[L]os ideales de la izquierda son la traslación política de los principios morales de los que se nutre la teoría de la justicia. Es justamente en este sentido en el que la izquierda puede reclamar con razón que tiene una superioridad moral con respecto a otras ideologías: encarna unos objetivos que son la consecuencia de llevar hasta sus últimos extremos políticos los principios morales basados en la universalidad y la imparcialidad. [...] [L]a pretensión de alcanzar una sociedad que garantice la posibilidad de que las personas desarrollen sus potencialidades y sean libres en el sentido fuerte del término es una traslación política de los principios morales más elevados. La sociedad comunista sería, desde este punto de vista, la realización más acabada y perfecta de nuestro sentido de la justicia. Incluso cabría decir que la utopía comunista no es más que la versión política, llevada hasta sus últimas consecuencias, del ideal kantiano según el cual todo ser humano es un fin en sí mismo y no un medio para algún otro fin.

—Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, La superioridad moral de la izquierda

[T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

[E]conomists…realize what Marx failed to realize: on the one hand, the vast productive possibilities of the capitalist engine that promise indefinitely higher mass standards of life, supplemented by gratis services without complete "expropriation of the expropriators"; on the other hand, the extent to which capitalist interests can in fact be expropriated without bringing the economic engine to a standstill and the extent to which this engine may be made to run in the labor interest. [They have]…discovered this possibility of a laborist capitalism

Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

The passing of market-economy can become the beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom. Juridical and actual freedom can be made wider and more general than ever before; regulation and control can achieve freedom not only for the few, but for all. […] With the liberal the idea of freedom…degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise (…). This means the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure, and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property.

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism. […] The accusation of interventionism on the part of liberal writers is thus an empty slogan, implying the denunciation of one and the same set of actions according to whether they happen to approve of them or not.

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

[T]he threat of fascism was far more than merely political. What was at issue – and nobody was more aware of this than intellectuals – was the future of an entire civilisation. If fascism stamped out Marx, it equally stamped out Voltaire and John Stuart Mill. It rejected liberalism in all its forms as implacably as socialism and communism. It rejected the entire heritage of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment together with all regimes sprung from the American and the French Revolutions as well as the Russian Revolution. Communists and liberals, confronted by the same enemy and the same threat of annihilation, were inevitably pressed into the same camp.

Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism

Özil, 2013-2020

Querido Özil, con gran tristeza ayer te dijimos adiós. Sobrellevaste con resignación ejemplar los continuos reveses de salud que sufriste en los últimos tiempos y hasta el final has sido un perro bueno y valiente.

Hemos compartido siete años maravillosos juntos, durante los cuales fuiste un miembro más de nuestro hogar y nuestra familia. Nos alegraste mucho la vida con tu buen carácter y tu personalidad tan cómica: desde que te conocimos, cada día nos mostraste tu amor y nos hiciste reír con tus gestos y ocurrencias. Menudo chor eras.

Extrañaremos —ya lo estamos haciendo— abrazarte, tu carita de felicidad con la lengua fuera, el tacto de tu pelo tan suave y acariciar tus orejitas como de terciopelo. Nunca se nos olvidarán tus carreras en círculos entusiasmado por Transmitter Park, cómo te volvías loco con la comida, girando sobre ti mismo, o tus inconfundibles ronquidos, que eran el sonido de la pura relajación.

Nos encantaba decirte “¡choca!” y que nos chocaras la mano, ver cómo te emocionabas cuando nos acercábamos a la tienda de vinos del barrio, porque sabías que te iban a dar chucherías, o cuando te metías en la bolsa de la ropa, envuelto entre nuestras prendas, mientras hacíamos la colada.

También guardaremos con todo nuestro cariño los recuerdos de cómo últimamente Óliver empezó a acariciarte, qué bueno que llegarais a conoceros. Te quisimos mucho, Özilito, fuiste ‘the best boy’ y siempre te llevaremos en nuestros corazones.

–Stacey + Alex

As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than the members of a particular nationality, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics. If so, having close to 200 independent states is a hindrance rather than a help. Since Swedes, Indonesians and Nigerians deserve the same human rights, wouldn’t it be simpler for a single global government to safeguard them?

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

As socialism slowly departed the world, human rights came to appeal as the central language of justice. After its participation in the creation of welfare states, socialism had become and long remained the most identifiable language of material equality, and its departure explains more than any other factor why the age of human rights was also the age of neoliberalism: it was no longer the age of a socialist left.

Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

Although the earthly ideal of Socialism-Communism has collapsed, the problems it purported to solve remain: the brazen use of social advantage and the inordinate power of money, which often direct the very course of events. And if the global lesson of the twentieth century does not serve as a healing inoculation, then the vast red whirlwind may repeat itself in entirety.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The New York Times, 28 November 1993

The will of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and Blacks alike. (…) We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other (…). We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else's profit (…). If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own – which it is – (…). For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

An Open Letter to Angela Davis, James Baldwin (November 19, 1970)

What Spain meant to liberals and those on the Left who lived through the 1930s is now difficult to remember, though for many of us the survivors…it remains the only political cause which, even in retrospect, appears as pure and compelling as it did in 1936.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: 1914–1991

For Nietzsche, the…decadence, pessimism and nihilism of the 1880s…were 'the logical end-product of our great values and ideals'. (…) The consequences of the modes of thought accepted by nineteenth-century politics and economics were nihilist. The culture of the age was threatened by its own cultural products. Democracy produced socialism, the fatal swamping of genius by mediocrity, strength by weakness – a note also struck, in a more pedestrian and positivistic key, by the eugenists. (…) The only ideology of serious calibre which remained firmly committed to the nineteenth-century belief in science, reason and progress was Marxism, which was unaffected by disillusion about the present because it looked forward to the future triumph of precisely those 'masses' whose rise created so much uneasiness among middle-class thinkers.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914

A world in which all were happy, and every individual fully and freely realized his or her potentialities, in which freedom reigned and government that was coercion had disappeared, was the ultimate aim of both liberals and socialists. What distinguishes the various members of the ideological family descended from humanism and the Enlightenment, liberal, socialist, communist or anarchist, is not the gentle anarchy which is the utopia of all of them, but the methods of achieving it.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848

From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage.

Alexis de Tocqueville on Manchester in 1835

If the word “libertarianism” is taken to mean “a belief in freedom” and the word “socialism” is taken to mean “a belief in fairness,” then the two are not just “not opposites,” but they are necessary complements. That’s because if you have “freedom” from government intervention, but you don’t have a fair economy, your freedom becomes meaningless, because you will still be faced with a choice between working and starving. Freedom is only meaningful to the extent that it actually creates a capacity for you to act. If you’re poor, you don’t have much of an actual capacity to do much, so you’re not terribly free. Likewise, “socialism” without a conception of freedom is not actually fair and equal. Libertarian socialists have always been critical of Marxist states, because the libertarian socialist recognizes that “equality” enforced by a brutal and repressive state is not just “un-free,” but is also unequal, because there is a huge imbalance of power between the people and the state. The Soviet Union was obviously not free, but it was also not socialist, because “the people” didn’t actually control anything; the state did. The libertarian socialist perspective is well-captured by a quote from the pioneering anarchist Mikhail Bakunin: “Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.” During the 1860s and ’70s, 50 years before the Soviet Union, Bakunin warned that Marxist socialism’s authoritarian currents would lead to hideous repression. In a Marxist regime, he said: “There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of ignorant ones!… You can see quite well that behind all the democratic and socialistic phrases and promises of Marx’s program, there is to be found in his State all that constitutes the true despotic and brutal nature of all States.” This, as we know, is precisely what happened. Unfortunately, however, the bloody history of 20th century Marxism-Leninism has convinced many people that socialism itself is discredited. They miss the voices of people in the libertarian socialist tradition, like Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Noam Chomsky, who have always stood for a kind of socialism that places a core value on freedom and deplores authoritarianism. It emphasizes true democracy; that is, people should get to participate in the decisions that affect their lives, whether those decisions are labeled “political” or “economic.” It detests capitalism because capitalist institutions are totalitarian (you don’t get to vote for who your boss is, and you get very little say in what your company does), but it also believes strongly in freedom of expression and civil liberties. Libertarian socialism seems to me a beautiful philosophy. It rejects both “misery through economic exploitation” and “misery through Stalinist totalitarianism,” arguing that the problem is misery itself, whatever the source. It’s a very simple concept, but it’s easy to miss because of the binary that pits “communism” against “capitalism.” Thus, if you’re a critic of capitalism, you must be an apologist for the most brutal socialist governments. But every time there has been such government, libertarian socialist critics have been the first to call it out for its hypocrisy. (Usually, such people are the first ones liquidated.) But the libertarian tradition in socialism is precious. And Chomsky, skeptical of corporate and governmental power alike, is our foremost public exponent of it.

Lessons From Chomsky, Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs.

When the system of mass incarceration collapses (and if history is any guide, it will), historians will undoubtedly look back and marvel that such an extraordinarily comprehensive system of racialized social control existed in the United States. How fascinating, they will likely say, that a drug war was waged almost exclusively against poor people of color—people already trapped in ghettos that lacked jobs and decent schools. They were rounded up by the millions, packed away in prisons, and when released, they were stigmatized for life, denied the right to vote, and ushered into a world of discrimination. Legally barred from employment, housing, and welfare benefits—and saddled with thousands of dollars of debt—these people were shamed and condemned for failing to hold together their families. They were chastised for succumbing to depression and anger, and blamed for landing back in prison. Historians will likely wonder how we could describe the new caste system as a system of crime control, when it is difficult to imagine a system better designed to create—rather than prevent—crime.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness