欧宝娱乐

“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.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“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.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“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.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn't that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak?”
― Mao Zedong

“Strikes, boycott, parliamentarism, meetings and demonstrations are all good forms of struggle as means for preparing and organising the proletariat. But not one of these means is capable of abolishing existing inequality. All these means must be concentrated in one principal and decisive means; the proletariat must rise and launch a determined attack upon the bourgeoisie in order to destroy capitalism to its foundations. This principal and decisive means is the socialist revolution. The socialist revolution must not be conceived as a sudden and short blow, it is a prolonged struggle waged by the proletarian masses, who inflict defeat upon the bourgeoisie and capture its positions.”
― Joseph Stalin, Anarchism or Socialism?

“So Marxism, for all its plurality, has been marked by the interplay of theoretical and political preoccupations. It has also been punctuated by widely perceived moments of internal crisis – starting in the late 1890s with the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s Preconditions of Socialism, but again during the First World War, in the 1930s, and at the end of the 1970s. Indeed, one of us has written, “Marxism is constitutively, from Marx’s contribution onwards, . . . crisis theory” (Kouvelakis 2005, 25). Perhaps there are two main reasons for this succession of crises. First, Marxism is inherently tied to capitalism, at once the object of the critique of political economy and an enemy to be vanquished. But since, as Marx and Engels showed in the Communist Manifesto, it is also a dynamic system constantly transforming itself, Marxism constantly falls victim to the anxiety that it is not adequate to its Protean antagonist, that it must run to keep up with the metamorphoses of bourgeois society. This is then connected to a second source of anxiety, namely that capitalism continues to exist, and that therefore the communist project remains unrealized, two centuries now after Marx’s birth.”
― Alex Callinicos Stathis Kouvelakis Lucia Pradella

“Great are the tasks of the National Government in the sphere of economic life.
Here all action shall be governed by one law: the Volk does not live for the economy, and the economy does not exist for capital, but capital serves the economy and the economy serves the Volk!”
― Adolf Hitler, Hitler Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945: The Chronicle of a Dictatorship. Vol. I: 1932-1934

“I am not speaking here of the theory of the class struggle — I am speaking of the fact as the workers know it. Hundreds and thousands of workers are class-conscious without ever having heard of Marx and without coming in contact with the doctrine as such. They are class-conscious because their struggles for existence and their desire to escape from oppression and monotony, find constant opposition.”
― Frank Tannenbaum, The Labor Movement : Its Conservative Functions and Social Consequences / (1921) [Leather Bound]

“The real-world experiments of comparing socialist-communist countries and capitalist ones have been repeated on countless occasions, and the data could not be any clearer that socialist-communist societies produce poverty and misery and capitalist societies produce prosperity and happiness.”
― Gad Saad, The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life

“Not surprisingly, historically speaking, dictators have always despised the use of humor, precisely because they recognize that their hold over people is ultimately fragile, based on force and lies, and humor undermines their rule.”
― Gad Saad, The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life

“[...]Many of those friends were self-declared socialists - Wester socialists, that is. They spoke about Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Salvador Allende or Ernesto 'Che' Guevara as secular saints. It occurred to me that they were like my father in this aspect: the only revolutionaries they considered worthy of admiration had been murdered.[...]ut they did not think that my stories from the eighties were in any way significant to their political beliefs. Sometimes, my appropriating the label of socialist to describe both my experiences and their commitments was considered a dangerous provocation. [...] 'What you had was not really socialism.' they would say, barely concealing their irritation.

My stories about socialism in Albania and references to all the other socialist countries against which our socialism had measured itself were, at best, tolerated as the embarrassing remarks of a foreigner still learning to integrate. The Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba; there was nothing socialist about them either. They were seen as the deserving losers of a historical battle that the real, authentic bearers of that title had yet to join. My friends' socialism was clear, bright and in the future. Mine was messy, bloody and of the past.

