Nathan J. Robinson > Quotes

“The socialist project is not just to create better living standards, but to create collective joy. It is a response to the loneliness, alienation, and deep sadness that occurs when everything is commodified and people are left on their own, without communal ties or collective support, to satisfy themselves through the purchase of consumer goods.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Socialists have advocated numerous ways of democratizing the economy, from setting up worker cooperatives to nationalizing major industries... At the core of economic democracy is the notion that control should not be vested in a small group of people, but in the people who do the labor. Managers and owners shouldn't decide what the workers have to do, the workers should decide what managers have to do (or if they need managers at all). And they should own the workplaces themselves.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“The free market is not necessarily free. Whether people are free depends not just on whether they own themselves, but whether others have power over them in practice.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Being an honest leftist requires one to have a nose for jargon and a determination to figure out what is actually going on. It means examining phrases like national security and globalization and ascertaining what they mean for real human beings. When we do so, we often find that the reality beneath the words is disturbing. The 'freest' country in the world is also the one that imprisons the most people; the most 'democratic' country in the world is one in which ordinary people's policy preferences matter little; and 'security' can be invoked to justify almost any kind of brutality. You can rationalize nearly anything if you speak at the right level of abstraction. But my kind of humanistic socialism, unlike the authoritarian Soviet variety, begins with a resolute determination to find the truth, to care about human beings, and to not turn away from unpleasant facts or find ways to make them less comforting.”
― Nathan J. Robinson

“The truth is: political reality changes quickly, so it's best to pick the things you want to see happen, and do your best to try to make them happen.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Bakunin had a simple formula that captures the ethos of libertarian socialists: We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality. Liberty without socialism means rule by CEOs, socialism without liberty means rule by bureaucrats.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“A socialist is, first and foremost, not just perturbed by injustice, but horrified by it, really truly sickened by it in a way that means they can’t stop thinking about it. For them, platitudes like “we can’t do anything about that” or “that’s just the way of the world” are just not acceptable.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Ironically, the [monopolistic] concentration of capital means that one of the great fears about socialism - that decisions about what to sell would be made by small, unelected groups of bureaucrats, rather than determined by competition - is increasingly coming true under capitalism.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“There are so many things to be done, and progressive minds are overflowing with ideas and proposals. As we consider real-world actions, though, there's one thing worth remembering above all: the future can't be planned by a group of socialist intellectuals designing bullet-pointed lists of what's best for the rest of humanity. Democracy means that people make choices themselves, and good ideas emerge from healthy, collective deliberation... Personally, I'ld like to see a thriving culture of political discussions, where the cafes are full of people passionately hashing out their disagreements about What Must Be Done. Not everyone has to participate in political life, but everyone should at least feel like someone would listen to them if they came up with a solution to a problem.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“...people don't need the illusory freedom of free-market choice (aka, the freedom to die when your medical bill exceeds your paycheck), nor the farcical freedom of an authoritarian police state; they need the ability to meaningfully choose between a lot of different routes of happiness. If this isn't what's happening, then you're not creating a socialist state, you're building an abominable perversion of socialism's ideals.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Here, we can see why the authoritarian 'socialist' regimes of the twentieth century did not deserve to be called socialist at all. In the Soviet Union, workers had very limited control over their workplaces. They were told what to do by party functionaries. Socialism does not mean control by the government, it means control by the people, and if the government is not responsive to the will of the people, it's 'socialistic' in the same way that Kim Jong-Un's Democratic People's Republic of Korea is 'democratic.' This is also why, while I and many others use the term democratic socialism to draw a distinction between our ideas and the hideous so-called socialism implemented under Joseph Stalin, ultimately the term should be redundant. Socialism is a term for economic democracy, so an undemocratic system doesn't deserve to claim the name.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Equality doesn't mean ensuring everybody is the same, it means making sure some people don't get godlike power to determine the fates of others.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“If you want a vision of the bleak, bland capitalist future, go to Hudson Yards in New York City, the new, billion-dollar complex of gleaming skyscrapers. It's a lifeless shopping mall for luxury goods, intensely policed and surveilled, where every aspect of life is curated by a corporation... This is the city for the winners. The losers will be in homeless encampments outside the city gates.
The left's city of the future looks very different. It is a Star Trek world, where we can travel through space together and meet aliens. It is public libraries and free colleges, where all can come and learn without worrying about money. It is Mardis Gras in New Orleans, where everyone expresses their individuality through art and costume without any regard for profit or commerce. It is camping trips and cookouts, book clubs and street cafes. It is the theory that life is meant to be enjoyed, and that nobody should lack the basic ingredients for a decent existence. It is, above all, the conviction that we're here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Values like fairness, democracy, and wisdom all disappear. Instead, everything becomes quantified, and market values predominate. This is neoliberalism: what happens depends on the market and almost nothing else.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“The question is complicated by Trump’s seeming lack of any sincere convictions. Racists, after all, generally have a set of beliefs. Trump, caring only for himself, could be too unprincipled to qualify as racist.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Trump: Anatomy of a Monstrosity

