George Bernard Shaw on Communism and 'the common'

’Most people will tell you that Communism is known in this country [Britain] only as a visionary project advocated by a handful of admirable cranks. Then they will stroll off across the common bridge, across the common embankment, by the light of the common street lamp shining alike on the just and the unjust, up the common street, and into the common Trafalgar Square, where on the smallest hint on their part that Communism is to be tolerated for an instant in a civilized country, they will be handily bludgeoned by the common policeman, and hauled off to the common gaol.’

George Bernard Shaw, "The Impossibility of Anarchism", a talk from 1891, published in Socialism and Individualism, 1911, p.42 - quoted here

Bertolt Brecht on War

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle.
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

'From a German War Primer'

Churchill on Franco and Hitler

Winston Churchill's respect for the work of 'Signor Mussolini' is well known, writing as late as 1939 that 'Up till a few years ago many people in Britain admired the work which the extraordinary man Signor Mussolini had done for his country. He had brought it out of incipient anarchy into a position of dignity and order which was admired even by those who regretted the suspension of Italian freedom.' It should not therefore come as much of a surprise that the imperialist gangster was also quite taken by the Spanish fascist dictator Franco and even Hitler himself (before WWII).

On February 23, 1939 he wrote of Franco:

'He now has the opportunity of becoming a great Spaniard of whom it may be written a hundred years hence: "He united his country and rebuilt its greatness. Apart from that he reconciled the past with the present, and broadened the life of the working people while preserving the faith and structure of the Spanish nation." Such an achievement would rank in history with the work of Ferdinand and Isabella and the glories of Charles V.'

Even after the Second World War and the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust had come out, Churchill remembered discussing Hitler in 1932, and noted:

'I admire men who stand up for their country in defeat, even though I am on the other side. He had a perfect right, to be a patriotic German if he chose. I always wanted England, Germany, and France to be friends.'

Happy new year

The good people over at the Marxist Internet Archive have produced a neat selection of Communist quotes, no doubt as a happy new year present to Marxists with internet access and a penchant for quotes the world over... I picked a few at random out below...

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
Frederick Engels, The Principles of Communism (1847)

War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths.
Rosa Luxemburg, In the Storm(1904)

Everybody talks about imperialism. But imperialism is merely monopoly capitalism.
V I Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It(1917)

Generally speaking, art is an expression of man’s need for an harmonious and complete life, that is to say, his need for those major benefits of which a society of classes has deprived him. That is why a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work. Every new tendency in art has begun with rebellion.
Leon Trotsky, Art and Politics in Our Epoch(1938)

Deutscher on the importance of class struggle

'On both sides of the great divide, a few ruthless and half-witted oligarchies – capitalist oligarchies here, bureaucratic oligarchies there – hold all the power and take all the decisions, obfuscate the minds and throttle the wills of the nations... The peoples have been silent too long. We can and we must get back to class struggle. It's all dignity. We may and we must restore meaning to the great ideas. The conflicting and partly conflicting ideas by which mankind is still living. The ideas of liberalism, democracy and communism. Yes, communism.'

Isaac Deutscher, 1965.

Jacques Roux on capitalist democracy

'Freedom is nothing but a vain phantom when one class of men can starve another with impunity. Equality is nothing but a vain phantom when the rich, through monopoly, exercise the right of life or death over their like. The republic is nothing but a vain phantom when the counter-revolution can operate every day through the price of commodities, which three quarters of all citizens cannot afford without shedding tears.'
Jacques Roux, Manifesto of the Enragés, 1793.

William Wilberforce on Africans

Today being the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, I thought I ought to really put up a quote from William Wilberforce about enslaved Africans to mark the occasion. The quote I found, for some reason, has not recieved a great deal of attention so far during the official British bicentennary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade, but I found it to be quite enlightening when it comes to how we might want to remember Wilberforce. As Marika Sherwood notes of Wilberforce in After Abolition:

'He held racist views, for example believing that "negroes' minds are uninformed and their moral characters are debased...their notions of morality extremely rude," while African kings had two great vices, "personal avarice and sensuality."'