And yet, the future that they sought, and that which socialist states had once embodied, found inspiration in the same books, the same critiques of society, the same historical characters. But to my surprise, they treated this as an unfortunate coincidence. Everything that went wrong on my side of the world could be explained by the cruelty of our leaders, or the uniquely backward nature of our institutions. They believed there was little for them to learn. There was no risk of repeating the same mistakes, no reason to ponder what had been achieved, and why it had been destroyed. Their socialism was characterized by the triumph of freedom and justice; mine by their failure. Their socialism would be brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, with the right combination of theory and practice. There was only one thing to do about mine: forget it.

[...]But if there was one lesson to take away from he history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say, 'What you had was not the real thing', applying that to socialism or liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsability. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies create din the name of great ideas, and we don't have to reflect, apologize and learn.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“They imagine that their poverty is transitory, and that they only need a stroke of good luck to transform them into capitalists.
Education, they think, is the lucky number in the social lottery, and it will bring them the grand prize. They do not perceive that this ticket given them by the capitalist class is a fraud, that labor, whether manual or intellectual, has no other chance than to earn its daily pittance, that it has nothing to hope for but to be exploited, and that the more capitalism goes on developing, the more do the chances of an individual raising himself out of his class go on diminishing.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

&濒诲辩耻辞;人们习惯的做法，就是在「社会主义」和「资本主义」这两个相互对立的框框裡面思考。但是更為正确，至少更加重要的做法，或许就是把「个人主义」而非「资本主义」视為「社会主义」的反面。&谤诲辩耻辞;
― Sebastian Haffner, The Meaning of Hitler

“Mao Tsetung's grasp of the future, his vision of man's true role on earth, has given him a place as a world figure. His creative genius has come from his constant return to the people, resisting all attempts to elevate himself above them. Much has been said about the "personality cult"; I have seen true, genuine love and admiration from the ordinary people of China for Mao Tsetung. The personality cult evolved round him by city bureaucrats he has done his best to put down, withdrawing himself as a person, giving to the people all homage for the Revolution. It is in this spirit, not elevating Mao as a genius, but showing him as a man, in a constant search for truth, for reality, that this book has been written.”
― Han Suyin

“We have made the start. When, at what date and time, and the proletarians of which nation will complete this process is not important. The important thing is that the ice has been broken; the road is open, the way has been shown.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“In a world where we are often told that power can corrupt, it’s essential to understand that this narrative is frequently a tool used to maintain the status quo. The idea that seeking power is inherently immoral or dangerous is a misconception, often perpetuated by those who already hold power and fear its redistribution or challenge.”
― Kevin L. Michel, The 7 Laws of Quantum Power

“Break free of the deception that exists in many cultures – the lie that speaks of power as inherently evil. Consider instead that weakness, poverty, and passivity, are often more dangerous than power. Weakness, poverty, and passivity often lead to paths that do not serve you individually – paths that do not serve us collectively, and paths that do not serve us spiritually.”
― Kevin L. Michel, The 7 Laws of Quantum Power

“It is time to throw off the absurd reverential awe that surrounds everything having to do with Marx. We have to dissociate socialism from Marxism, or at any rate concede that they might be dissociated, and recognize Marxism as one of the many transitory theorizations of the social movement—a movement that affirms itself spontaneously and independently of any theory and that is based on elementary human motives and needs.”
― Carlo Rosselli

“The problem consists in making explicit what is implicit and getting rid of the residue which still clings to its ideology, in having the courage to call things by their real names. Revisionist neo-Marxism and workers’ praxis are respectively the theoretical face and the practical face of a new liberal socialist conception, in which the problems of social equality and living together can and should be put on the same level as those of liberty and individual life. Socialism must tend to become liberal, and liberalism to take on the substance of the proletarian struggle. It is not possible to be liberal without joining actively in the cause of the workers, and there is no way to serve the cause of labor efficiently without coming to grips with the philosophy of the modern world, a philosophy founded on the idea of development through oppositions eternally overcome; here lies the core of the liberal point of view.”
― Carlo Rosselli

“The ideal of a perfect society of free and equal persons, with no classes, no struggle, and no state, is being transformed more and more into a limiting ideal that in itself is worthless but that serves as a stimulus and a focus for the spirit.”
― Carlo Rosselli

“We talk about liberty, we fight for liberty, but the first liberty we have to put in place is liberty within the movement itself, and that means breaking up these hardened layers of dogma and grotesque monopolies. The socialist movement has to be coherent enough to apply to itself the ideal rules that inspires its attempt to reform all of society.”
― Carlo Rosselli

