Paul Foot

Very few, if any, Poplar councillors of 1921 were revolutionaries, however. They wanted to change their world by the means provided for them by the 1918 Representation of the People Act, through the ballot box. But they were not prepared to sit passively by while their power as elected councillors was whittled away by the economic system and the judges and regulators imposed not by ballot but by ancient prejudices and reactionary laws.
The real meaning of Poplarism is the use by elected representatives of their democratic power to challenge laws and customs that restrict democracy. The Poplar councillors not only used that power. They used it at least to some extent successfully, and for that they could never be forgiven

- The Vote: How it was Won and how it was Undermined, 2005:260

George Lansbury

The workers must be given tangible proof that Labour administration means something different from capitalist administration.'

- Quoted in The Vote: How it was Won and how it was Undermined, Paul Foot. 2005:259

We have got nothing by being passive and quiet, and we are going to be passive and quiet no longer.

- Quoted in The Vote: How it was Won and how it was Undermined, Paul Foot. 2005:260

Cicero

Not until Burke would you see another defence of oligarchy at the expense of democracy phrased with undisguised class hatred like this. But I particularly like the bit on music: makes me think that if he were alive today he'd be a columnist for the Daily Fail. Try and read it in the disapproving tone of 'Mad' Mel Phillips, you'll see what I mean.

suppose in a shipwreck a stronger man sees a weaker man on a plank, will he not push him off to save himself, especially if there are no witnesses? If he doesn't, he will act justly but will foolishly throw away his own life. So, ... political justice is not justice but prudence; natural justice is indeed justice, but is at the same time folly.

- Paraphrase of The Republic III.29-31, reconstituted from Lactantius, Divine Institutiones 5.16.5-13

a state should be organised in such a way as to last forever. And so the death of a state is never natural, as it is with a person, for whom death is not only inevitable but also frequently desirable. Again, when a state is destroyed, eliminated, and blotted out, it is rather as if (to compare small with great) this whole world were to collapse and pass away.

- The Republic, III.34

SCIPIO: ... wherever there is a tyrant, one cannot say ... that there is a defective republic; logic now forces us to conlcude that there is no republic at all. ... a place totally controlled by a clique cannot properly be called a republic either ...When everything is supposed to be done under the people's control, when the masses punish whoever they please, when they seize, carry off, hold on to, or squander whatever they like, can you deny then, Laelius, that a republic exists, when everythinng belongs to the public? After all, our definition of a republic is "the property of the people'.
LAELIUS: Actually there is no state to which I should be quicker to refuse the name of republic than the one which is totally in the power of the masses. ... I don't see how there is any stronger case for applying the name of republic to a state enslaved by the mob. ... That rabble is just as tyrannical as one man, and all the more repellant in that there is nothing more monstrous than a creature which masquerades as a public and usurps its name. It is quite inconsistent that, when the property of the insane is placed by law in the hands of male relatives because the former [are no longer capable of managing it themselves, the property of the public should be left in the hands of an insane mob]

- The Republic, III.44-45

Nothing can so easily influence young and impressionable minds as the variety of vocal sounds. One can hardly express what enormous power that exerts for better or worse. ... I do notice how in theatres which once used to be filled with the agreeable plainness of Livius' and Naevius' tunes audiences now rock to and fro jerking their necks and eyes in time with the inflexions of the singer's voice. Ancient Greece used to punish that sort of thing very severely. It foresaw far in advance that the deadly plague, gradually creeping into the citizens' minds and infecting them with pernicious crazes and pernicious ideas, would suddenly bring about the collapse of entire states

Laws 2:38-40

Howard Spring

For a moment he hung over a gulf where he and his like, all the makers of windy promises, the pedlars of paradise, swirled like a handful of inconsiderable dust. He saw with clarity that the immortal aspirations of men for freedom, truth, beauty, equality, could never know secular satisfaction, and this very fact made both the glory and the tragedy of human life.

Fame is the Spur (1943:442)

"I expect," she said, "he'll do like the rest of us. He'll do what he wants to, till the time comes for him to wonder whether it was worth doing."

