1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. John Strachey

John Strachey Quotes

Evelyn John St Loe Strachey was a British Labour politician and writer.

A journalist by profession, Strachey was elected to Parliament in 1929. He was initially a disciple of Oswald Mosley, and, feeling that the Second Labour Government was not doing enough to combat unemployment, joined Mosley in founding the New Party in 1931. He broke with Mosley later in the year and so did not follow him into fascism. Strachey lost his seat in 1931, was a Communist sympathiser for the rest of the 1930s and broke with the Communist Party in 1940.

During the Second World War, Strachey served as a Royal Air Force officer in planning and public relations roles. He was once again elected to Parliament as a Labour MP in 1945 and held office under Clement Attlee as Minister of Food and as Secretary of State for War. He continued to be a Labour MP, generally as a supporter of the party's right wing until his death.

Throughout his career, Strachey was a prolific writer of books and articles from a communist perspective in the 1930s and as a social democrat after the Second World War. Wikipedia  

✵ 21. October 1901 – 15. July 1963
John Strachey photo
John Strachey: 2 quotes0 likes

John Strachey Quotes

“It is almost always impossible to get the fascist party together without using some anti-capitalist slogans, in the early stages at any rate, of the necessary propaganda. And this type of propaganda may have so coloured the minds of the rank and file of the Fascist party as to make them difficult adequately to control.”

John Strachey

Source: The Coming Struggle for Power (1932), p. 262

“The institutions of democracy will be gradually and, if possible, imperceptibly withdrawn. The Press will become a better and better directed and drilled servant of the capitalist class. All other methods of disseminating information, notably the cinema and the wireless, will be more and more consciously monopolized. Power may be gradually withdrawn from a democratically elected Chamber (cf . Reform of the House of Lords in Britain) or alternatively the franchise may be gradually curtailed (cf. the proposals of the British Conservative party for withholding the franchise from persons in receipt of poor relief). At the same time, the habitual regime of police violence will be increased (cf. the present heavy sentences on working-class militants in Britain passed almost openly, not for any specific offence but because the accused were working-class militants, as notably in the case of Arthur Homer; the increasing use of terror in all American wage disputes ; the police regime in France, etc., etc.). This method applies the principle of " the inevitability of gradualness " to the introduction of an open capitalist dictatorship.”

John Strachey

Source: The Coming Struggle for Power (1932), p. 268

Similar authors

Arthur C. Clarke photo
Arthur C. Clarke207
British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, u… None
Margaret Thatcher photo
Margaret Thatcher348
British stateswoman and politician None
A.A. Milne photo
A.A. Milne169
British author None
Doris Lessing photo
Doris Lessing94
British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer … None
V.S. Naipaul photo
V.S. Naipaul34
Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry None
Alberto Moravia photo
Alberto Moravia8
Italian writer and journalist None
W. Somerset Maugham photo
W. Somerset Maugham158
British playwright, novelist, short story writer None
Elias Canetti photo
Elias Canetti43
Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist,… None
Mario Vargas Llosa photo
Mario Vargas Llosa30
Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist None
Bertil Ohlin photo
Bertil Ohlin11
Swedish economist and politician None