverishly in this direction."

"The girls must not be tied down to the home, but from the early years should be accustomed to being together, in one organisation with the boys—to be with them on a comradely footing."

"Art appears to stand outside this realm of rigid instrumentality, bureaucratized life, and its complementary mass culture. That it can do so is due to art’s peculiar economy, based on the manufacture of unique or rare artefacts, and its spurning of mechanical reproduction."

"The question of art’s use takes us back, naturally, to art’s freedom. That the very concerns of art – creativity, enlightenment, criticality, self-criticism – are as instrumentally grounded as what they serve to conceal – business, state triage, and war – is the consideration that must be concealed. And it can be, because the local liberation offered in the production of art, and its enjoyment, are genuine."

"The economy functions strictly and instrumentally according to iron conventions, imposed unequally on nations by the great transnational economic bodies; it establishes hierarchies of wealth and power; it enforces on the vast majority of the world's inhabitants a timetabled and regulated working life, while consoling them with visions of cinematic lives given meaning through adventure and coherent narrative (in which heroes make their lives free precisely by breaking the rules), and with plaintive songs of rebellion or love..."

"Paris, that great but compact cosmopolitan and imperial city, has a strong claim to be considered the cradle of street photography. The city helped form this genre of photography and, equally, photography contributed to the formation of the city, as Parisians saw first their buildings and then themselves reflected in the many photographic photographic portraits constructed in magazines and books."

"Governments, as we have seen, look to art as a social salve, and hope that socially interactive art will act as bandaging for the grave wounds continually prised open by capital."

"The art market is regulated by dealers who control not only production but also consumption, vetting the suitability of buyers for particular works; the ‘who are you?’ question to buyers."

"[During the 2017 general election campaign] Andrew Murray is a member of the Labour Party and he is an official at Unite, and he is temporarily helping us with the campaign."

"He is a person of enormous abilities and professionalism, and is the head of staff of Unite the union. To manage a very large union and a large number of staff takes special skills, and Andrew has them."

"[Following Murray's comments ("That things happened in the USSR...") cited above] Murray is seriously maintaining that its an open question whether British communists did all they might have done in denouncing these abominations."

"There were no emails in 1978. Word processing meant dictating copy to stenographers; each newspaper had a phone booth in a gloomy corridor for this purpose. The [[w:Morning Star (British newspaper)|[Morning] Star]]s chief stenographer was an implacable Bolshevik called Doris. The 80-something comrade was hard of hearing with arthritis in her fingers, leaving her bereft of any qualification for her role beyond ideological rectitude. I had no chance of keeping an exclusive as I bellowed my scoops at a pace Doris could keep up with. Eventually I persuaded management that an infusion of youth was required in the stenography department, and a new typist was engaged. Dictating to her for the first time, I began my story, as so often in those days, with "Premier Thatcher...". I was stopped at that point. "How do you spell that?" she asked. "Which word?" I said. "Both." Give thanks for automatic spellchecks too."

"The Salisbury attack is something we got wrong. When it happened, I thought, "Well, probably there's Russians behind this, because of the use of novichok." I just thought it was Russian gangsters — some business interests, and so forth. I didn't think the Russian state was behind it. And we were wrong. The evidence that's emerged since is overwhelming. We misread that. I still think that the line Jeremy was trying to follow, which is, "Get the evidence first and then state sanctions, and so on, rather than the other way around," is a defensible position. You don't run into saying "This is Putin's responsibility" when you haven't produced the evidence of it. In fact, this evidence has now been produced. Had we known then what we know now, we'd have taken a different view, I think. We just didn't think the Russian state would be so stupid and brazen as to do something like that — to carry out a poisoning attack on British soil. I know, given the Litvinenko precedent perhaps we should have done but that never really got sorted out so clearly . . . Up until then we'd still ha[d] a quiescent PLP. We were doing all right in the polls. That started bringing all the doubts about Jeremy and the leader’s office to the surface again."

"[Asked about Murray's alleged "Stalinism"] I don't believe that Andrew is anything other than a democratic socialist and member of the Labour Party like me."

"Hitler is uniquely excoriated because his victims were almost all white Europeans, while those of Britain (and other classic colonialisms — French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian and Wilhelmine German) were Asian, African and Arabs. That Hitler's regime is seen as the most bestial of modern times is not of course objectionable. What needs to be confronted is the view that the crimes of other great powers of the last 150 years or so, being less lurid than those of the Nazis, can therefore be subject to a more nuanced judgment, in which the deaths of millions of people on the one hand can be offset against the construction of railways on the other. The British Empire was almost certainly responsible for more human deaths, albeit over a considerably longer period of time, than Hitler was."

