Quotes About Socialism

the man of the future in Russia was the peasant, the muzhik; and economically backward, not-yet-capitalist Russia, blessed by the survival of its archaic village commune, might in fact be destined to lead the world to socialism.[11] Here in embryo was the socialist ideology of the Russian populist (narodrik) revolutionary movement that developed among the radical intelligentsia in the late fifties and sixties.

What is remarkable is that Herzen, in the earlier years of Alexander II's reign (1855–81), combined this "Russian socialism," as it came to be called, with the theory of progressive autocracy. He called upon Alexander to be a "crowned revolutionary," and a "tsar of the land," and to continue Peter the Great's cause of reform by breaking with the Petersburg period as resolutely as Peter had broken with the Moscow period.

He spent the next three weeks in the Siberian centers of Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Rubtsovsk, and Omsk conferring with local party and government officials and dictating the line they were to follow. Here at last he found an opportunity to practice the "Leninist hardness" that he had foreseen would be necessary in the revolutionary process of building Soviet socialism.

Stalin elaborated the Stalinist version of building socialism into a coherent ideological doctrine.

seminary influence was also visible in his dogmatic style of exposition, the way in which he would invoke the classical Marxist texts to establish points of philosophical doctrine. Anarchism or Socialism? was the product of a religiously formed mind that had found in dialectical materialism an irrevocable and enormously satisfying intellectual commitment.

In effect, he amalgamated his earlier Russocentric, great-power gospel of socialism in one country with the programmatic content of high-speed industrialization and collectivization; yet he was flexible on certain points or adopted a moderate tone so as to allay fears concerning the possible implications of this program. A landmark in the arguing of the case was Stalin's principal address during the Central Committee plenum of July 4–12, 1928.

central to Stalinism, that the class struggle inevitably grows sharper with the country's advance toward socialism.

soon after being expelled he caused the expulsion of the other members of his secret socialist group in the seminary by reporting their names to the rector. According to these sources, he admitted his action and justified it to the expelled boys on the ground that they would become good revolutionaries now that they had lost the opportunity for careers as priests.

he advocated a strategy of pressing forward from the stage of democratic revolution represented in the Provisional Government to that of socialist revolution via the seizure of power and establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." In an effort to validate this position ideologically, Lenin went back to his Marxist texts during an interval of forced inactivity during 1917 and wrote The State and Revolution, his principal work of political theory.

The soul of the classical Marxism of Marx and Engels was the teaching that the revolutionary proletarian dictatorship was the necessary political instrument of a society's transition to socialism and future communism. To be a genuine Marxist it was not enough to accept the theory of the class struggle; one also had to accept the doctrine of proletarian dictatorship as the goal and terminal point of this struggle.

As in the earlier debate over "socialism in one country," Stalin studded his speeches with Lenin quotations and represented the views he was advocating as Leninism. There was never any suggestion that his special amalgam of Russocentrism and a revolutionary approach in building socialism could be called "Stalinism.

socialist movement via the Third International,

What "complete victory" really meant in Leninist thinking, it now transpired, was not the complete building of socialism in the USSR; it was the safety of Soviet socialism from external danger, from military intervention by the hostile capitalist encirclement.

In a capitalist economy, entrepreneurs create businesses to make profits, which they earn by pleasing their customers. But in a socialist system, a bureaucrat decides which businesses can open, where they can operate, and what they can sell, and he really doesn't care what the customer thinks.

Young adults across America prefer socialism (fairness) to capitalism (selfishness).' Socialism doesn't simply equal 'fairness.' What it really equals is the abolition of private property; in a socialist economy, the government decides what will be produced, how, and for whom." -p. 13

The massive movement of people from low-productivity rural areas to cities with private industry has spurred China's development… When Communist China was governed by socialist ideologues it was an impoverished, totalitarian police state that killed tens of millions of its own people. Now that Communist China practices crony capitalism, it is a prosperous and much more restrained police state.

The young, naïve socialists who dream of socialism "from below" are caught in a conundrum. Non-state socialist communes can only work (poorly) on a small scale in an otherwise capitalist world. To replace capitalism with this system necessitates centralizing power in order to plan the economy. That ultimately results in state ownership, control, and tyranny. Society-wide socialism "from below" that doesn't entail state ownership is a contradiction in terms.

In 1988, the Chinese constitution was amended to officially recognize private property and private business. Before then, the Communist state had been China's only official employer, with small exceptions. By 1998, the state employed about 60 percent of the working population, and in 2010 it employed only about 19 percent.9 China had transitioned from socialism to a form of crony capitalism.

We can anticipate Mises's ultimate conclusion: There is no viable third system. People must choose between capitalism and socialism.

Putting aside the concerns about the intentions of the rulers and the incentives for the workers, socialism cannot work because the central planner(s) would lack market prices and hence would have no way of determining, even after the fact, if their "rational" plan for production made an efficient use of resources.

Keynes emphatically rejected socialism as an economic remedy for the ills of capitalism. Both classical economists and socialists, he often said, believed in the same 'laws of economics'. But whereas the former regarded them as true and inevitable, the latter saw them as true and intolerable. Keynes proposed to show they were not true.

the socialists ultimately penalized themselves due to their lack of financial education.

And they never promoted anybody who could do the math, because anyone who could do enough math to understand physical limits would be opposed to socialism in the first place.

We, in Africa, have no more need of being 'converted' to socialism than we have of being 'taught' democracy. Both are rooted in our past -- in the traditional society which produced us.