Capitalism Socialism And Democracy Quotes

The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.

Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not.

A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.

The truth is, one who seeks to achieve freedom by petitioning those in power to give it to him has already failed, regardless of the response. To beg for the blessing of “authority” is to accept that the choice is the master’s alone to make, which means that the person is already, by definition, a slave.

The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

People and institutions that refuse to admit error eventually discredit themselves.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

The world economy would collapse if a significant number of people were to realize and then act on the realization that it is possible to enjoy many if not most of the things that they enjoy without first having to own them.

Democracy is supposed to be ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Capitalism is ‘of the capitalist, for the capitalist’. Period.

I don’t know. What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind. For I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide. In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.

This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it.

My take on socialism is this: Socialism only seems to work when you don't fully implement it, when you keep enough capitalism around to pay socialism's bills, at least for a time. It's the difference between milking the cow and killing it. Socialism has no theory of wealth creation; it's just a destructive, envy-driven fantasy about redistributing it after something else (and somebody else) creates it first.

Democracy is a pretty word. Democracy is a captivating magic. The oppressed classes always wanted and the oppressing ones always promised a democracy. But this was precisely for democracy that the both parts had always fought. The great French Revolution proclaimed the great appeal "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". The history showed that from the class viewpoint, they could indicate different things, distinct contents; these concepts must be filled with different sense. In the class society, in the society locked in a state, Liberty is always at the top of somebody’s spear! Equality is the Achilles’ heel, into which this spear is plunged. Humanity is the pledge for plunging it by all force.  

It is precisely democracy which is destroying the American political structure, American law, and the American economy.

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.

Just like the myth of the people’s or popular capitalism, which was propagated since the mid1950s in the countries to the west of Berlin Wall, to the east and the north of it, since the same time it was introduced the myth of the people’s or popular socialism. But the suggestion is always the same. Under any “people’s” power—from people’s capitalism to people’s socialism—the greatest illusion suggested to the oppressed classes is that the people are sovereign, i.e., that all the people dominate over themselves. In this respect, even John Kenneth Galbraith makes Marxist conclusions, which even in the Internet epoch have the same power: “Young people are suggested that in a democracy the entire power belongs to the people!” (“The Anatomy of Power”) Yet, old people know that this is not true!

We all know how 'modern democracies take loaves from the wealthy.' It's the slipups in the 'pass them out to the poor' department that inspire a study of Economics.

Capitalism Survive?—I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.

In one important sense, Marxism is a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved.

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them. The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears "natural" today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth. We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.

Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

In a democracy, there will be more complaints but less crisis, in a dictatorship more silence but much more suffering.

Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia—or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.

The public mind has by now so thoroughly grown out of humor with it as to make condemnation of capitalism and all its works a foregone conclusion---almost a requirement of the etiquette of discussion.

As a matter of practical necessity, socialist democracy may eventually turn out to be more of a sham than capitalist democracy ever was. In any case, that democracy will not mean increased personal freedom.

Libertarians make no exceptions to the golden rule and provide no moral loophole, no double standard, for government. That is, libertarians believe that murder is murder and does not become sanctified by reasons of state if committed by the government. We believe that theft is theft and does not become legitimated because organized robbers call their theft "taxation." We believe that enslavement is enslavement even if the institution committing that act calls it "conscription." In short, the key to libertarian theory is that it makes no exceptions in its universal ethic for government.

In a covenant...among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society.

Truth is found neither in traditional capitalism nor in classical Communism. Each represents a partial truth. Capitalism fails to see the truth in collectivism. Communism fails to see the truth in individualism. Capitalism fails to realize that life is social. Communism fails to realize that life is personal. The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of Communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.

When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights.

The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.

There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.

Honey, it isn’t democracy that runs this country. Capitalism rules. It does no good to reason with the capitalists or their politicians. This is a class war. We have to stir up the American people, the lower class. Some of the better-off lower class do show some sympathy for us when they’re smacked with the facts. And when they voice themselves collectively, good things happen.” — Mother Jones

We live in a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory.

Nothing should be more obvious than that the business organism cannot function according to design when its most important “parameters of action”—wages, prices, interest—are transferred to the political sphere and there dealt with according to the requirements of the political game or, which sometimes is more serious still, according to the ideas of some planners.

We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe.

