Oppression and Liberty

We can say, to put it briefly, that up to the present mankind has known two principal forms of oppression, the one (slavery or serfdom) exercised in the name of armed force, the other in the name of wealth thus transformed into capital; what we have to determine is whether these are not now being succeeded by a new species of oppression, oppression

Abolishing the division of men into capitalists and proletarians does not in the least imply that “the separation of the spiritual forces of labour from manual labour” must disappear, even progressively.

seeing that a defeat would run the risk of destroying, for an indefinite period, everything which lends value to human life in our eyes, it is obvious that we must struggle by every means which seems to us to have some chance of proving effective.

“In the factory there exists a dead mechanism, independent of the workers, which incorporates them as living cogs.”

Militants cannot take the place of the working class. The emancipation of the workers will be carried out by the workers themselves, or it will not take place at all.

All oppressive societies give birth to a false conception of the relationship between man and nature, from the mere fact that it is only the downtrodden who are in direct contact with nature,

Such a work is a very distressing mark of the socialist movement’s deficiency in the domain of pure theory.

Only a few defenders of economic liberalism oppose this powerful tendency, but they become more and more timid

the orientation of the Hitlerite masses, though violently anti-capitalist, is by no means socialist,