The Socialist Manifesto Quotes

“Any ideology built around a notion of destiny—nationalism and socialism alike—runs the risk of calamity. The solution is a banal one: valuing and protecting rights and liberties, while ensuring that ordinary people are not only consulted through mass rallies but actually have democratic avenues to make choices and hold their leaders accountable. Without this bedrock, any postcapitalist society risks creating a new caste of oppressors.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“Socialism was made to be an ideology of radical democracy, of working-class self-emancipation, not a tool for state-managed development. A revolution from above, with an unelected party overseeing the creation of a social surplus and rerouting it to certain ends, even with the best of intentions, is a formula for authoritarianism.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“At its core, to be a socialist is to assert the moral worth of every person, no matter who they are, where they’re from, or what they did.17 With any luck, future generations will look back at the time when life outcomes were accidents of birth with shock and disgust, the same way we look back on more extreme forms of exploitation and oppression—slavery, feudalism, and so on—that have already been done away with. If all human beings have the same inherent worth, then they must be free to fulfill their potential, to flourish in all their individuality.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“Now imagine what a change it would be for a young black American to grow up in a society where they didn’t have to settle for the worst schools, the worst health care, the worst jobs, or possibly be subjected to the worst carceral system on Earth. Imagine what it would mean for women if they were more easily able to leave abusive relationships or escape workplace harassment with the help of strong welfare guarantees. Imagine our future Einsteins and Leonardo da Vincis liberated from grinding poverty and misery and able to contribute to human greatness. Or forget Einstein and Leonardo—better yet, imagine ordinary people, with ordinary abilities, having time after their twenty-eight-hour workweek to explore whatever interests or hobbies strike their fancy (or simply enjoy their right to be bored). The deluge of bad poetry, strange philosophical blog posts, and terrible abstract art will be a sure sign of progress.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“Most people are saddled with debt, have few job protections, can’t comfortably afford health care and housing, and don’t believe that their children will fare any better than they do. In this new gilded age, they’re unwilling philanthropists, subsidizing the lavish lifestyles of the rich.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“faster. Now, when new technology is brought in, your coworkers have a different calculus. If they can produce 20 percent more per employee, why not decrease the workweek to twenty-eight hours? (For all sectors, legislation dictates the required workweek cannot exceed thirty-five hours.)13 There is still market competition, and firms still fail, but the grow-or-die imperative doesn’t apply when your enterprise’s goal is no longer to maximize total profits but rather to maximize profit-per-worker. And instead of a race to the bottom, there’s pressure to make sure janitorial and other “dirty jobs” are well compensated. In time, many of these tasks will be automated. People used to fear that machines would bring about mass unemployment, but now you and most others look forward to the social impact of technological innovations.14”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“BOOKS LIKE THIS often start by telling you, the reader, what’s wrong with the world today. For much of capitalism’s history, radicals have been sustained less by a clear vision of socialism than by visceral opposition to the horrors around them. Instead of making the case for socialism, we made the case against capitalism. I have tried to do something different by presenting what a different social system could look like and how we can get there. Naturally, it’s easy to compare an existing, complicated society with one that only lives in our imagination. In Marx’s day, utopian socialists did little but write “recipes for the cookshops of the future.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“the average CEO-to-worker compensation in the nation was 354:1; after, it dropped to 89:1. At your workplace the most extreme differential is now 4:1. It’s similar at others, as well. Work gets better, but it doesn’t feel as if something monumental”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“These measures provoke turmoil as capitalists muster desperate acts of resistance. But in the end banks are nationalized, and the state takes over all private firms. You see firsthand how things play out at the pasta sauce plant.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“Collectively you and your coworkers now control your company. You’re more like citizens of a community than owners. You just have to pay a tax on its capital assets (the building and the land it’s on, machinery, and so forth), in effect renting it from society as a whole. (To preserve the value of the capital stock in your care, a depreciation fund must be set up for repairs and improvements.)10 Your tax goes into a public fund, which invests in new endeavors. More about that later. But the tax you pay also solves the problem of different production processes having”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“Two key markets under capitalism are thereby done away with: the traditional labor market and capital markets. But markets for goods and services remain. Too many informational problems exist for them to be done away with. Companies will also still have to compete with each other—inefficient firms will collapse (though the fall for individual stakeholders in a firm would be cushioned by the welfare state, even more so than it was”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“Unions are important. They might not be revolutionary organizations, but they are labor’s primary vehicle in the battle with capital over the spoils of production. Today, despite organizing just 11 percent of the US workforce, unions are still the only institutions capable of exerting political pressure at the scale required to push back against national elites.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“DSA today has over fifty thousand members—that’s forty-five thousand more than it did a few years ago. Buoyed by the rise of Sanders, youth disillusionment with the politics of the Democratic center, and outrage over Trump’s actions, DSA has quickly garnered widespread attention and its share of local victories.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“Our task is formidable. Democratic socialists must secure decisive majorities in legislatures while winning hegemony in the unions. Then our organizations must be willing to flex their social power in the form of mass mobilizations and political strikes to counter the structural power of capital and ensure that our leaders choose confrontation over accommodation with elites. This is the sole way we’ll not only make our reforms durable but break with capitalism entirely and bring about a world that values people over profit.