إن من سيدفع عجلة التغير من الرأسمالية الى الإشتراكية هم المتعلمين الذين يظنون أنفسهم أنهم أذكى الناس ولكن لا يجدون وظيقة لأن ليس لديهم مهارات للسوق فيقولون إن المشكلة من الرأسمالية ولو أن النظام عادل لكانو هم المتحكمين في الدولة لأنهم هم المتعلمين

That’s got to stop,” says I. “The idea of any blood-thirsty pirate (Mexican President Diaz) sitting on a throne and reaching across the border to tromp on our Constitution makes my blood boil.” — Mother Jones

Social structures, types and attitudes are coins that do not readily melt. Once they are formed they persist, possibly for centuries, and since different structures and types display different degrees of this ability to survive, we almost always find that actual group and national behavior more or less departs from what we should expect it to be if we tried to infer it from the dominant forms of the productive process.

Every socialist wishes to revolutionize society from the economic angle and all the blessings he expects are to come through a change in economic institutions. This of course implies a theory about social causation—the theory that the economic pattern is the really operative element in the sum total of the phenomena that we call society.

Oh, Rachel, Rachel," Leah said. "Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of the nations, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that?

What do you see out there?” I ask. “Pittsburgh,” he replies. Now I laugh. “No, young man. What you see is hell with the lid taken off.” — Mother Jones

Ever since peasants worked themselves to death to build a pyramid for the Pharaoh, the rich ruling class has sucked the life out of the poor.

The fact that you can impose democracy on other nations is already an undemocratic approach.

Have you ever played Monopoly? It's a board game designed to teach kids capitalism. And what happens in the end? The winner has all the money, and everyone else has nothing. Woohoo! So much fun! That's literally how America works. That's why there are a few super rich people who own almost everything, and tens of millions of dirt poor people who have nothing.

To begin with, convinced socialists will derive satisfaction from the mere fact of living in a socialist society.4 Socialist bread may well taste sweeter to them than capitalist bread simply because it is socialist bread, and it would do so even if they found mice in it.

However, whether favorable or unfavorable, value judgments about capitalist performance are of little interest. For mankind is not free to choose. This is not only because the mass of people are not in a position to compare alternatives rationally and always accept what they are being told. There is a much deeper reason for it. Things economic and social move by their own momentum and the ensuing situations compel individuals and groups to behave in certain ways whatever they may wish to do—not indeed by destroying their freedom of choice but by shaping the choosing mentalities and by narrowing the list of possibilities from which to choose.

Please do not think that I am accusing socialists of insincerity or that I wish to hold them up to scorn either as bad democrats or as unprincipled schemers and opportunists. I fully believe, in spite of the childish Machiavellism in which some of their prophets indulge, that fundamentally most of them always have been as sincere in their professions as any other men. Besides, I do not believe in insincerity in social strife, for people always come to think what they want to think and what they incessantly profess. As regards democracy, socialist parties are presumably no more opportunists than are any others; they simply espouse democracy if, as, and when it serves their ideals and interests and not otherwise. Lest readers should be shocked and think so immoral a view worthy only of the most callous of political practitioners, ...

Go home now,” says I. “Keep away from the saloons. Save your money. You are going to need it.” “What are we going to need it for?” asks a voice from the crowd. “For guns and ammunition,” says I.

The very principle of democracy is founded on the possibility of making alternative choices. There is no longer a need for democracy, since ideology made the idea that "there is no alternative" acceptable. Adherence to a meta-social principle of superior rationality allows for the elimination of the necessity and possibility of choosing. The so-called principle of the rationality of "markets" exactly fills this function in the ideology of obsolescent capitalism. Democratic practice is thus emptied of all content in the way is open to what I have called "low-intensity democracy" - that is, to electoral buffooneries where parades of majorettes take the place of programs, to the society of the spectacle. Delegitimized by these practices, politics is undone, begins to drift and loses its potential power to give meaning and coherence to alternative societal projects.

I am a citizen of this country,” I declare, “and Mr. Mayor, tonight I will be a citizen of this city when I put my shoes under my bed. The courageous men, women and children who are with me (blocked from crossing the bridge into NYC) are also citizens of this country and will be sleeping near their shoes too. I want them with me tonight, here, in the city of New York. We are all American citizens.” — Mother Jones

Turning back to the crowd I say, “I am duty bound to make this plea, but I want to say, with all due respect to the governor here, that I doubt seriously that he will do — cannot do — anything. And for the reason that he is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the capitalists who placed him here in this building.” — Mother Jones

The underlying ideology within social media is not to enhance choice or agency, but rather to narrow, filter, and reduce choice to benefit creators and advertisers. Social media herds the citizenry into surveilled spaces where the architects can track and classify them and use this understanding to influence their behavior. If democracy and capitalism are based on accessible information and free choice, what we are witnessing is their subversion from the inside.

As much as I say that market economy is a more aggressive, expansile form of command economy, I say now that democracy is a more aggressive, expansile form of dictatorship. The sin of democracy and any types of -cracy is their numbers.

Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can. But this opinion of mine, like that of every other economist who has pronounced upon the subject, is in itself completely uninteresting. What counts in any attempt at social prognosis is not the Yes or No that sums up the facts and arguments which lead up to it but those facts and arguments themselves.

To the RKO motion picture camera at her 100th birthday party: “I pray for the day when working men and women are able to earn a fair share of the wealth they produce in a capitalist system, a day when all Americans are able to enjoy the freedom, rights and opportunities guaranteed them by the Constitution of the United States of America.” — Mother Jones

The impoverished families of the long-term unemployed strained to the point of dysfunction, communities deprived of viable economies, interrupted educations, lost skills: these and many more results of capitalism’s crisis will put difficult demands on governments for years. On the one hand, they will aggravate social problems that impose costs on governments.

In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about certain carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I have never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that there is something seriously wrong with this system. Capitalism is a system that puts rich people on a pedestal, legalizes greed, and enables the rich to exploit the poor. It’s morally wrong. What kind of a God would support something so immoral? Would Jesus support the exploitation of the poor by the rich? No, of course not. If you think of yourself as a follower of Christ’s teachings, if you consider yourself a good person, you are morally obligated to be against greed. It’s your duty as a good person to be against exploitation. It’s your moral duty to be against predatory capitalism.

Government as we now know it in the USA and other economically advanced countries is so manifestly horrifying, so corrupt, counterproductive, and outright vicious, that one might well wonder how it continues to enjoy so much popular legitimacy and to be perceived so widely as not only tolerable but indispensable. The answer, in overwhelming part, may be reduced to a two-part formula: bribes and bamboozlement (classically "bread and circuses"). Under the former rubric falls the vast array of government "benefits" and goodies of all sorts, from corporate subsidies and privileges to professional grants and contracts to welfare payments and health care for low-income people and other members of the lumpenproletariat. Under the latter rubric fall such measures as the government schools, the government's lapdog news media, and the government's collaboration with the producers of professional sporting events and Hollywood films. Seen as a semi-integrated whole, these measures give current governments a strong hold on the public's allegiance and instill in the masses and the elites alike a deep fear of anything that seriously threatens the status quo.

The coming of Caesarism breaks the dictature of money and its political weapon, democracy. After a long triumph of world-city economy and its interests over political creative force, the political side of life manifests itself after all as the stronger of the two. The sword is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will. If we call these money-powers 'Capitalism,' then we may designate as Socialism the will to call into life a mighty politico-economic order that transcends all class interests, a system of lofty thoughtfulness and duty-sense that keeps the whole in fine condition for the decisive battle of its history, and this battle is also the battle of money and law. The private powers of the economy want free paths for their acquisition of great resources. No legislation must stand in their way. They want to make the laws themselves, in their interests, and to that end they make use of the tool they have made for themselves, democracy, the subsidized party. Law needs, in order to resist this onslaught, a high tradition and an ambition of strong families that finds its satisfaction not in the heaping-up of riches, but in the tasks of true rulership, above and beyond all money-advantage. A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic stream in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history. Before the irresistible rhythm of the generation-sequence, everything built up by the waking-consciousness in its intellectual world vanishes at the last. Ever in History it is life and life only race-quality, the triumph of the will-to-power and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World-history is the world court, and it has ever decided in favour of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its right would hold before a tribunal of waking-consciousness.

Our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview, or at any rate a meritocratic hope, by which I mean a belief in a society in which inequality is based more on merit and effort than on kinship and rents. This belief and this hope play a very crucial role in modern society, for a simple reason: in a democracy, the professed equality of rights of all citizens contrasts sharply with the very real inequality of living conditions, and in order to overcome this contradiction it is vital to make sure that social inequalities derive from rational and universal principles rather than arbitrary contingencies. Inequalities must therefore be just and useful to all, at least in the realm of discourse and as far as possible in reality as well.

In a truly free-market society, pervasive private power of the kind exposed in the last several chapters should not exist. All capitalist institutions should be-to a greater or lesser extent-subject to the overwhelming power of the market mechanism. Instead, we find a world in which private institutions are able to dominate and control markets, while also dominating and controlling workers and manipulating entire states. Capitalism means rule by capital-not free markets.

I go back to the union man and say, “Sir, this is a house of God, not a proper place for a union meeting. I have some things to say today that God would not want to hear in His own house. Boys, I want you to get up, every one of you, and go across the road. I want you to sit down on the hillside over there and wait for me to speak to you.