Churchill on Mussolini

'I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by his gentle and simple bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers.' Mr Churchill declined to discuss Fascism in its national aspect, he said: 'Different countries have different ways of doing the same thing...If I had been an Italian, I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. But in England we have not yet had to face this danger in the same deadly form...But that we shall succeed in grappling with Communism and choking the life out of it – of that I am absolutely sure.'

Extracts from press statements made by Churchill, January 1927 (Churchill Papers, CHAR 9/82B), after a visit to meet Mussolini. For a brief run down on Churchill, see here.

Lenin on Socialism

'As I just passed through your hall, I observed a placard with the inscription: "The realm of the workers and peasants will never end!" After I had read this remarkable placard, which did not, it is true, hang on the wall in the usual manner but stood in a corner, perhaps because it occurred to someone that the inscription had not been happily chosen and he therefore put it on the side – when I had read this remarkable placard, I was forced to think: So, there still prevail among us misunderstandings and false conceptions about those most elementary and most fundamental things! If the realm of the workers and peasants were really never to end, this would mean that there would never be socialism, for socialism is the abolition of all classes; but so long as there are workers and peasants, then there are different classes, and complete socialism would be for that reason impossible. And when I reflected that, three and a half years after the October revolution, there can be among us such remarkable placards, even if pushed somewhat to the side, it occurred to me that it is possible for the greatest misunderstandings to prevail even about the most widely disseminated and widely used watchwords.'

Lenin, Speech at the All-Russian Conference of Transport Workers, Moscow, March 1921

W. E. B. Du Bois on communism

'Accomplish the end which every honest human being must desire by means other than communism, and communism need not be feared. On the other hand, if a world of ultimate democracy, reaching across the colour line and abolishing race discrimination, can only be accomplished by the method laid down by Karl Marx, then that method deserves to be triumphant no matter what we think or do.'

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), c1945. One of the greatest African-American scholars of his time, author of such works as Black Reconstruction; An essay towards a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880, Du Bois died aged 95 a citizen of Ghana - which celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its independence last week - after having moved there on the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah in 1961 to work on compiling an Encyclopedia Africana.

Max Weber on revolution

'Politics...takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible'
- Max Weber.

Winston Churchill on slavery and the slave trade

'Our [Britain's] possession of the West Indies, like that of India... gave us the strength, the capital, the wealth at a time when no other European nation possessed such a reserve. It enabled us to come through the Napoleonic wars, the keen competition of the 18th and 19th centuries and enabled us to lay the foundation of that commercial and financial leadership which gave us a great position in the world.'

Winston Churchill addressing a banquet of West Indies sugar planters in London on 20 July 1939.

Duncan Hallas on the Labour Party

'It’s not a question that a Labour government won’t bring socialism, you have to be pretty daft to believe that. But Labour will act as the agent of capital. And, paradoxically enough, because it is not in the same sense part of the system, it may be worse [than the Tories] as it has to prove itself to the bankers and big business. The only thing which can offset that is a rise in the level of the class struggle.'

The late, great Duncan Hallas (1925-2002) on what a future Labour Government would be like, from a speech in 1990.

Engels on the 'Iron Chancellor'

'a man of great practical judgment and great cunning...but this advanced sense of the practical often goes hand in hand with a corresponding narrowness of outlook...Bismarck, as we shall see, never managed to produce even a hint of any political ideas of his own but always combined the ready-made ideas of others to suit his own purposes. However, precisely this narrow-mindedness was his good fortune. Without it he would never have been able to regard the entire history of the world from a specific Prussian point of view; and if in this typically Prussian world outlook of his there had been a rent through which daylight could penetrate, he would have bungled his entire mission and it would have been the end of his glory.'

Substitute 'Brown' for 'Bismarck' and 'British' for 'Prussian' and I think Engels' critique of the 'Iron Chancellor' still kind of works, particularly given Gordon Brown's obsession with championing 'Britishness'...an obsession that British taxpayers are going to have to indulge to the tune of up to £100 billion (£76 billion for Trident plus £20 billion for ID Cards)...

Robespierre on Empire building

'The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.'

Maximilien Robespierre, speech to the Jacobin Club, 1792.

Lenin on the Channel Tunnel

'Britain and France are the most civilised countries in the world. London and Paris are the world’s capitals, with populations of six and three million, respectively. The distance between them is an eight- to nine-hour journey.

