After retreats like this, isn’t it true, as one socialist said at a conference fringe meeting, ‘that there really isn’t any difference between Labour policies and Tory ones?’ Paul Foot, article November 1991, ‘Will Labour Make a Difference?’
Before Marx and Engels, socialism had been seen mainly as an ideal, to be imposed from on high by idealists. It was an almost ethereal concept of an equal society in which everybody shared – far too beautiful to be achieved or administered by the rather selfish and ignorant masses. Such idealists were inclined to dismiss the rising clamour for the vote as irrelevant to the socialist cause, at best a diversion, at worst an obstacle. Marx and Engels took an entirely different view. As Hal Draper puts it, ‘Marx was the first socialist figure to come to an acceptance of the socialist idea through the battle for the consistent extension of democratic control from below.’ Paul Foot, article ‘Socialism & Democracy’
The argument, which swept like wildfire through the rapidly growing labour parties in Europe, was contested by a revolutionary minority boosted by two enormously powerful pamphlets – Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution (1900) and Lenin’s State and Revolution, written in the revolutionary summer of 1917. Both pamphlets continued in the tradition set out by Marx in the 1840s. Far from contrasting socialism with democracy, they started from the principle of a democratic society controlled from below. Lenin specifically hailed the ‘elective principle’ as indispensable to a socialist society. Rosa Luxemburg’s passionate identification with the spontaneous movements of the masses shines out of every sentence she wrote. Her whole approach was democratic from start to finish.
Like Marx’s, their argument was not at all that there is some choice to be made between socialism and democracy but that the two are indivisible. The problem, they argued, with the ‘democratic’ approach proposed by the main European workers’ parties was that their democracy was not strong enough to contest the hierarchies of the rich. It locked democracy up in a small parliamentary island, while control over the ocean – industry, finance, law, armed forces, police, media – stayed in the hands of the unelected rich. The contest between the new confined democracy in parliament and the boundless undemocratic hierarchies of the rich would be, they warned, no contest. The rich would win; and in the process the workers would lose confidence in themselves and lower their guard still further. For the essence of the parliamentary argument was that ordinary people could and should do nothing to emancipate themselves. They should leave the sophisticated business of emancipation to their betters, to the educated elite within the movement who would make their way to parliament. If and when, as was inevitable, this elite failed to achieve even a small part of the emancipation they promised, the workers would be left high and dry, rudderless and hopeless. If the educated elite couldn’t do the job, they would ask, who could? Passivity would lead to despair, to the triumph of the right, with disastrous consequences for democracy.
The experience of parliamentary democracy this century grimly vindicates what Lenin and Luxemburg predicted. ibid.
Equality lies only in human moral dignity ... Let there be brothers first, then there will be brotherhood, and only then will there be a fair sharing of goods among brothers. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind. Mikhail Gorbachev
For the socialist, the New Ager and the Masons have declared war on the Christians. And as in every war the enemy must be defeated even by bloodshed if necessary. Bill Cooper, Hour of Our Time
It is therefore a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion. A Christian socialist is in fact an anti-socialist. Christianity is the antithesis of Socialism. Socialist Party of Great Britain, pamphlet Socialism & Religion 1911
Workers, this is the voice of the Socialist Party! It is the voice of the Sovereign People. Corleone I [Il Capo dei Capi] starring Caludio Gioe & Daniele Liotti & Simona Cavallari & Marco Leonardi & Salvatore Lazzaro & Marco Leonardi & Alfredo Pea et al, opening scene, cart through town, Sky Arts 2013
A real socialist movement cannot be built by temporising in front of a dying cause such as that of the Orange Ascendancy, even although in the paroxysms of its death struggle it assumes the appearance of energy like unto that of health. A real socialist movement can only be born of struggle, of uncompromising affirmation of the faith that is in us. Such a movement infallibly gathers to it every element of rebellion and of progress, and in the midst of the storm and stress of the struggle solidifies into a real revolutionary force. James Connolly
We are all socialists now. William Harcourt
But at the moment I’d like to talk about another way because this threat is with us and at the moment is more imminent. One of the traditional methods of imposing Statism or Socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. The doctor begins to lose freedoms. It’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. The doctor wants to practise in one town, and the government says to him, You can’t live in that town; they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent … It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project ... Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We have an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this. Ronald Reagan, recording Speaks out against Socialised Medicine 1961
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. Winston Churchill, House of Commons 22 October 1945
Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Winston Churchill, Perth Scotland 28th May 1948
Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike. William O Douglas, former US Supreme Court Justice, 1969
This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism ... An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. Albert Einstein, cited Why Socialism?
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labour ... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. ibid.
What is this, the sound and rumour? What is this that all men hear,
Like the wind in hollow valleys wen the storm is drawing near,
Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear?
’Tis the people marching on. William Morris, Chants for Socialism, 1885
The Socialist Party will stand firmly behind its resolution to oppose American involvement in this war. Reds 1981 starring Warren Beatty & Diane Keaton & Jack Nicholson & Gene Hackman & Edward Herrmann & Jerzy Kosinski & Paul Sorvino & Maureen Stapleton & Nicolas Coster & William Daniels & E Emmet Walsh & Ian Wolfe & Bessie Love et al, director Warren Beatty, Socialist Party conference
Socialism would free us from the awful necessity of living for others. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough. William Shakespeare, The History of King Lear IV i 69-70, Gloucester
People who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society, they take a stand for the surface modification of the old society. Our programme becomes not the realisation of socialism, but the reform of capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg
The point is that there are two different sorts of private property. The one is private property in the means of production: private property in a factory or a mine, or in the land. And the other sort is private property in consumers’ goods, in food and clothing and furniture, in houses, in motor cars, in gardens, in labour-saving devices, in access to amusements, in every sort of thing which we actually use and consume ... It ought to be impossible to mix them up. For there is one rule for distinguishing between them. Private property of the first sort carries an income with it ... Private property of the second sort does not carry an income with it. The economic system which is currently called socialism involves abolishing the first sort of private property in order to increase vastly the second sort of property. John Strachey
In the service of the people we followed such a policy that socialism would not lose its human face. Alexander Dubcek
More socialism means more democracy, openness and collectivism in everyday life. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika – New Thinking for Our Country and the World, 1988
I’ve lived in the UK most of my life, and I’ve used the National Health Service; I regard it as a treasure. I’ve had some of the best care, for not particularly serious ailments, but I’ve had some of the best care that I could possibly have ... The way the National Health Service is represented in the United States is truly scandalous – that word socialist is pulled out – it’s kind of infantile almost. Yes it’s socialist. If socialist is caring for the majority of the people and taking away the fear of being denied health care, that so many millions of Americans have, they have this fear, then yes. It is so much a part of people’s lives ... What is it about US legislators that they appear to be so in bed with such powerful interests, such as the insurance companies, that they can’t represent their own people’s needs, their own people’s basic human rights? John Pilger, interview Democracy Now! July 2009