Xenophobia Looks Like Becoming The Mass Ideology

Nations Without A Past Are Contradictions In Terms. What Makes A Nation Is The Past, What Justifies One Nation Against Others Is The Past, And Historians Are The People Who Produce It.

The Greatest Cruelties Of Our Century Have Been The Impersonal Cruelties Of Remote Decision, Of System And Routine, Especially When They Could Be Justified As Regrettable Operational Necessity.

Many Years Later, Another Marxian Rephrased This As The Choice Between Socialism And Barbarity. Which Of These Will Prevail Is A Question Which The Twenty-first Century Must Be Left To Answer.

It Is One Of The Ironies Of This Strange Century That The Most Lasting Results Of The October Revolution, Whose Object Was The Global Overthrow Of Capitalism, Was To Save Its Antagonist, Both In War And In Peace - That Is To Say, By Providing It With The Incentive, Fear, To Reform Itself After The Second World War, And, By Establishing The Popularity Of Economic Planning, Furnishing It With Some Of The Procedures For Its Reform

Impotence Therefore Faces Both Those Who Believe In What Amounts To A Pure, Stateless, Market Capitalism, A Sort Of International Bourgeois Anarchism, And Those Who Believe In A Planned Socialism Uncontaminated By Private Profit-seeking. Both Are Bankrupt. The Future, Like The Present And The Past, Belongs To Mixed Economies In Which Public And Private Are Braided Together In One Way Or Another. But How? That Is The Problem For Everybody Today, But Especially For People On The Left.