One can imagine how great is the commercial intercourse between these two capitals, what masses of goods and of people are constantly moving from the one to the other.

And yet the richest, the most civilised and the freest countries in the world are now discussing, in fear and trepidation—by no means for the first time!—the “difficult” question of whether a tunnel can be built under the English Channel (which separates Britain from the European Continent).

Engineers have long been of the, opinion that it can. The capitalists of Britain and France have mountains of money. Profit from capital invested in such an enterprise would be absolutely certain.

What, then, is holding the matter up?

Britain is afraid of—invasion! A tunnel, you see, would, “if anything should happen”, facilitate the invasion of Britain by enemy troops. That is why the British military authorities have, not for the first time, wrecked the plan to build the tunnel.

The madness and blindness of the civilised nations makes astonishing reading. Needless to say, it would take only a few seconds with modern technical devices to bring traffic in the tunnel to a halt, and to wreck the tunnel completely.

But the civilised nations have driven themselves into the position of barbarians. Capitalism has brought about a situation in which the bourgeoisie, in order to hoodwink the workers, is compelled to frighten the British people with idiotic tales about “invasion”. Capitalism has brought about a situation in which a whole group of capitalists who stand to lose “good business” through the digging of the tunnel are doing their utmost to wreck this plan and hold up technical progress.

The Britishers’ fear of the tunnel is fear of themselves. Capitalist barbarism is stronger than civilisation.

On all sides, at every step one comes across problems which man is quite capable of solving immediately, but capitalism is in the way. It has amassed enormous wealth—and has made men the slaves of this wealth. It has solved the most complicated technical problems—and has blocked the application of technical improvements because of the poverty and ignorance of millions of the population, because of the stupid avarice of a handful of millionaires.

Civilisation, freedom and wealth under capitalism call to mind the rich glutton who is rotting alive but will not let what is young live on. But the young is growing and will emerge supreme in spite of all.'

Lenin, 'Civilised Barbarism', 1913. 'EuroTunnel' finally opened in...1994, a mere eighty years later.

John Stuart Mill on Communism

'If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its chances, and the present [1852] state of society with all its sufferings and injustices; if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence, that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour—the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in a descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life; if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance.'

John Stuart Mill, (1806-1893) The Principles of Political Economy

Bloody foreigners

The following inflamatory speech in the House of Commons by a Conservative MP railing against 'foreign invaders' whom he claimed were displacing native Britons caught my eye:

'Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for...Romanians, Russians and Poles. Rents are raised 50 or 100 percent...It is only a matter of time before the population becomes entirely foreign...The working classes know that the new buildings are erected not for them but for strangers from abroad; they see schools crowded with foreign children, and the very posters and advertisements on the wall in a foreign tongue.'

The date of the speech? Er, 29th January 1902. Its author, one Major William Evans-Gordon was demonising Jewish people looking for refuge from anti-semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe. Thank goodness British MPs today would never stoop so low as to make a bid for political power by playing the race card against migrants.

[Quote from Nigel Harris, Thinking the Unthinkable (2002), p. 46]

Al Capone on Capitalism

It is well known that legendary American gangster Al Capone once said that 'Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class', - and I have commented on the links between organised crime and capitalist accumulation before on this blog, but I recently came across the following story from Claud Cockburn's autobiography, and decided to put it up on Histomat for you all.

In 1930, Cockburn, then a correspondent in America for the Times newspaper, interviewed Al Capone at the Lexington Hotel in Chicago, when Capone was at the height of his power. He recalls that except for 'the sub-machine gun...poking through the transom of a door behind the desk, Capone's own room was nearly indistinguishable from that of, say, a "newly arrived" Texan oil millionaire. Apart from the jowly young murderer on the far side of the desk, what took the eye were a number of large, flattish, solid silver bowls upon the desk, each filled with roses. They were nice to look at, and they had another purpose too, for Capone when agitated stood up and dipped the tips of his fingers in the water in which floated the roses.