..."extreme capitalism": the obsessive, uncritical penetration of the concept of the market into every aspect of American life, and the attempt to drive out every other institution, including law, art, culture, public education, Social Security, unions, community, you name it. It is the conflation of markets with populism, with democracy, with diversity, with liberty, and with choice---and so the denial of any form of choice that imposes limits on the market. More than that, it is the elimination of these separate concepts from our political discourse, so that we find ourselves looking to the stock market to fund retirement, college education, health care, and having forgotten that in other wealthy and developed societies these are rights, not the contingent outcomes of speculative games. James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, University of Texas.

The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism

From the end of the World War twenty-one years ago, this country, like many others, went through a phase of having large groups of people carried away by some emotion--some alluring, attractive, even speciously inspiring, public presentation of a nostrum, a cure-all. Many Americans lost their heads because several plausible fellows lost theirs in expounding schemes to end barbarity, to give weekly handouts to people, to give everybody a better job--or, more modestly, for example, to put a chicken or two in every pot--all by adoption of some new financial plan or some new social system. And all of them burst like bubbles. Some proponents of nostrums were honest and sincere, others--too many of them--were seekers of personal power; still others saw a chance to get rich on the dimes and quarters of the poorer people in our population. All of them, perhaps unconsciously, were capitalizing on the fact that the democratic form of Government works slowly. There always exists in a democratic society a large group which, quite naturally, champs at the bit over the slowness of democracy; and that is why it is right for us who believe in democracy to keep the democratic processes progressive--in other words, moving forward with the advances in civilization. That is why it is dangerous for democracy to stop moving forward because any period of stagnation increases the numbers of those who demand action and action now.

Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.

The masses have not always felt themselves to be frustrated and exploited. But the intellectuals that formulated their views for them have always told them that they were, without necessarily meaning by it anything precise.

People were surprised in the 1990s when multinationals began to contribute heavily to New Labour, favoured even above the Conservative Party. But this move of Labour to New Labour was much more important to capitalism than simply having one party to support, for if you can have both big parties you have achieved the ultimate switch from a capitalist democracy to a totalitarian capitalist democracy, such as was accomplished in the USA many years previously.

The passage from the ancestral line of slavery via feudalism and capitalism to socialism can only lie through revolution: it cannot lie through reform. For in reform, fundamental principles are held constant, and the details of their expression are modified. In the words of Marx, it leaves the pillars of the building intact. Indeed sometimes, reform itself may be initiated by the necessities of preserving identical fundamental principles. Reform is a tactic of self-preservation.

But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance)—competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.

The political perspective of this book, ironically, is the progeny of the progressive potential of capitalism as an historical system. The joint possibility of universal material well-being and the democratization of society is a product of the capitalist era. But the history of capitalism is a chronicle of the tension between possibilities and limits: democracy and universal affluence in perpetual and ubiquitous conflict with class domination - itself a product of the social organization of capitalist production.

A real reconciliation of East and West is impossible and inconceivable on the basis of a materialistic Communism, or of a materialistic Capitalism, or indeed of a materialistic Socialism. The third way will neither be "anti-Communist" nor 'anti-Capitalist'. It will recognize the truth in liberal democracy, and it will equally recognize the truth in Communism. A critique of Communism and Marxism does not entail an enmity towards Soviet Russia, just as a critique of liberal democracy is not entail enmity towards the west. . . . But the final and most important justification of a 'third way' is that there must be a place from which we may boldly testify to, and proclaim, truth, love and justice. No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth.

What the hell’s the matter with you men? Are you cowards as well as stupid? You boys make me sick. I’m done with you. You hear me? I want you to go back to your places now and stay with your children until I say you’re needed. “Tell your wives and your older children to bring with them dish pans and cooking pots. Tell them to bring their stirring spoons and ladles. Tell them to carry a mop over their shoulders. We’re goin’ to march on that mine and we’re going to stand guard to see that no scabs are allowed in. Do you hear me?” — Mother Jones

Whether a free lance or a party executive or a civil servant, the individual socialist looks upon the advent of socialism, naïvely but naturally, as synonymous with his advent to power. Socialization means to him that “we” are going to take over. Displacement of existing managements is an important, perhaps the most important, part of the show. And I confess that in conversing with militant socialists I have often felt some doubt as to whether some or. even most of them would care for a socialist régime, however perfect in other respects, if it were to be run by other people.

(The world is profoundly unjust and must be changed, but both the peaceful coexistence between American imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracies, on the one hand, and the reformist politics of the European, and especially the Italian, workers’ parties, on the other, are directed at keeping the proletariat in a subordinate wait-and-see situation that throws water on the fire of revolution, with the result that if the global stalemate wins, if social democracy wins, it will be capital that triumphs through the centuries and the working class will fall victim to enforced consumerism.)

In order to identify himself with the capitalist system, the unemployed of today would have completely to forget his personal fate and the politician of today his personal ambition. The long-run interests of society are so entirely lodged with the upper strata of bourgeois society that it is perfectly natural for people to look upon them as the interests of that class only. For the masses, it is the short-run view that counts. Like Louis XV, they feel après nous le deluge, and from the standpoint of individualist utilitarianism they are of course being perfectly rational if they feel like that.

Whoever has known the spiritual beauty of the Under­ground Church cannot be satisfied anymore with the emptiness of some Western churches. I suffer in the West more than I suffered in a Communist jail because now I see with my own eyes Western civilization dying. Oswald Spengler wrote in Decline of the West: You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your ­pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains —can prove to you that there are characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient states—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome. This was written in 1926. Since then, democracy and civilization have

The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting “power” as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized. Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by the results. This means, for example, that economic decisions will be made by stakeholders rather than by shareholders, and that entrepreneurship and markets will cease to play their present role. When they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place. […] Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of non market economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this. The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function. The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. […] The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century. Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable non market economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. […] But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.

More pertinent, however, is that capitalism tends to stultify the worker’s creativity, his human urge for self-expression, freedom, mutually respectful interaction with others, recognition of his self-determined sense of self, recognition of himself as a self rather than an object, a means to an end. Karl Marx called it “alienation.” Capitalism alienates the worker—and the capitalist—from his “fundamental human need” for “self-fulfilling and creative work,” “the exercise of skill and craftsmanship,”8 in addition to his fundamental desire to determine himself (whence comes the desire to dismantle oppressive power-relations and replace them with democracy). Alternative visions of social organization thus arise, including Robert Owen’s communitarian socialism, Charles Fourier’s associationist communalism, Proudhon’s mutualism (a kind of anarchism), Marx’s communism, Bakunin’s collectivist anarchism, Kropotkin’s anarchist communism, Anton Pannekoek’s council communism, and more recently, Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, Michael Albert’s participatory economics, Takis Fotopoulos’s inclusive democracy, Paul Hirst’s associationalism, and so on. Each of these schools of thought differs from the others in more or less defined ways, but they all have in common the privileging of economic and social cooperation and egalitarianism.

Although I was too tactful to ask about politics or religion, I learned that she was socially and economically progressive. She believed in birth control, gun control, and rent control; she believed in the liberation of homosexuals and civil rights for all; she believed in Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thich Nhat Hanh; she believed in nonviolence, world peace, and yoga; she believed in the revolutionary potential of disco and the United Nations of nightclubs; she believed in national self-determination for the Third World as well as liberal democracy and regulated capitalism, which was, she said, to believe that the invisible hand of the market should wear the kid glove of socialism. Her

The institutional requirements of community pose fundamental issues that neither corporate capitalism nor state socialism ever took seriously. The critical point of departure is the question: Can you have Democracy with a big D in any system if you don't have democracy with a small d in the actual experience and everyday community life of ordinary everyday citizens?

In fact, a nation that is full of hives is a nation of happy and satisfied people. It’s not a very promising target for takeover by a demagogue offering people meaning in exchange for their souls. Creating a nation of multiple competing groups and parties was, in fact, seen by America’s founding fathers as a way of preventing tyranny.60 More recently, research on social capital has demonstrated that bowling leagues, churches, and other kinds of groups, teams, and clubs are crucial for the health of individuals and of a nation. As political scientist Robert Putnam put it, the social capital that is generated by such local groups “makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.”61

So it’s democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global battle, there’s empty land here, there’s scarce and nonrenewable resources here, and we’re going to get swept up into the fight and we cannot choose not to be part of it, we are one of the prizes and our fate will be decided by what happens throughout the human world. That being the case, we had better band together for the common good, for Mars and for us and for all the people on earth and for the seven generations, it’s going to be hard it’s going to take years, and the stronger we are the better our chances, which is why I’m so happy to see that burning meteor in the sky pumping the matrix of life into our world, and why I’m so happy to see you all here to celebrate it together, a representative congress of all that I love in this world, but look I think that steel-drum band is ready to play aren’t you” (shouts of assent) “so why don’t you folks start and we’ll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere.

