State Socialism Quotes

“If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“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?”
― Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution

“As far as socialism, I used to think I was fundamentally opposed to it, but eventually came to realize that wasn't really true, and that what I actually oppose is aggression. Voluntary socialism can be a wonderful way of living for small groups, and most people practice some form of it in their families. Only when imposed on people by force does socialism become evil. One of the beautiful things about a libertarian society is that people could still create socialist communes and be left alone to redistribute resources within them to their hearts' content, so long as no one is forced to join or prevented from leaving. This stands in stark contrast to a state-socialist society, which cannot similarly tolerate peaceful acts of capitalism among consenting participants.”
― Starchild

“If, indeed, anyone should think that, in the communistic society, man must still remain under some form of compulsion in order to, do what is right, and leave off what is wrong, he had better give up communism at once and abandon all hope for the human race.”
― Johann Joseph Most, An Anarchist Reader

“What thus emerged from the Russian Revolution was a new model of state capitalism which, in turn, would become attractive to the bourgeoisie of “backward” countries and colonies of the Western colonial powers (like Cuba, Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, etc.). They could use the State to keep Western multinationals from bleeding the country dry, and try to “develop” independently through state mobilisation of the population. Devoid of real proletarian initiative, this was a flawed model, and even the Communist Party of the Chinese People’s Republic abandoned Stalinism after the death of Mao by setting up Special Economic Zones to attract international capital and build a new Chinese capitalist class (so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics”). What they have in fact returned to is the type of state capitalism that Lenin advocated in 1918, opposed by the Left Communists of that time. Across the world many workers in the former Eastern European bloc still think it was better than what they have now. But neither “state capitalism” nor “state socialism” are socialism as understood by Marx. Both depend on the exploitation of workers whose surplus value is the basis for capitalist profit and who have no actual political say in the system.”
― Jock Dominie, Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left

“The fact that the state-socialist countries were backward countries desperate to catch up partly explains why it is that, instead of executing the legacy of Marx, i.e. of constructing an egalitarian, non-market society with a truly human organisation of the labour process and an end to the division of labour and the exploitation of man by man, they were actually mainly concerned with executing the legacy of Peter the Great, the Meiji Restoration and Feng Guifen.”
― Michael Ellman, Socialist Planning

“In the traditional model, the dominant form of ownership is state ownership. The state owns the land and all other natural resources and all the enterprises and their productive assets. Collective ownership (e.g. the property of collective farms) also exists, but plays a subsidiary role, and is expected to be temporary. In due course, it is expected to be transformed into the higher form of state ownership.”
― Michael Ellman, Socialist Planning

“In more advanced countries, such as the Czech Republic and Estonia, state socialism led to a steadily increasing lag behind neighbouring countries such as Austria and Finland.”
― Michael Ellman, Socialist Planning