Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions. Albert Einstein, cited The New Quotable Einstein
All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual. Albert Einstein
A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. Albert Einstein
We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind. The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education. Arnold J Toynbee, Surviving the Future, 1971
Socially too Toba left a mark on our species. Evidence reveals that social networking in surviving humans increased. Planet of the Apemen: Battle for Earth I, BBC 2011
In individuals insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche
Man is formed for society. William Blackstone
Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included. Karl Marx, Marx to Kugelmann in Hanover, cited Marxists online
Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them. Karl Marx, attributed
In making itself the master of all the means of production to use them in accordance with a social plan, society puts an end to the former subjection of men to their own means of production. It goes without saying that society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed. The old mode of production must therefore be revolutionised from top to bottom, and in particular the former division of labour must disappear. Its place must be taken by an organisation of production in which, on the one hand, no individual can throw on the shoulders of others his share in productive labour, this natural condition of human existence; and in which, on the other hand, productive labour, instead of being a means of subjugating men, will become a means of their emancipation, by offering each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full – in which, therefore, productive labour will become a pleasure instead of being a burden. Friedrich Engels
The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not ‘abolished’. It dies out. Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
It’s religion that’s forming human society itself. Professor Bettany Hughes, Divine Women I: When God Was a Girl, BBC 2012
Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated. Saddam Hussein, The Revolution and Woman in Iraq
If society will not admit of woman’s free development, then society must be remodelled. Elizabeth Blackwell
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. Jane Addams
The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, ‘This is mine’ and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754
The majority of any society comprised, Smith knew, not landlords or merchants, but ‘servants, laborers, and workmen of different kinds’, who derived their income from wages. Their welfare was the prime concern of economic policy, as Smith conceived it. ‘No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable’, he wrote. ‘It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged’. The chief economic concern of the legislator, in Smith’s view, ought to be the purchasing power of wages, since that was the measure of the material well-being of the bulk of the population. Jerry Z Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought
Every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labour. While every previous form of society was an organization of labour in the interests of a minority, which organized its State apparatus for the oppression of the overwhelming majority of the workers, we are making the first attempt in world history to organize labour in the interests of the labouring majority itself. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism
What I mean by a cultural study of society is trying to understand better and to interpret therefore the whole way of life of that society as it shows itself, as the way it goes about its daily business. Richard Hoggart, interview BBC
Amongst developed countries we have one of the poorest levels of social mobility. Richard Bilton, Who Gets the Best Jobs? BBC 2011
Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain. Marquis de Sade
A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular. Adlai Stevenson, speech 1952
How people behave depends very much on the kind of society they live in. If the society beckons forward the greedy and the selfish, if it offers them great riches and privileges in return for collaboration in exploiting others, if it criminalises solidarity (as the Tory trade union laws have done), then people will lose their confidence in one another, shrink into their shells and denounce their neighbours. If, on the other hand, society welcomes those who act and think as part of the community, people’s confidence in themselves and in one another will grow and the dark side of their natures will diminish. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism chapter 5
Great disparities of wealth in society, however, restrict freedoms every bit as much as restrictions on voting. Everyone is ‘free’ to send their children to private school, to have tea at the The Ritz, to gamble on the stock exchange. These ‘freedoms’ are defended far more vigorously than the freedom to vote, yet they are in fact restrictions on freedom. For every one person who can have tea at The Ritz, there are a hundred who cannot do so because they have not got the money. If 10 per cent can send their children to private school and secure for them a straight route back into the privileged class from which they came, 90 per cent cannot do so – are banned from doing so – because they cannot afford it.
Thus the ‘freedom’ handed out by capitalist society is more often than not the opposite of freedom. Yet the idea of freedom still prevails, because the prevailing ideas of any society are the ideas of the class which runs it.
So the people who fight against these ideas – whether in strikes, demonstrations, popular protests or just in argument – are always, or almost always, swimming against the stream. They are the minority. But this minority, unlike the passive majority, can involve other people far outside their immediate orbit. And once involved in struggle against the old society, people’s ideas can change decisively. ibid. ch6
The theme of this book is that fire down below. If society is to change in a socialist direction and if capitalism is to be replaced by socialism, the source of that change must be the fight against the exploitative society by the exploited people themselves. To knuckle down to the notion that changes can only come from the top is to accept the most debilitating and arrogant of all capitalist arguments: namely that there is at all times in human history a God-given elite, a few who are equipped to rule, while most people are not capable of government or politics and should count themselves lucky to have the occasional chance to choose which section of the elite should govern them.
This assumption of the rights of the few and the ignorance and inefficiency of the many is the hallmark of class rule through all our history. The reformer who believes that an educated elite in a parliament can change things for the masses, can – in the words of the Labour Party’s famous Clause Four – ‘secure for the workers ... the full fruits of their industry’, is really playing the same game and making the same assumptions as the most bigoted class warrior. Both believe that whatever is right and wrong for most people can only be determined by the enlightened few. ibid.
Only the working masses can change society; but they will not do that spontaneously, on their own. They can rock capitalism back onto its heels but they will only knock it out if they have the organisation, the socialist party, which can show the way to a new, socialist order of society. Such a party does not just emerge. It can only be built out of the day-to-day struggles of working people. Paul Foot, Why You Should Be a Socialist