Well, honey, it’s capitalism that brings out the meanness and greed,” says I. “Our founding fathers did a decent job of framing our democracy. They wrote the Constitution and added a Bill of Rights that intended for people of all classes to enjoy the freedoms the Constitution offers. But capitalism came along without a constitution or a bill of rights and the industrialists grabbed unrestricted power. The capitalists wrote their own ‘Declaration of Capitalism’.” — Mother Jones

Estimates suggest that $7.6 trillion of wealth is hidden in tax havens all over the world. The international finance sector acts as a 'circulation system for criminal money acquired through drug trafficking, terrorism, piracy, human trafficking, proliferation and tax evasion.' When we look at the international financial system, we don't find a free-market paradise. Instead, we find incredibly powerful institutions in both the public and private sector shaping the conditions faced by everyone else. Financial institutions 'dress themselves up in liberal trappings of the market, yet capture the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the social body to feed their own profits.' Yet all this power is held without any democratic accountability. Politicians, technocrats, and financiers work together to decide everything from the interest rates we pay on our loans to who gets what when a state files for bankruptcy. If everyone had a say in determining how these rules were made and enforced, rather than just a privileged few, we'd live in a very different world.

It did not take National Socialism long to rally workers, most of whom were either unemployed or still very young, into the SA [Sturmangriff, Stormtroopers, "brown shirts"]. To a large extent, however, these workers were revolutionary in a dull sort of way and still maintained an authoritarian attitude. For this reason National Socialist propaganda was contradictory; it's content was determined by the class for which it was intended. Only in its manipulation of the mystical feelings of the masses was it clear and consistent. In talks with followers of the National Socialist party and especially with members of the SA, it was clearly brought out that the revolutionary phraseology of National Socialism was the decisive factor in the winning over of these masses. One heard National Socialists deny that Hitler represented capital. One heard SA men warn Hitler that he must not betray the cause of the "revolution." One heard SA men say that Hitler was the German Lenin. Those who went over to National Socialism from Social Democracy and the liberal central parties were, without exception, revolutionary minded masses who were either nonpolitical or politically undecided prior to this. Those who went over from the Communist party were often revolutionary elements who simply could not make any sense of many of the German Communist party's contradictory political slogans. In part they were men upon whom the external features of Hitler's party, it's military character, its assertiveness, etc., made a big impression. To begin with, it is the symbol of the flag that stands out among the symbols used for purposes of propaganda.

All men know that by sheer weight of physical force, the mass of men must in the last resort become the arbiters of human action. But reason, skill, wealth, machines and power may for long periods enable the few to control the many. But to what end? The current theory of democracy is that dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character. But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for narrower ends, because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We rule by junta; we turn Fascist, because we do not believe in men; yet the basis of fact in this disbelief is incredibly narrow. We know perfectly well that most human beings have never had a decent human chance to be full men. Most of us may be convinced that even with opportunity the number of utter human failures would be vast; and yet remember that this assumption kept the ancestors of present white America long in slavery and degradation. It is then one's moral duty to see that every human being, to the extent of his capacity, escapes ignorance, poverty and crime. With this high ideal held unswervingly in view, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorships may rule; but the end will be the rule of All, if mayhap All or Most qualify. The only unforgivable sin is dictatorship for the benefit of Fools, Voluptuaries, gilded Satraps, Prostitutes and Idiots. The rule of the famished, unlettered, stinking mob is better than this and the only inevitable, logical and justifiable return. To escape from ultimate democracy is as impossible as it is for ignorant poverty and crime to rule forever.

The middle and working classes no longer think of the present society as structured around classes. Current opinion holds that the rich are deserving and the poor are not, while an incalculable number of people linger between the categories. A huge section of public opinion in the Western world tends to regard oppression and exploitation as residual abuses, not inherent features of a specific social order. The prevailing society is neither rationally analyzed nor forcefully challenged; it is prudently psychoanalyzed and politely coaxed, as though social problems emerge from erratic individual behavior.

the dull old facts of altered climate, vanishing forests, creatures and polar ice. Profitable and poisonous agriculture obliterating biological beauty. Oceans turning to weak acid. Well above the horizon, approaching fast, the urinous tsunami of the burgeoning old, cancerous and demented, demanding care. And soon, with demographic transition, the reverse, populations in catastrophic decline. Free speech no longer free, liberal democracy no longer the obvious port of destiny, robots stealing jobs, liberty in close combat with security, socialism in disgrace, capitalism corrupt, destructive and in disgrace, no alternatives in sight.

Democracy and decarbonization are often seen as enemies. Democratic processes are slow, and time is running out. But unless we are able to democratize our society, political and economic decision-making processes will continue to be dominated by those who have helped to cause climate breakdown up to now. We cannot rely on the hope that the powerful will suddenly realize the need to tackle climate breakdown and take appropriate action. Even if they do realize in time, they will seek to protect their interests at the expense of the general interest. It is not hard to envisage a world in which wealthy nations respond to climate breakdown by building walls to keep at bay those displaced by rising temperatures. Much like the separation between states and markets, the separation between man and nature is a liberal myth. Humanity is a part of nature. The fight against climate breakdown is not a fight to save "the planet"- the planet will continue to exist long after it is rendered uninhabitable for humans. The fight against climate breakdown is a fight to protect human life on earth. And that fight cannot be won by sacrificing millions of lives or the freedoms that make life worth living. But if we continue to allow the response to climate breakdown to be shaped solely by the powerful, this is the kind of "solution" we will get.