I had been a little embarrassed as to how the interview was to be launched. Naturally the nub of all such interviews is somehow to get round to the question "What makes you tick?" but in the case of this millionaire killer the approach to this central question seemed mined with dangerous impediments. However, on the way down to the Lexington Hotel I had had the good fortune to see, I think in the Chicago Daily News, some statistics offered by an insurance company which dealt with the average expectation of life of gangsters in Chicago. I forget exactly what the average was, and also what the exact age of Capone at that time - I think he was in his early thirties. The point was, however, that in any case he was four years older than the upper limit considered by the insurance company to be the proper average expectation of life for a Chicago gangster. This seemed to offer a more or less neutral and academic line of approach, and after the ordinary greetings I asked Capone whether he had read this piece of statistics in the paper. He said that he had. I asked him whether he considered the estimate reasonably accurate. He said that he thought that the insurance companies and the newspaper boys probably knew their stuff. "In that case", I asked him, "how does it feel to be, say, four years over the age?"

He took the question quite seriously and spoke of the matter with neither more nor less excitement or agitation than a man would who, let us say, had been asked whether he, as the rear machine-gunner of a bomber, was aware of the average incidence of casualties in that occupation. He apparently assumed that sooner or later he would be shot despite the elaborate precautions which he regularly took. The idea that - as afterwards turned out to be the case - he would be arrested by the Federal authorities for income-tax evasion had not, I think, at that time so much as crossed his mind. And, after all, he said with a little bit of corn-and-ham somewhere at the back of his throat, supposing he had not gone into this racket? What would be have been doing? He would, he said, "have been selling newspapers barefoot on the street in Brooklyn".

He stood as he spoke, cooling his finger-tips in the rose bowl in front of him. He sat down again, brooding and sighing. Despite the ham-and-corn, what he said was probably true and I said so, sympathetically. A little bit too sympathetically, as immediately emerged, for as I spoke I saw him looking at me suspiciously, not to say censoriously. My remarks about the harsh way the world treats barefoot boys in Brooklyn were interrupted by an urgent angry waggle of his podgy hand.

"Listen," he said, "don't get the idea I'm one of those goddam radicals. Don't get the idea I'm knocking the American system. The American system..." As though an invisible chairman had called upon him for a few words, he broke into an oration upon the theme. He praised freedom, enterprise and the pioneers. He spoke of "our heritage". He referred with contempuous disgust to Socialism and Anarchism. "My rackets," he repeated several times, "are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way"...his vision of the American system began to excite him profoundly and now he was on his feet again, leaning across the desk like the chairman of a board meeting, his fingers plunged in the rose bowls.

"This American system of ours," he shouted, "call it Americanism, call it Capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it." He held out his hand towards me, the fingers dripping a little, and stared at me sternly for a few seconds before reseating himself.

A month later in New York I was telling this story to Mr John Walter, minority owner of The Times. He asked me why I had not written the Capone interview for the paper. I explained that when I had come to put my notes together I saw that most of what Capone had said was in essence identical with what was being said in the leading articles of The Times itself, and I doubted whether the paper would be best pleased to find itself seeing eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago. Mr Walter, after a moment's wry reflection, admitted that probably my idea had been correct.'

Quote Me Happy Index

After a kind of false start, this blog has established a tradition of putting up various quotes, and I have decided to collect them together into one post for ease of reference. This will get added to as and when.

Tony Benn on Paul Robeson
Al Capone on Capitalism
Winston Churchill on Gandhi
Winston Churchill on slavery and the slave trade
Winston Churchill on 'the sinews of peace'
Eugene Debs on war
W.E.B. Du Bois on communism
Terry Eagleton on terrorism
Frederick Engels on the 'Iron Chancellor'
William Evans-Gordon MP on migrants
Norman Geras on 'the ex-Marxists conscience'
Duncan Hallas on the Labour Party
Christopher Hitchens on 'imperial beastliness'
Robert Ingersoll on war
Vladmir Lenin on the Channel Tunnel
Karl Marx on the working class
John Stuart Mill on Communism
John Pilger on Empire
Pope Pius XI on colonialism
Paul Robeson on liberty
Maximilien Robespierre on Empire-building
Josef Stalin on Cromwell
EP Thompson on the nuclear nightmare
Leon Trotsky on Ignazio Silone and Jack London
Max Weber on revolution