Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection

Otto Remer, former German WW2 General, became an advocate for cooperation with Russia:

“Germany must leave NATO, the Americans must get out of Germany and out of Europe, and we must develop partnership with Russia – here are the goals which stand before true German patriots now.”

“For Reagan and the Zionists ... The Soviet Union is the incarnation of evil, but for us it is a great power neighboring us with its own security requirements and a doctrine that corresponds to them.”

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If the state is not the powerful master, it is the slave of the bank; no middle ground is possible. - Barrès

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It will be red communism that realizes the old dream of the Slavophiles, to transfer the capital from Petersburg to Moscow, within the Kremlin. It will be [red communism] that reprises the formula of the Slavophiles and Dostoevsky: Ex Oriente lux. From Moscow, from the Kremlin, the light that must clear the bourgeois shadows of the West surges forth. And at the same time communism creates a despotic and bureaucratic state called to rule not only over bodies, but also over souls, conforming to the traditions of Ivan the Terrible and the autocracy of the Tsars. The Marxism reworked and re-founded by the Russians proclaims the primacy of the political over the economic, the power to modify the economic life of the country at will.

-Nicolas Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (1936)

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"Although I have focused on capitalist abstract clock-time, throughout this study I have kept alive notions of concrete times. I have highlighted the temporal aspect of dynamics of domination and resistance between capitalism’s tendency to commodify – and therefore alienate – time, and the concrete times of human lives and socio-natural processes that resist it. Capitalism’s drive to commodify and alienate time is relentless, and it is expressed in processes occurring all across the social field. Indeed, the drive toward the privatisation of natural resources can be read as an attempt by capital to abstract the concrete times of socio-natural cycles in order to ‘valorise’ them, i.e. to integrate these times in the logic of capital accumulation. In such processes of commodification, the complex cluster of useful labour, socio-natural cycles, human bodies and concrete temporal relationships become means to an end: capital accumulation. Privatising water, for example, entails the abstraction from all the concrete socio-natural and human times involved in the relationship between humans and water into a set of quantifiable time-units expressed in value, thus attributing a – capitalist – value to water, not in the aim of satisfy- ing human needs, but in the aim of profit making. Examples such as these with regards to the relationship between humans and a socially mediated nature, between humans and humans, and between humans and their own bodies, illustrate a struggle between capitalism and human lives, of which the temporal dimension deserves more attention from critical scholarship."

Jonathan Martineau, "Time, Capitalism, and Alienation: A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time", p. 167

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Michel Aflaq, co-founder of the Ba'ath (Renaissance) party, Syrian-Arab nationalist and socialist :

"If I were asked about my predilection towards socialism I would answer: with regard to this issue what I aspire to is not to increase the wealth of factories but that of life. My concern is not that people should be equal in the distribution of food but that every individual should be allowed to exploit his talents and potential. The laborer crushed by his misery may not find in socialism anything except a promise that he may take what he is deprived of, but I view it as continuous and generous giving, as giving to life many times what it has offered us."

(The wealth of life, 1936)

"He who thinks that socialism is a religion of pity is gravely mistaken. We are not hermits taking refuge in mercy to give peace to a conscience disturbed by seeing misery and suffering, so that we become great in our own eyes and sleep untroubled. Defending deprived masses is not a matter of giving them alms but demanding their rights. We are not only concerned about alleviating misery but also about increasing the wealth of life."

(The wealth of life, 1936)

"In fact this class on which the representation of the country fell in a certain period is very far from the spirit of the nation, its needs and requirements, for it is a senile and ancient class whose vitality has been exhausted and its relation to the spirit of the nation shaken. It has become so servile to economic interests and traditional ' social influence that it is impossible for it to discern the qualities of the Arab life at this stage of development in its history .The consequence of this is that it enters the national struggle unwillingly while dreaming of stability and longing for rest. How many times during the short period of the national struggle has this class deluded itself that the play has come to an end, that the trust was delivered and that the time has come for plucking the fruits and receiving the wages. But the people in their renewed vitality, awakened instinct and repeated revolutions has been warning this class from time to time of the falsehood of its illusions and violently reminding it that the struggle is not yet finished."

(The new formula for patriotism -The Baath, 4 -July 17, 1946)