First of all, we should not forget that the concept of fascism has frequently been used even after World War II, and not only in order to define the military dictatorships of Latin America. In 1959, Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘the survival of National Socialism within democracy’ was potentially more dangerous than ‘the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy’.2 In 1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini depicted the anthropological models of neoliberal capitalism as a ‘new fascism’ compared to which the regime of Mussolini appeared irremediably archaic, as a kind of ‘paleofascism’.3 And in even more recent decades, many historians seeking to provide interpretations of Berlusconi’s Italy recognized its intimacy—if not its filiation—with classical fascism

Marxist writers are generally either indifferent or mildly hostile to the anti-capitalist movement, which they see as no good substitute for the great projects of communism and social democracy. Now, in one sense this is quite justified[…] However, there seems very little reason to believe that a return to the tactics of the twentieth-century labour movement is going to achieve anything in the future… [W]hat is wrong with commodification is not commodification per se… Marxist tradition goes much further than simply recommending that the excessive power of capital be challenged and curbed. Historically, this tradition tends to assert that such a challenge can only be made by virtue of a direct challenge to the existing relations of production, conceived of as the basis for a social totality, and, crucially, that it can only be made by the proletariat, politically mobilizes as a ‘Class of Itself’. In concrete terms, this means that only the labour movement, being organized and mobilized on the basis of its class identity and demanding the socialization of the means of production, can mount such a challenge… This is where I, and the anti-capitalist movement, part company with classical Marxism… [A]nti-capitalist movement is characterized by a certain pluralism, an unwillingness to impose any one model of social organization, and a refusal of neoliberal hegemony not on the basis of a single class identity or even a single universal human identity, but precisely n the basis of a defence of such pluralism against neoliberalism’s tyrannical monomania.

Consider almost any public issue. Today’s Democratic Party and its legislators, with a few notable individual exceptions, is well to the right of counterparts from the New Deal and Great Society eras. In the time of Lyndon Johnson, the average Democrat in Congress was for single-payer national health insurance. In 1971, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, for universal, public, tax-supported, high-quality day care and prekindergarten. Nixon vetoed the bill in 1972, but even Nixon was for a guaranteed annual income, and his version of health reform, “play or pay,” in which employers would have to provide good health insurance or pay a tax to purchase it, was well to the left of either Bill or Hillary Clinton’s version, or Barack Obama’s. The Medicare and Medicaid laws of 1965 were not byzantine mash-ups of public and private like Obamacare. They were public. Infrastructure investments were also public. There was no bipartisan drive for either privatization or deregulation. The late 1960s and early 1970s (with Nixon in the White House!) were the heyday of landmark health, safety, environmental, and financial regulation. To name just three out of several dozen, Nixon signed the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the 1973 Consumer Product Safety Act. Why did Democrats move toward the center and Republicans to the far right? Several things occurred. Money became more important in politics. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed by business-friendly and Southern Democrats after Walter Mondale’s epic 1984 defeat, believed that in order to be more competitive electorally, Democrats had to be more centrist on both economic and social issues.

More specifically, this book will try to establish the following points. First, there are not two great liberal social and political systems but three. One is democracy—political liberalism—by which we decide who is entitled to use force; another is capitalism—economic liberalism—by which we decide how to allocate resources. The third is liberal science, by which we decide who is right. Second, the third system has been astoundingly successful, not merely as a producer of technology but also, far more important, as a peacemaker and builder of social bridges. Its great advantages as a social system for raising and settling differences of opinion are inherent, not incidental. However, its disadvantages—it causes pain and suffering, it creates legions of losers and outsiders, it is disorienting and unsettling, it allows and even thrives on prejudice and bias—are also inherent. And today it is once again under attack. Third, the attackers seek to undermine the two social rules which make liberal science possible. (I’ll outline them in the next chapter and elaborate them in the rest of the book.) For the system to function, people must try to follow those rules even if they would prefer not to. Unfortunately, many people are forgetting them, ignoring them, or carving out exemptions. That trend must be fought, because, fourth, the alternatives to liberal science lead straight to authoritarianism. And intellectual authoritarianism, although once the province of the religious and the political right in America, is now flourishing among the secular and the political left. Fifth, behind the new authoritarian push are three idealistic impulses: Fundamentalists want to protect the truth. Egalitarians want to help the oppressed and let in the excluded. Humanitarians want to stop verbal violence and the pain it causes. The three impulses are now working in concert. Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought. Seventh, there is no way to advance knowledge peacefully and productively by adhering to the principles advocated by egalitarians and humanitarians. Their principles are poisonous to liberal science and ultimately to peace and freedom. Eighth, no social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.