“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” —Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Bakunin had a simple formula that captures the ethos of libertarian socialists: We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“A magician does things that seem like they cannot be done, that defy our understanding of the rules by which the world operates. This means that the magician’s art involves deceiving people, because obviously whatever they are doing can be done somehow. A magician pulls a rabbit out of an empty hat. Empty hats, by definition, do not contain rabbits, so the magician did not, in fact, pull a rabbit out of an empty hat. Something has happened, then, that we have not noticed. It is not a miracle. It’s a trick. In an important sense, there is no such thing as magic. That is, it is not possible to do the impossible. Only the possible is possible. The magician’s art is making things that are possible look like they’re not. But if the thing you’re seeing is actually clearly impossible, then something must be going on that you don’t understand.”
― Nathan J. Robinson

“If there is one place we should begin, it is with a resolve to not conceal sins, to not seal ourselves off from people's suffering by burying it under a mountain of vacuous bullshit. Euphemisms are an attempt to find pleasant words for an ugly reality, and in doing so, they allow their users to avoid feeling guilty or uncomfortable. This is why they are particularly common in the business world, where executives do not want to admit that they are ruining a lot of people's lives through mass firings and so discuss restructuring, outsourcing, redundancy, and streamlining. An independent contractor is a worker who has no benefits or guaranteed hours, and increasing efficiency often means making people do more work in less time.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Demand the Impossible.”3 We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. —Ursula K. Le Guin”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“4 Conservatism is “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“The political establishment is vulnerable. And if we make our numbers count, we can change anything.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“I saw some disturbing things: people I had gone to school with, whose personalities had sparkled with creativity and curiosity, went into the workforce and became depressed, dulled, and directionless. They were so tired and jaded that all they felt capable of doing at the end of a workday was flopping onto the sofa and watching Netflix. Democracy itself had become something of a joke, as everyone knew that business and political elites, not the mass public, determined the contours of government policy. There was a widespread sense of fear, anxiety, and helplessness. People joked that they didn’t know how long the human species had left, what with climate change and nuclear weapons and the steady piling up of mountains and mountains of garbage. The future seemed to hold, at best, something like the dystopia depicted in Pixar’s WALL-E: a grim, desiccated planet strewn with flaming rubbish, nary a plant in sight, and the remaining human population reduced to passive, internet-addicted lumps.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Unmask all falsehoods, puncture all idols, irritate all authorities, charm all acquaintances”
― Nathan J. Robinson, The Current Affairs Rules For Life: On Social Justice & Its Critics

“One distinguishing difference between neoliberalism and plain old nineteenth-century free-market capitalism is this tendency to try to improve the 'image' without changing the substance. Wall Street votes Democratic now, holds diversity trainings, and deplores outright bigotry. But they still won't hesitate to profit off the victims of a natural disaster or close a factory to make a buck.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich … [All accumulation] beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“There's a left-wing slogan that says, 'If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.' Like all slogans, it has lost its meaning with overuse. But it expresses something profoundly important: It is only possible to be comfortable if we accept things as they are without questioning them. Once you start paying attention, once you start looking closely at the world, outrage is not just reasonable but inescapable.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Dorothy Day (1897–1980). She is a legendary figure among social justice Catholics, organizing the Catholic Worker Movement and advocating pacifism, economic equality, and civil rights from a Christian anarchist perspective.26 Arrested numerous times for her civil disobedience, Day often took Biblical teaching more seriously than the Church did. She was the kind of Christian who defers to the Sermon on the Mount rather than the prejudices of local priests and bishops, and as such has been long admired for her moral courage. Predictably, there have been attempts to sanitize her legacy and minimize her radicalism. The Catholic Crisis magazine has suggested she was a conservative, because she “lamented the encroachment of the state and the perils of the welfare system.”27 She did so, however, because she was an anarchist, not a conservative. It’s true that her economics were not purely socialistic, but her words made clear how she felt about capitalism: I am sure that God did not intend that there be so many poor. The class structure is of our making and our consent, not His. It is the way we have arranged it, and it is up to us to change it. So we are urging revolutionary change … We need to change the system. We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists “of conspiring to teach [us] to do,” but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.28”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“The Founding Fathers viewed the majority of human beings as inferior, and believed in their right as white men to rule over them ...the Constitution was never approved through a democratic process; thus, its moral authority is limited..the structural flaws of the political system will create injustice (266,277)

The United States is able to convince itself of its virtue, in part, by failing to confront its obvious atrocities (112)”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments

“There is one more salient feature of neoliberalism that is essential in identifying it in the wild: fake social progressivism. This is one of its most sinister traits, because it helps unjust institutions appear benevolent and forward-thinking... You'll notice that tendency over and over; an institution that is inherently hierarchical and unjust tries to defuse criticisms through superficial changes. A corporation, for instance, will not increase the rights of its ordinary workers or eliminate racial and gender pay gaps, but it might introduce racial and gender diversity on its board of directors.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist