Quotes About Socialism

The better shaped his product, the more misshapen the worker.

If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all.

I see socialism in the direction, of management, of enterprise, by all who work in the enterprise.

I grew up in a strongly socialist family. While I was at school, I worked in party politics and with organizations like the Anti-Nazi League. Everywhere I saw it, I fought prejudice.

All that socialism means to me, to be very frank with you, is democracy with a small 'd.' I believe in democracy, and by democracy, I mean that, to as great an extent as possible, human beings have the right to control their own lives. And that means that you cannot separate the political structure from the economic structure.

My dad saw himself as part of a historic struggle for human liberation: he met my mum canvassing for the Labour party in a snowstorm in Tooting, he helped lead strikes, and recruited miners to socialism.

My ideas had been taking a socialistic shape for many years; but they were lacking in definite outline.

Socialism is the ultimate ponzi scheme.

By the end of his sixteen-course meal in Buckingham Palace, Ramsay McDonald discovered he had changed his mind about the workers owning the means of production. From now on, he felt it better that the Dukes and Duchesses should continue to own the means of production. The workers would just have to make do with what was left over.

I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.

Because fascism is a movement of despair, while socialism is a movement of hope, to fight fascism it is necessary not only to fight the fascists but also the conditions that lead to despair. One has to fight the rats, but also the sewers in which the rats multiply. One has to fight the fascists, but also capitalism that creates conditions that breed fascism - unemployment, bad housing, social deprivation, etc.

His fellow German socialist and labor organizer Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx referred to as a "greasy Jew," "the little kike," "water-polack Jew," "Jew Braun," "Yid," "Izzy," "Wily Ephraim," "Baron Itzig," and "the Jewish Nigger.

Indeed, Marx and Engels willingly conceded that this program would require despotism. They stated of their ten points, "Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads.

He stated emphatically that "Socialism cannot be brought into existence without revolution.

In other words, in American political discourse, anyone who wants to make life in a market economy less nasty, brutish, and short gets denounced as a socialist.

What Americans who support "socialism" actually want is what the rest of the world calls social democracy: a market economy, but with extreme hardship limited by a strong social safety net and extreme inequality limited by progressive taxation. They want us to look like Denmark or Norway, not Venezuela.

On the other hand, we should never discount the power of dishonesty. Right-wing media will portray whomever the Democrats nominate for president as the second coming of Leon Trotsky, and millions of people will believe them. Let's just hope that the rest of the media report the clean little secret of American socialism, which is that it isn't radical at all.

I'm vey bad at marshaling arguments. I can't, at a dinner party, explain why I'm a socialist and why others should be socialists as well.

Art was the first casualty of the Socialist and Communist revolutions of the 20th Century. Socialists killed the independent thinkers first.

capitalism always did manage to make the comfort industry work better than socialism did.

Some forms of socialism and collectivism are – explicitly or implicitly – based on the notion that many people are not competent to make decisions about their own lives, so that the more talented should make decisions for them. But that would mean there were no universal human rights, only rights that some have and others do not, denying the essential humanity of those who are deemed to be owned.

Those "socialists" must do badly at encouraging growth in an entrepreneurial-competitive capitalist economy. – They're fiscally irresponsible and will saddle future generations with outrageous debt. – Because liberals moralize, that means they cannot be the pragmatic ones. Would it surprise you that these truisms all run diametrically opposite to fact? Or that almost none of our side's pols or pundits have glommed onto that response?

In the meantime, powerful industries and business investors spend considerable sums of money in secretive lobbying; persuading, cajoling and needling politicians to pursue policies that are, in effect, corporate welfare programmes. Corporations and banks receive huge public subsidies and bailouts, while the rest of us are largely left to the cold biting winds of 'market' economics. It's socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the rest of us.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.