“Humans thrive -in every way: economically and in their pursuit of happiness- when given the freedom to instantiate their individuality. This is precisely why East Germany had walls meant to stop its citizens from fleeing to the West. Too many East Germans knew that if they could escape from the -utopian egalitarianism- of communism, they would flourish and be happy in the capitalist West. It is the same reason that for more than six decades Cubans have risked shark-infested waters to seek freedom and happiness on the shores of the United States. Political and economic systems that are antithetical to human nature inevitably produce unhappiness.”
― Gad Saad, The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life

“Truth is anti-fragile. It is not brittle. It does not shatter into a million pieces because of an -offensive and hurtful- joke. An individual with a strong personhood can laugh at others (in a playful manner) and laugh at himself. Humor is a test of anti-fragility and non-brittleness in a person and in a society. A society that can’t laugh at others and at itself in a good-humored way is on its way out.”
― Gad Saad, The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life

“. . . a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.”
― Primo Levi, If This is a Man

“Broadly socialists believe all human beings are of equal worth and that society should be organised to reflect that. Fairness, equality, justice and the common good are the foundations of socialism. The wealth created by humans should be used to benefit everyone.”
― Harriet Sherwood

“Sharing is not socialism,
Caring is not altruism.
Helping is not humanism,
Reform is not politicalism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yüz ?iirlerin Yüzü?ü (Ring of 100 Poems, Bilingual Edition): 100 Turkish Poems with Translations

“Apologists for modernity and capitalism within the Catholic Church insist that capitalism is compatible with defined dogmas declared by the magisterium, with the tenets of natural law, and with the incontrovertible truths expressed in the divine positive law. Catholics such as this writer are insulted with the epithets of "socialists" or "unpatriotic" or "ignorant" for failing to see the good brought by modern democracy, for calling into question the nature of the supposed freedoms granted by governments elected through popular sovereignty without reference to Christ the King and His Vicar the Pope, and for insisting on a return to an understanding of human life predicated on the essential nature of human family and divine worship to the happiness of man on earth and his beatitude in Heaven. This writer is waiting for an explanation of how the separation of the state from the Church has lent support to the absolute sanctity of life from conception to natural death. He desires to see proof that democratically elected governments and their citizens are committed to prohibiting divorce and the destruction of the family as mandated by God when He physically walked the earth two thousand years ago . . . If indeed there is a difference on the moral plane between capitalist consumption of goods and communist redistribution of goods, it is high time that man be given evidence of the existence of this singular truth which heretofore has been an amazingly well kept secret. Other than the fact that both communists and capitalists seek to produce as many material things as possible with the capitalists having far more success thereat, none has convincingly demonstrated that aught else separates the two systems in their impact on the understanding of the sanctity of human life, the controls placed on the conduct of human life, and the ultimate end of human life. (pages 171-172)”
― Fr. Lawrence Smith, Distributism for Dorothy

“... - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of entire populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“What, you might ask, has happened to Schumpeter's powerful forces of creative destruction? Barriers to entry-whether regulatory barriers, the cost of investment, or anticompetitive behavior by the corporations themselves-allow monopolistic firms to retain their power by preventing new firms from entering the industry. In big tech, large incumbents police the so-called kill zone in their marketplace by "hoovering up or squashing any potential competitors." Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have, between them, "collectively bought over 436 companies and startups in the past 10 years and regulators have not challenged any of them.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The main takeaway here is that corporations are political-as well as economic-entities. Within the corporation, relationships are shaped by the social division of labor: the fact that some own the things we need to produce commodities, while other are forced to sell their labor power as an input to production merely in order to survive. The corporation came into existence to formalize this unequal and exploitative relationship between worker and boss, while insulating owners from risk. The corporation is capital personified.

As corporations have become bigger, they have gained more power over both the markets in which they operate and the workforces they control. Complex corporate hierarchies have institutionalized the power imbalance between workers and bosses, mediated by a large class of professional managers. Ultimately, these corporations have become sovereign actors within our society-capable of delivering punishment, governing life, and making and breaking law in much the same way as states.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom