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#politics

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Marxism is meant to be a strictly provisional affair, which is why anyone who invests the whole of their identity in it has missed the point. That there is a life after Marxism is the whole point of Marxism. — location: 76 ^ref-27624

The stage was thus set for Reagan and Thatcher, who would help to dismantle traditional manufacture, shackle the labour movement, let the market rip, strengthen the repressive arm of the state and champion a new social philosophy known as barefaced greed. — location: 111 ^ref-61010

It was not this that led them to ditch Marxism along with their sideburns and headbands, but the growing conviction that the regime they confronted was simply too hard to crack. It was not illusions about the new capitalism, but disillusion about the possibility of changing it, which proved decisive. — location: 115 ^ref-30367

How do we fight this? How to maintain hope about possibility of change within Occupy movement?

ought to be well accustomed to defeat. — location: 129 ^ref-37620

Taken overall, Maoism and Stalinism were botched, bloody experiments which made the very idea of socialism stink in the nostrils of many of those elsewhere in the world who had most to benefit from it. — location: 208 ^ref-52255

is true that capitalism works some of the time, in the sense that it has brought untold prosperity to some sectors of the world. But it has done so, as did Stalin and Mao, at a staggering human cost. This — location: 212 ^ref-25037

The system has also proved incapable of breeding affluence without creating huge swathes of deprivation alongside it. — location: 214 ^ref-47406

You cannot reorganise wealth for the benefit of all if there is precious little wealth to reorganise. — location: 220 ^ref-33964

How would one avoid the chronic short-termism of markets, their habit of ignoring the overall social picture and the long-term antisocial effects of their own fragmented decisions? — location: 316 ^ref-24899

Under capitalism, we are deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce more hospitals or more breakfast cereals. — location: 324 ^ref-50506

As Oscar Wilde once remarked, the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings. Yet one needs at least to take account of the role of modern information technology in oiling the wheels of such a system. Even the former vice-president of Procter & Gamble has acknowledged that it makes workers’ self-management a real possibility. — location: 333 ^ref-59785