Quotes About Socialism

William pouts irritably. Socialism is not the same thing as letting one's servants muddle towards anarchy. But never mind, never mind: on a day like today, it's not worth worrying over. Soon the servant question, at least in William Rackham's household, will be resolved beyond any ambiguity.

Lo único divertido del asunto era mi existencia, la existencia de un hombre borrado por la historia, de los manuales de literatura y de la guía de teléfonos, de un hombre muerto que volvía a la vida en una sorprendente reencarnación para predicar a centenares de miles de jóvenes socialistas la gran verdad de la astrología.

Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation.

Commies love concrete.

capitalism may be the unequal distribution of wealth, socialism is the equal distribution of poverty.

The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing it's people to abject poverty.

It is capitalism that sees production as potentially infinite, and socialism that sets it in the context of moral and aesthetic values. Or as Marx himself puts it in the first volume of Capital, "under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race.

Baa Baa Black Sheep' makes Marx's Capital look like Mary Poppins .

As the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, revolution is not a runaway train; it is the application of the emergency brake. It is capitalism which is out of control, driven as it is by the anarchy of market forces, and socialism which attempts to reassert some collective mastery over this rampaging beast.

In Marx's view, what was awry with the prevailing notion of equality was that it was too abstract. It did not pay sufficient attention to the individuality of things and people... It was capitalism that standardised people, not socialism.

Nature does not guarantee that socialism will follow on the heels of capitalism. There are many different futures implicit in the present, some of them a lot less attractive than others...[T]hough the future may turn out to be a great deal worse than the present, the one thing about it is that it will be very different. One reason why the financial markets blew up a few years ago was because they relied on models that assumed the future would be very like the present.

Socialists often speak of oppression, injustice and exploitation. But if this were all humanity had ever known, we would never be able to identify these things for what they are. Instead, they would simply seem like our natural condition. We might not even have special names for them. To see a relationship as exploitative, you need to have some idea of what a nonexploitative relationship would look like.

Under capitalism, we are deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce more hospitals or more breakfast cereals. Under socialism, this freedom would be regularly exercised.

The distinction between elitism and socialism is in effect one between present and future.

o socialismo exige uma expansão das forças produtivas, mas a tarefa de expandi-las cabe não ao socialismo em si, mas ao capitalismo

We will know that socialism has established itself when we are able to look back with utter incredulity on the idea that a handful of commercial thugs were given free rein to corrupt the minds of the public with Neanderthal political views convenient for their own bank balances but for little else.

At every stage, public debate over alternative economic plans and policies would be essential. In this way, what and how we produce could be determined by social need rather than private profit. Under capitalism, we are deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce more hospitals or more breakfast cereals. Under socialism, this freedom would be regularly exercised.

apenas o capitalismo é capaz de desenvolver as forças produtivas até o ponto em que, sob uma administração política diferente, o excedente por elas gerado possa ser usado para prover o bastante para todos. Para ter o socialismo, primeiro é preciso ter capitalismo...

se não houvesse exploração, não haveria a expansão significativa das forças produtivas, e, se tal expansão não existisse, não haveria base material para o socialismo

Não que a construção do socialismo não possa começar em situações de privação, mas, sem recursos materiais, a tendência será a de que ele seja deturpado e vire a caricatura monstruosa de socialismo conhecida como stalinismo

Para se tornar socialista, é preciso estar razoavelmente bem de vida, tanto no sentido literal quanto no sentido metafórico do termo

Marx's aim was to close this gap between state and society, politics and everyday life, by dissolving the former into the latter. And this is what he called democracy. Men and women had to reclaim in their daily lives the powers that the state had appropriated from them. Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.

Marxist theory itself is not just a commentary on the world, but an instrument for changing it.

As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.