“The aim of the anarchist is to eliminate private ownership.”
Anarchy (1959)
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Robert LeFevre47
American libertarian businessman 1911–1986Related quotes
Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant
Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 150
Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist
The Ethics of Freedom (1973 - 1974)
Context: No society can last in conditions of anarchy. This is self-evident and I am in full agreement. But my aim is not the establishment of an anarchist society or the total destruction of the state. Here I differ from anarchists. I do not believe that it is possible to destroy the modern state. It is pure imagination to think that some day this power will be overthrown. From a pragmatic standpoint there is no chance of success. Furthermore, I do not believe that anarchist doctrine is the solution to the problem of organization in society and government. I do not think that if anarchism were to succeed we should have a better or more livable society. Hence I am not fighting for the triumph of this doctrine.
On the other hand, it seems to me that an anarchist attitude is the only one that is sufficiently radical in the face of a general statist system.
p. 396
Ha-Joon Chang book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 5: 'Man exploits man; Private enterprise good, public enterprise bad?', The pitfalls of privatization, p. 116
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution
Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 398–421.
Collected Works
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) American novelist, writer, journalist, political activist
p10, 3rd principle of the 12 Principles of EPIC
I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty (1933)
Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), The Basis for Hope, Peaceful Competition
Context: Without socialism, bourgeois practices and the egotistical principle of private ownership gave rise to the "people of the abyss" described by Jack London and earlier by Engels.
Only the competition with socialism and the pressure of the working class made possible the social progress of the twentieth century and, all the more, will insure the now inevitable process of rapprochement of the two systems. It took socialism to raise the meaning of labor to the heights of a moral feat. Before the advent of socialism, national egotism gave rise to colonial oppression, nationalism, and racism. By now it has become clear that victory is on the side of the humanistic, international approach.
The capitalist world could not help giving birth to the socialist, but now the socialist world should not seek to destroy by force the ground from which it grew. Under the present conditions this would be tantamount to the suicide of mankind. Socialism should ennoble that ground by its example and other indirect forms of pressure and then merge with it.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Source: 1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918), Ch. VI: International relations, p. 99