Sunday 24 March 2019

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 54

Excellent video series from CPGB-ML Red Youth:


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Stalin: Every Leninist knows that equalisation in the sphere of requirements and personal, everyday life is a reactionary petty-bourgeois absurdity, for we cannot expect all people to have the same requirements and tastes. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/01/26.htm
Marxism proceeds from the assumption that people’s tastes and requirements are not, and cannot be, identical and equal in regard to quality or quantity, whether in the period of socialism or the period of communism.
To conclude that according to the Marxist plan all should wear the same clothes and eat the same dishes in the same quantity is to utter vulgarities and to slander Marxism.
It is time we understood that Marxism is an enemy of equalisation. Already in the Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels scourged primitive utopian socialism and termed it reactionary because it preached “universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.”
Bourgeois professors have tried to make use of the concept of equality to accuse us of wanting to make all men equal to one another, accusing socialists of an absurdity which they themselves invented. But Marxists cannot be held responsible for the stupidity of bourgeois writers.

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MODERN POPULISM, by Alexander Dugin

"The people is neither left nor right. The people stands all at once for order and for freedom, for a powerful state and for social justice, for strength and for continuous holiday. The people easily unites opposites without even noticing. The people lives according to a particular logic that has nothing to do with the norms of modern political science or sociology. The people is always not what others think about it. It does not lend itself to be calculated or counted. It proceeds from a different logic than that of the Enlightenment and societies of modernity. In some sense, the people is very ancient. It is nurtured by the juices of eternity.

The people as a political concept is appearing today in opposition to liberalism. The liberals are hollering about a fascist or communist-fascist threat, and they are incapable of understanding the essence of the populist moment, which they interpret through old clichés. Hence why they are losing. Hence why they are doomed." ...

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"One curious thing about Venezuela that few people seem to have remarked upon is that Chavez and Maduro are not really all that hardcore about their class war. The latter assumed the powers of Congress in 2017, but didn’t send armed men to round up the querulous parliamentarians. They continued to yack and squawk in their assembly, and now one of them has declared himself President. Bourgeois speculators, comprador elites, and dark foreign powers are conspiring to keep food off the supermarket shelves, but there haven’t been any demonstrative shootings of saboteurs and wreckers. Economic populism ran amok in an unsustainable flood of gibs that has only been recently been devalued by hyperinflation, but there was no serious attempt to set up central planning organs. Even Salvador Allende began to do that from his first year in power."

—Anatoly Karlin, 'Shadows of the Past in Venezuela' (24 January 2019)

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With everything that’s happening, it’s as if the popular classes everywhere are realizing that the “dynastic powers” no longer have any other ideal but offering them the continual dissolution of their way of life - and their last social benefits - in the endless movement of globalized growth, whether it’s painted green or even in the colors of “sustainable development”, “energy transition”, and the “digital revolution.”

- Jean-Claude Michéa, Notre ennemi, le Capital

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The culture of narcissism, economic deregulation, the religion of human rights, the collapse of the collective, the theory of gender, the advocacy for hybrids of any kind, the emergence of “contemporary art”, tele-reality, utilitarianism, the logic of the market, the primacy of the just over the good (and right over duty), subjective “free choice” erected as a general rule, the taste for cheap junk, the reign of the disposable and programmed obsolescence, all that is part of a contemporary system where, under the influence of liberalism, the individual has become the center of everything and has been erected as the universal criterion of evaluation. To understand liberal logic is to understand what links all these elements together and how they derive from a common matrix.

(Alain de Benoist, "Contre le libéralisme", éditions du Rocher, 2019, p.11)

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What is Patriotism? Love of country, someone answers. But what is meant by ‘love of country’? “The rich man,” says a French writer, “loves his country because he conceives it owes him a duty, whereas the poor man loves his country as he believes he owes it a duty.” The recognition of the duty we owe our country is, I take it, the real mainspring of patriotic action; and our ‘country’, properly understood, means not merely the particular spot on the earth's surface from which we derive our parentage, but also comprises all the men, women and children of our race whose collective life constitutes our country’s political existence. True patriotism seeks the welfare of each in the happiness of all, and is inconsistent with the selfish desire for worldly wealth which can only be gained by the spoliation of less favoured fellow-mortals.

- James Connolly

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"What is peace? Did we borrow Palestine from them? Are we renting the land? Did they give it to us all those years back as an act of kindness?
There will never be peace with the confiscators of our lands, and if there ever emerges a supine coward among you who calls for peace with enemy, throw him in the river Nile."

- Leader Gamal Abdel Nasser

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What an absolute fucking joke to think just across the channel the french working class are fighting against the same thing the middle class are marching for in London. Disgrace. 

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“Back in the chaotic collapsing scenery of the Soviet Union in the late Eighties, there occurred an event that signaled the eventual fate of the USSR, even if no one exactly knew it at the moment. A fairly unknown teacher named Nina Andreyeva published an essay in a political magazine called Sovetskaya Rossiya, or Soviet Russia. The brave Andreyeva leveled sharp criticism at Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), a reformist agenda clandestinely aimed at dismantling the Communist Party and moving the country toward perhaps what would have been a vague form of European market-based social democracy. Andreyeva had understood where Gorbachev was headed and, as a committed communist, feared the dissolution of the workers’ struggle to build a truly communist society.”

- Jason Hirthler

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