Nathan Schneider > Quotes

“alienation of labor when work is external to the worker . . . not part of his nature . . . [so that] he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself . . . [and is] physically exhausted and mentally debased,” alienated labor that “casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines,” thus depriving man of his “species character” of “free conscious activity” and “productive life.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“Barack Obama, whom this generation’s door-knocking helped elect but whose administration strengthened the corporate oligarchy, waged unaccountable robot wars, and imprisoned migrant workers and heroic whistleblowers at record rates. So much for “socialism.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“These ideas grow out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt’s Limits of State Action, Kant’s insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“Yet the word “socialism” has been so thoroughly tarnished in the hegemonic sound bites of Fox News as to be obviously unusable politically.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“When tech people talk about “democratizing” something, like driving directions or online banking, what they really mean is access. Access is fine, but it’s just access. It’s a drive-through window, not a door. Access is only part of what democracy has always entailed—alongside real ownership, governance, and accountability. Democracy is a process, not a product.”
― Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

“no form of politics is worth our time until it helps struggling people get what they need, sustainably and reliably. All the better if you can do so without patriarchy and fundamentalism.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“These traces of commonwealth have begun to seem like a secret society, an inverted reality lurking inside what claims to be reality, economies that reject the rules by which the economy supposedly plays. In these traces, even tucked within competitive markets, cooperative advantage holds its ground. Each example pokes a hole in the usual story about how the world came to be as it is, challenging tall tales about progress made from competition and the pursuit of profit. No, there have been other principles at work.”
― Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

“We came to consciousness in a world where communism was a doomed proposition from the get-go, vanquished by our Reagan-esque grandfathers and manifestly genocidal to boot. Capitalism won fair and square: market forces work.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“It wasn’t investigating my family history that put me on the lookout for cooperatives. I started looking because of stirrings I noticed as a reporter among veterans of the protests that began in 2011, such as Occupy Wall Street and Spain’s 15M movement. Once their uprisings simmered, the protesters had to figure out how to make a living in the economy they hadn’t yet transformed, and they started creating co-ops. Some were doing it with software—cooperative social media, cloud data, music streaming, digital currencies, gig markets, and more. But this generation was not all lost to the digital; others used cooperation to live by dirt and soil. The young radicals turned to the same kind of business that my buttoned-up, old-world, conservative grandfather did. Following them, I began following in my grandfather’s footsteps before I even knew it. Both”
― Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

“Anarchism, then, is a corner backed into rather than a conscious choice—an apophatic last resort, and a fruitful one. It permits being political outside the red-and-blue confines of what is normally referred to as “politics” in the United States, without being doomed to a major party’s inevitable betrayal. We can affirm the values we’ve learned on the Internet—transparency, crowd-sourcing, freedom to, freedom from. We can be ourselves.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“Chomsky refers to right-wing libertarianism as “an aberration” nearly unique to this country, a theory of “a world built on hatred” that “would self-destruct in three seconds.” Yet the vitality of this once- or twice-removed cousin of anarchism becomes evident with every election cycle, when libertarian candidate Ron Paul squeezes his way into the Republican debates thanks to the impressively determined and youthful “army” fighting for his “rEVOLution.” (The capitalized words spell “LOVE” backward.) This is anarchism with corporate funding and misplaced nostalgia, its solidarity cleaved off by the willful protagonists in Ayn Rand’s novels. Yet”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“One might, however, argue rather differently: that at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to—rather than alleviate—material and cultural deficit.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“anarchist amnesia that has overtaken radical politics in the United States is a reflection of the amnesia in U.S. politics generally.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“This anarchist amnesia that has overtaken radical politics in the United States is a reflection of the amnesia in U.S. politics generally. With the exception of a few shared mythologies about our founding slaveholders and our most murderous wars, we like to imagine that everything we do is being done for the very first time. Such amnesia can be useful, because it lends a sensation of pioneering vitality to our undertakings that the rest of the history-heavy world seems to envy. But it also condemns us to forever reinvent the wheel.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“Independent of the state, these citadels put into practice something anarchists have been saying all along: no form of politics is worth our time until it helps struggling people get what they need, sustainability and reliably. All the better if you can do so without patriarchy and fundamentalism.”
― Nathan Schneider, Chomsky On Anarchism

“Anarchism is necessarily anti-capitalist in that it “opposes the exploitation of man by man.” But anarchism also opposes “the dominion of man over man.” It insists that “socialism will be free or it will not be at all.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“As industrial agriculture becomes more and more poisoned by profit motives, anarchists are growing their own food. Anarchist hackers understand better than most of us the power of information and the lengths that those in power will go to control it; proof is in the years- and decades-long prison sentences now being doled out for online civil disobedience.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society in which labor will “become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life,”16 an impossibility when the worker is driven by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: “no form of wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious than another, can do away with the misery of wage-labor itself.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism

“Co-ops tend to take hold when the order of things is in flux, when people have to figure out how to do what no one will do for them. Farmers had to get their own electricity when investors wouldn’t bring it; small hardware stores organized co-ops to compete with big boxes before buying local was in fashion. Before employers and governments offered insurance, people set it up for themselves. Co-ops have served as test runs for the social contracts that may later be taken for granted, and they’re doing so again.”
― Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

“Serious businesspeople nowadays tend to regard any alternative to the investor-owned corporation as aberrant or impossible. But the alternatives actually preceded the models that prevail today. In Britain, the first legislation for co-ops passed four years before joint-stock companies got their own law in 1856. Legal scholar Henry Hansmann has suggested that we regard investor-owned companies as a distorted kind of cooperative, bent in service of investor interests over anyone else’s.8 The kind of business that now seems normal was once strange; someday it might seem strange again.”
― Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

“A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.”
― Nathan Schneider, On Anarchism