(ibid, 485)

Hardie interrupted him. "The world will be busier soon. We are on the brink of war." ... "Where will you be, Hamer? I am not asking you now as your old leader. As a friend, tell me, where will you be?" ...
"It is not a thing that can be decided off-hand," said Hamer, "There are a thousand considerations."
"There is one consideration," Hardie answered. "Thou shalt not kill."
He got up wearily and held out his hand. "Good-bye," he said. "Think of me at cock-crow."

(ibid, 474)

Charles looked relieved, and smiled again. "I must confess, Father," he said, "that I still find it a bit difficult to follow a man who once demanded the Millennium and now says he'll make do with Pleasant Sunday Afternoons."
"Go on demanding the Millennium, my boy," said Hamer. "God help us when we cease to do that. But don't expect to get it, and, above all things, don't try to shove it down the people's throats. If the Millennium pays a penny in the pound, you'll be lucky...."

(ibid, 646)

"I know his views. They're an old man's views, and as such I can tolerate them and even respect them. But, remember, Charles, there's an impulsive wisdom of youth as well as a cautious wisdom of age. The views he's been giving you weren't his views when he was as young as we are now."

(ibid, 660-1)

"There's no job now for romantics. We, on our side, have got to be as dispassionate as a sanitary squad, cleaning up a dirty smell. And we've got to be quick, because it's spreading, and soon it'll poison and suffocate every decent thing and instinct. ... This is the sabre of Peterloo."
She stood for a moment looking at the light playing on the curved blade ... : the blade that had slashed the life out of the girl Emma in a Manchester street, that the old Warrior had maundered over, that Ellen had polished with bathbrick, that Hamer Shawcross had used to carve his way to the notice and applause of the people, that Jimmy Newbould had worshipped, and that Lady Lostwithiel had embalmed in velvet. ...
"I wondered why I brought it," she said, "But now I know. The world is face to face with reality. It is time to make an end of romantic gestures."
She stood away from Charles, whirled the sabre in a shining circle once round her head, then hurled it far out into the radiance of the moonlight. Silently, as if spellbound, they watched the silver splash of its fall, an Excalibur that no hand was lifted to receive.
For a moment, neither spoke; then Charles said quietly: "That was the most romantic gesture I have ever seen."

(ibid, 661)

David Manning

I think there is a real risk that the administration underestimates the difficulties [of invading Iraq]. They may agree that failure isn't an option , but this doesn't mean that they will avoid it.

March 14th 2003

Linda Smith

What is it with the Labour Party? What is this genius it has for making you nostalgic for the previous party leader, the one you used to think was rubbish? I thought Neil Kinnock was useless, but now, looking back, he seems like Spartacus!

Linda Smith

Mark Thomas

We pay for the arms companies to influence our government, bribe other governments and arm the world. And then we phone up radio stations and defend the arms companies for being good for the economy and creating jobs. We paid for the jobs. We bought our own jobs. How mafia is that! And do you know what? When it comes to the arms trade, Britain is one of the better regulated countries on the planet - think how fucked the others have to be! And it doesn't have to be this way. An ethical foreign policy - just think what could have happened if it had been real.

As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela

Horst Mahler

Every capitalist has a terrorist in the family.

(N.B. this was back in the days when he was a socialist.)

Lenin

To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to misrepresent the people in parliament is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics ... How can it be dispensed with? ...
The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of the representative institutions and the electoral principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from mere "talking shops" into working bodies.

"The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time."

The State and Revolution (Essential Works, Dover 1987, p. 305)

Monopoly has sprung from the banks. The banks have developed from modest intermediary enterprises into the monopolists of finance capital. Some three or five of the biggest banks in each of the foremost capitalist countries have achieved the "personal union" of industrial and bank capital, and have concentrated in their hands the power to dispose of thousands upon thousands of millions which form the greater part of the capital and revenue of entire countries. A financial oligarchy, which throws a close net of relations of dependence over all the economic and political institutions of contemporary bourgeois society without exception - such is the most striking manifestation of this monopoly. ...
Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination instead of the striving for liberty, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by an extremely small group of the richest or most powerful nations - all these have given birth to those distinctive features of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. More and more there emerges as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of the "bondholding" (rentier) state, the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by "clipping coupons."