"Our party has already made its basic position of solidarity with People's Korea clear."

"There is nothing in the imperial record as chilling as the systematic extermination of the great majority of Europe's Jews."

"For the Labour Party, the exclusion of the revolutionary trend in the movement paved the way for the unchallenged domination of the right wing and locked the party ever more firmly into class collaboration and reformism. [...] In that sense, the decision to reject communist affiliation paved the way for the whole miserable litany of Labour-led disasters from 1931 to 1979."

"That things happened in the USSR which were inexcusable and which ultimately prejudiced Socialism's whole prospect is today undeniable. Whether Communists in the capitalist world could or should have done more than they did is much more contentious."

"[Israel is a "white settler state"] To ask Muslim community leaders to tackle "extremism" effectively when every night you can see on television a Muslim child being pulled lifeless from the rubble caused by the operations of the bloc of the USA, Britain, Israel and other white settler states like Canada and Australia is asking a lot."

"[Following Murray's comments ("That things happened in the USSR...") cited above] Mr Murray believes that British communists in the 1930s were justified in backing the Great Terror, the Moscow Trials and the Ukraine famine."

"Next Tuesday is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Josef Stalin. His career is the subject of a vast and ever expanding literature. Read it all and, at the end, you are still left paying your money and taking your choice. A socialist system embracing a third of the world and the defeat of Nazi Germany on the one hand. On the other, all accompanied by harsh measures imposed by a one-party regime. Nevertheless, if you believe that the worst crimes visited on humanity this century, from colonialism to Hiroshima and from concentration camps to mass poverty and unemployment have been caused by imperialism, then [Stalin’s birthday] might at least be a moment to ponder why the authors of those crimes and their hack propagandists abominate the name of Stalin beyond all others. It was, after all, Stalin’s best-known critic, Nikita Khrushchev, who remarked in 1956 that "against imperialists, we are all Stalinists"."

"But [[Owen Jones|[Owen] Jones]]'s real bete noire is Milne, whom he charges with a simple "lack of professionalism". One insider says he was one of the few people in Corbyn’s office "that you could actually discuss socialist theory with", but in Jones's telling, it was "impossible to get him to sign off press releases, speeches or other public interventions", and "this apparent non-engagement would frequently bring the entire operation to a grinding halt". From one of the Corbyn project’s most devout advocates, this is remarkable stuff."

"Corbyn’s circle of advisers reflects and reinforces the moral absolutism of his political instincts. The anti-imperialist left is, in short, running the show. The name of Seumas Milne, a former Guardian journalist now Labour's head of strategy and communications, often emerges in this connection. His case illuminates precisely the ideological direction of Corbyn's Labour. Milne has a brilliant intellect and there is vanishingly little he does not know about anti-Semitism, its traps and tropes. (I know this because I owe a good deal of my own education on the subject to him, a former colleague.) Milne himself would never have fallen into his boss's grossest errors—of failing to notice, for example, that a London mural whose removal Corbyn protested in a recently-resurfaced 2012 Facebook posting contained shockingly obvious and explicit anti-Semitic stereotypes. But Milne is in lockstep with Corbyn in cleaving to the hard left's anti-imperialist line that whatever the faults of authoritarians such as Putin, Assad, and Maduro, they are at least enemies of American hegemony, and the crimes of the United States and Israel are infinitely worse."

"No major 20th-century political tradition is without blood on its hands, but battles over history are more about the future than the past. Part of the current enthusiasm in official western circles for dancing on the grave of communism is no doubt about relations with today's Russia and China. But it also reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed."

"Communism, which came to control a third of the planet in a generation, was the most important political movement of the past century. It carried out what other socialists had only talked about, abolishing capitalism and creating publicly owned, planned economies. Its crimes and failures are now so well rehearsed that they are in danger of obliterating any understanding of its achievements - both of which have lessons for the future of progressive politics and the search for a social alternative to globalised capitalism."

"What has transformed the contest has been the dramatic rise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, former Socialist minister and candidate of the Front de Gauche (Left Front), who has gone from 6% to 15% in a few months to become the pivotal "third man" in the election. He has done so with an unashamedly populist campaign, targeting marginalised working class voters prey to the National Front, inspiring the young and non-voters and using the kind of street language alien to the magic circles of the French political establishment he abandoned."

"A particularly telling Milne moment came in 2006, when the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly voted to condemn "the massive human rights violations committed by totalitarian communist regimes". In the article he wrote in response, Milne admitted the USSR executed 799,455 people, then moved on. "For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality," he insisted. Now, you can quibble with the facts. Focussing only on the USSR's executions ignores the millions it starved to death in Ukraine, or in the mass deportations from the Caucasus and Crimea, the way it used rape as a weapon, or that fact it invaded without provocation half a dozen countries. You can also question those "huge advances" considering the fact that life expectancy in the USSR peaked in 1962, then declined steadily as chronic alcoholism took hold."

"There is a view among pro-Palestinian people often that the Zionist movement has a grip on the media, in a way that I think sometimes exaggerates the mechanisms through which that influence is exerted."

"The media and politicians in this country and all over the Western world would have you believe that the cause of this suffering and this carnage is the rockets of Hamas that are fired into Israel. That is to turn reality on its head. The Palestinian people have the right, as any occupied people under law and under all political and legal conventions - the right to resist. Israel, as an illegal occupying power, has one obligation, and that is to withdraw. Even now, despite the horrific casualties, Hamas is not broken and will not be broken, because of the spirit of resistance of the Palestinian people."

"[Initially referring to Jeremy Corbyn] I don't think he is showing any professionalism in his leadership of the Labour party and you see from his appointment of his strategy and communications director Seumas Milne, whom I happen to know and like as it happens. But he's completely unsuited to such a job. He has little connection with mainstream politics or mainstream media in the country and yet he's in charge of communications for the Labour party. That doesn't sound very professional to me."

"Seumas Milne, the Stalinist Rip van Winkle who now edits the Guardians comment pages"

"Zionist movement activists [are] incredibly hard-working and dedicated, and they bombard the media, day in and day out, with their obsessive campaigns."

"During a Valdai club session I chaired, [[Vladimir Putin|[Vladimir] Putin]] told foreign journalists and academics that the unipolar world had been a "means of justifying dictatorship over people and countries" – but the emerging multipolar world was likely to be still more unstable. The only answer – and this was clearly intended as an opening to the west – was to rebuild international institutions, based on mutual respect and co-operation. The choice was new rules – or no rules, which would lead to "global anarchy". When I asked Putin whether Russia's actions in Ukraine had been a response to, and an example of, a "no-rules order", Putin denied it, insisting that the Kosovo precedent meant Crimea had every right to self-determination. But by conceding that Russian troops had intervened in Crimea "to block Ukrainian units", he effectively admitted crossing the line of legality – even if not remotely on the scale of the illegal invasions, bombing campaigns and covert interventions by the US and its allies over the past decade and a half. But there is little chance of the western camp responding to Putin's call for a new system of global rules. In fact, the US showed little respect for rules during the cold war either, intervening relentlessly wherever it could. But it did have respect for power. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that restraint disappeared. It was only the failure of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and Russia's subsequent challenge to western expansion and intervention in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine – that provided some check to unbridled US power."

"Emboldened by the wave of change and growing support across the region, Hamas has also regained credibility as a resistance force, which had faded since 2009, and strengthened its hand against an increasingly discredited Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah."

"Putin’s oligarchic nationalism may not have much global appeal, but Russia's role as a counterweight to western supremacism certainly does."

"[On the 2011 London riots] Those people need to be organised and need to find a political expression . . . It is a huge opportunity to channel that anger."

"Only China offers the eventual prospect of a global restraint on western unilateral power and that is still some way off."

"He was oversympathetic to autocratic regimes and undersympathetic to countries with the rule of law and democracy [...] That is the worst aspect of the hard left."

"It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming."

"But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent."

"But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed."

"It has become almost received wisdom to bracket Stalin and Hitler as twin monsters of the past century - Mao and Pol Pot are sometimes thrown in as an afterthought - and commonplace to equate communism and fascism as the two greatest evils of an unprecedentedly sanguinary era. In some versions, communism is even held to be the more vile and bloodier wickedness. The impact of this cold war victors' version of the past has been to relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure."

"Resistance and the unity of the working class is what will progress our movement."

"A particular form of socialism grew up in the post-war period in the conditions of the Cold War [...] East Berlin was absolutely at the front line of the cold war. That’s what the Berlin Wall was. It was a front line between two social and military systems and two military alliances, and a very tense one at that. It wasn’t just some kind of arbitrary division to hold people in, it was also a front line in a global conflict. And that conditioned a lot of the things that happened."

"La obra maestra no florece sino en un terreno abonado por una anónima u oscura multitud de obras mediocres."

"No es posible democratizar la enseñanza de un país sin democratizar su economía y sin democratizar, por ende, su superestructura política."

"No renegamos, propiamente, la herencia española; renegamos la herencia feudal"

"Our task is, persistently to conduct the class-political training of the membership, to master the art of combining legal work with underground work, to eliminate the shortcomings that we still meet in our work, to base our entire activity on maintaining the confidence of the masses and not to lag behind the revolutionary struggle which is developing at a rapid rate."