But then something unexpected happened. Donald Trump, a real estate mogul and television celebrity who did not need the Koch donor network’s money to run, who seemed to have little grasp of the goals of this movement, entered the race. More than that, to get ahead, Trump was able to successfully mock the candidates they had already cowed as “puppets.” And he offered a different economic vision. He loved capitalism, to be sure, but he was not a libertarian by any stretch. Like Bill Clinton before him, he claimed to feel his audience’s pain. He promised to stanch it with curbs on the very agenda the party’s front-runners were promoting: no more free-trade deals that shuttered American factories, no cuts to Social Security or Medicare, and no more penny-pinching while the nation’s infrastructure crumbled. He went so far as to pledge to build a costly wall to stop immigrants from coming to take the jobs U.S. companies offered them because they could hire desperate, rightless workers for less. He said and did a lot more, too, much that was ugly and incendiary. And in November, he shocked the world by winning the Electoral College vote.

The liberal ideals of the Enlightenment could be realized only in very partial and limited ways in the emerging capitalist order: "Democracy with its mono of equality of all citizens before the law and Liberalism with its right of man over his own person both were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy," Rocker correctly observed. Those who are compelled to rent themselves to owners of capital in order to survive are deprived of one of the most fundamental rights: the right to productive, creative and fulfilling work under one's own control, in solidarity with others. And under the ideological constraints of capitalist democracy, the prime necessity is to satisfy the needs of those in a position to make investment decisions; if their demands are not satisfied, there will be no production, no work, no social services, no means for survival. All necessarily subordinate themselves and their interests to the overriding need to serve the interests of the owners and managers of the society, who, furthermore, with their control over resources, are easily able to shape the ideological system (the media, schools, universities and so on) in their interests, to determine the basic conditions within which the political process will function, its parameters and basic agenda, and to call upon the resources of state violence, when need be, to suppress any challenge to entrenched power. The point was formulated succinctly in the early days of the liberal democratic revolutions by John Jay, the President of the Continental Congress and the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court: "The people who own the country ought to govern it." And, of course, they do, whatever political faction may be in power. Matters could hardly be otherwise when economic power is narrowly concentrated and the basic decisions over the nature and character of life, the investment decisions, are in principle removed from democratic control.

With the increasing recognition of Jews as the parasitic germs of these diseases, state after state was forced in the last years to take a position on this fateful question for nations. Imbued with the instinct of self-preservation, they had to take those measures which were suited to protect for good their own people against this international poison. Even if Bolshevik Russia is the concrete product of this Jewish infection, one should not forget that democratic capitalism creates the conditions for it. In this way, the Jews prepare what the same Jews execute in the second stage of this process. In the first stage, they deprive the majority of men of their rights and reduce them to helpless slaves. Or, as they themselves put it, they make them expropriated proletarians in order to spur them on, as a fanaticized mob, to destroy the foundations of their state. Later, this is followed by the extermination of their own national intelligentsia, and finally by the elimination of all cultural foundations that, as a thousand-year-old heritage, could provide these people with their inner worth or serve as a warning to the future. What remains after that is the beast in man and a Jewish class that, as parasites in leadership positions, will in the end destroy the fertile soil on which it thrives. On this process-which according to Mommsen results in the Jewish engineered decomposition of people and states-the young, awakening Europe has now declared war. Proud and honorable people in other parts of the world have allied themselves to it. They will be joined by hundreds of millions of oppressed men who, irrespective of how their present leaders may view this, will one day break their chains. The end of these liars will come, liars who claim to protect the world against a threatening domination but who actually only seek to save their own world-rule. We are now in the midst of this mighty, truly historic awakening of the people, partly as leading, acting, or performing men. On the one side stand the men of the democracies that form the heart of Jewish capitalism, with their whole dead weight of dusty theories of state, their parliamentary corruption, their outdated social order, their Jewish brain trusts, their Jewish newspapers, stock exchanges, and banks-a combination, a mix of political and economic racketeers of the worst sort; on their side, there is the Bolshevik state, that is, that number of brutish men over whom the Jew, as in the Soviet Union, wields his bloody whip. And on the other side stand those nations who fight for their freedom and independence, for the securing of their people’s daily bread. Adolf Hitler – speech to the Reichstag April 26, 1942

Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.