P. D. James Quotes
I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.
James, P. D. The Children of Men. Faber and Faber, 1992.
Fitzhugh was a Southern iconoclast whose view of Northern labor was much like that of Karl Marx but who was an enthusiastic supporter of slavery.
Most Americans looked at anarchists as communists. They generally were not, and opposed state communism as much as state capitalism. In many ways they distrusted government the way some modern libertarians do.
Socialism in its then pure form had the state owning and controlling all the major assets of the nation. In this sense it was contradictory to individual freedom and hence democracy. However, in the years after Tocqueville’s quotation and the industrial revolution, socialism has gradually moved away from state ownership and operations of all institutions and resources. Democracy has tended to adopt a more regulatory view to control the excesses of unbridled capitalism. The range of democratic nations by the 21st century encompassed differences but some were described as “social democracies” and had some state ownership but were basically capitalistic economies. Even the self-described Communist nations had become heavily capitalistic albeit with less political freedom. At the same time, even the United States—the epitome of 21st century capitalism, owned and controlled a few of the resources and means of production and tended to regulate the others—a substantial difference from the American democracy which Tocqueville studied.
One of the contradictions of capitalism is that at many points in history capitalism has caused and/or contributed to great death and suffering. However, that same capitalism has led to the development of science, technology, agronomy, medicine and education which has saved and preserved millions of lives and raised the standard of living more than anything else.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston. He favored and argued for a middle ground of a capitalistic socialism or a socialized capitalism, which is what most democracies became.
Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL, known professionally as P. D. James, was an English novelist and politician. She rose to fame for her series of detective novels featuring police commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh.