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Essential Works, p. 266)

Tony Benn

From Free at Last!:

Tuesday 17 August [1999]
A tragic earthquake in Turkey. Originally they thought 500 people had died but by the end of the day they were talking about 5000 or 10,000 people killed. The British Government has put aside £0.5 milliion in relief.
When you think that £8 billion was spent on killin 2000 Serbs and half a million pounds is going on trying to rescue up to 10,000, it just confirms how disgraceful war is.

Tuesday 24 August [1999]
I wrote a letter to The Times linking together the bombing of Iraq, the inadequate help given for the Turkish earthquake and the continued support for the KLA in the Balkans. I wrote that I couldn't recall a government pursuing such an unethical and immoral foreign and defence policy.

Monday 27 September [1999], Labour Party Conference, Bournemouth
The Conference is totally different now; they really have obliterated any function of deision-making and the media just hover around trying to find a bit of trouble. But the press may get bored with Jesus Christ taking responsibility for all our sins.

Tuesday 28th September [1999]
I was invited to the Channel 4 breakfast - God knows why I was asked. ... Vanni Treves [Chairman of Channel 4] welcomed us, as if somehow Channel 4 was running the Conference at Bournemouth and we were his invited guests. ... When Vannni Treves said, 'We are very glad out masters; - referring to the Government - 'have conceded some reduction in taxation,' I thought, 'our masters' indeed. It's the other way around.

Wednesday 29th September [1999]
There were 250 people at the Campaign Group rally at the Wessex Hotel ... I said that after the class war has been abolished by Tony Blair, he's going to announce that Darwin was wrong, that the world was made in seven days - and you know by whom; that Galileo was wrong, the Earth does rotate around the Millbank Tower.

Sunday 4 February [2001]
There is an anti-globalisation conference in London this weekend, organised in effect by the Socialist Workers' Party. The more I think of the SWP, the more I realise how important that element is in any successful political movement.

Power Without Responsibility

From Curran and Seaton's 1997 classic, Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, which has been on my reading pile for a significant proportion of my adult life...

a Foreign Office official added, “it cannot be the object of foreign policy to wipe a tear from every eye – however much the cameras would like us to.”

(Curran and Seaton 1997:251)

It might also be helpful if, rather than saying that we know what shape the future holds - and consequently abdicating responsibility for it - we began to ask again what it might be possible to do to make it better.

(ibid.: 262)

Karl Marx

On Lincoln

Lincoln is a sui generis figure in the annals of history. He has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, no historical trappings. He gives his most important utterances the most commonplace form. Other people claim to be 'fighting for an idea', when it is a matter for them of fighting for square feet of land. Lincoln, even when he is motivated by an ideal, talks about square feet ... Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This ... average person of good will was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its social and political organisation, ordinary people of good will can achieve feats which only the heroes could achieve in the old world.

Karl Marx, Die Presse, 22 August 1862

On Religion
One of my favourite pieces from Marx, taken from Critique of Hegel's Theory of Right. Contains one of his most famous phrases, almost always used out of context...

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man's self-consciousness an self-awareness as long as he has not found his feet in the universe. But man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the world of men, the State, and society. This State, this society, produce religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spritual point d'honeur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human being inasmuch as the human bieng possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.

... The immediate task is to unmask human alienation in its secular form, now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form. Thus the criticism of heaven transforms itself into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of laws, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

Tom Paine

Still brilliant more than 200 years later, here's a wonderfully catty remark about Edmund Burke in The Rights of Man:

I know a place in America called Point-no-Point, because as you proceed along the shore, gay and flowery as Mr Burke's language, it continually recedes and presents itself at a distance before you; but when you have got as far as you can go, there is no point at all. Just thus it is with Mr Burke's three hundred and fifty-six pages.

On religion:

With respect to what are called denominations of religion, if every one is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge each other's religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore all the world is right, or all the world is wrong.