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“To Sanders, the path to reform is through confrontation with elites. Rather than talking about an entire nation struggling together to restore the US economy and shared prosperity, and rather than seeking to negotiate a better settlement with business leaders (if only they saw that progressive change was in their interests!), Sanders’s movement is about creating a “political revolution” to get what is rightfully ours from “millionaires and billionaires.” His”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“class. We’re not starting from scratch, though. The Bernie Sanders campaign encouraged millions to believe that things can be different. New mass actions, such as 2018’s teacher strikes, have also revealed in our own age the power of working people. What we need now are organizations: working-class parties and unions that can unite scattered resistance into a socialist movement.1 Easier said than done. But this chapter offers a road map based on the long, complex, variously inspiring and dismal history of left politics—for challenging capitalism and creating a democratic socialist alternative to it. 1. Class-struggle social democracy does not close avenues for radicals; it opens them. On the face of it, Corbyn and Sanders advocate a set of demands that are essentially social democratic. But they represent something far different from modern social democracy. Whereas social democracy morphed in the postwar period into a tool to suppress class conflict in favor of tripartite arrangements among business, labor, and the state, both of these leaders encourage a renewal of class antagonism and movements from below. To”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“THE 2007–2008 FINANCIAL crisis provoked no great protests, but it did provide plenty of villains. Advances in information technology and the loosening up of financial industry regulations since the 1980s had set bankers free to take enormous risks. By the late 1990s, with home prices climbing higher and higher every year, private mortgage lenders saw an opportunity to reap tremendous profits while passing the risks on to the public.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“The pain is not limited to one generation. It’s widely felt. In the United States, hourly wages have grown by a paltry 0.2 percent since 1979. Things”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“If you could even find Marx outside of university classrooms (where he was increasingly presented as a humanist philosopher instead of a revolutionary firebrand), it was on Wall Street, where cheeky traders put down Sun Tzu and heralded the long-dead German as a prophet of globalization. Capitalism had certainly yielded immense progress in countries such as China and India. In 1991, when Indian finance minister Manmohan Singh announced plans to liberalize India’s economy, he quoted Victor Hugo: “No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” Over the next twenty-five years, India’s GDP grew by almost 1,000 percent. An even more impressive process unfolded in China, where Deng Xiaoping upturned Mao-era policies to deliver what he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and what the rest of the world recognized as state-managed liberalization. China is now as radically unequal as Latin America, but over five hundred million Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty during the past thirty years.1”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“It was the economist John Maynard Keynes, a liberal who believed socialists were well-intentioned idiots, who presented the best approach of the time to taming capitalism. The methods laid out in his 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, once implemented, would help spur employment, ensure productive investment, and mitigate crises. Before the Keynesian revolution, the reigning classical theory”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“You get paid more, you have a bit more say in what goes on at work, your job is secure, your managers are responsive, there’s more office camaraderie, but still, at the end of the day, everyone just wants to leave.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“workers simply collectively owned their firms’ capital, those in capital-intensive industries would earn far more profits than those in labor-intensive ones. Having different “rents” prevents that. You also have to pay a graduated income tax, as you did before, on the income you”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“Capitalism is a social system based on private ownership of the means of production and wage labor. It relies on multiple markets: markets for goods and services, the labor market, and the capital market.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“They had their little plot of land, and they grew as much crop as possible on it. They ate some of it, and then they gave a chunk of the remainder to a local lord to avoid getting killed. Any leftover product they often”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“The market under capitalism is different because you don’t just choose to participate in it—you have to take part in it to survive. Your ancestors were peasants, but they weren’t any less greedy than you.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“You know your company is in a precarious position, but you also know that those in charge are getting paid fifty times more than you. Are they really doing fifty times the work? Couldn’t you figure out how to do their jobs too?”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“To be a socialist today is to believe that more, not less, democracy will help solve social ills—and to believe that ordinary people can shape the systems that shape their lives.”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“wasn’t an awakening. Like many a middle-class kid before me, I found radicalism through books. My local library had heaps of socialist literature, most of them donated by red diaper babies and Jewish cultural associations. By chance, I picked up Leon Trotsky’s My Life the summer after seventh grade, didn’t particularly like it (still don’t), but was sufficiently intrigued to read the Isaac Deutscher biographies of Trotsky, the works of democratic socialist thinkers including Michael Harrington and Ralph Miliband, and eventually the mysterious Karl”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“with a good school district. Even though we didn’t have much, I had enough—a decent home, a great education, basketball courts, and a public library where I spent way too much of my youth. My life was far more comfortable than the world my parents were born into, or even that of my older siblings. It was clear to me why—certainly the tireless efforts of my family,”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

“the”
― Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality