James Petras

"The inefficiency of the state is directly related to its subordination to private interests."

"By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectors of the neo-liberal ruling classes realised that their policies were polarising the society and provoking large-scale social discontent. Neo-liberal politicians began to finance and promote a parallel strategy of “from below”, the promotion of “grassroots” organisation with an “anti-statist” ideology to intervene among potentially conflicting classes, to create a “social cushion”. These organisations were financially dependent on neo-liberal sources and were directly involved in competing with socio-political movements for the allegiance of local leaders and activist communities. By the 1990s these organisations, described as “non-governmental”, numbered in the thousands and were receiving close to US$4 billion world-wide."

"The trade unions, narrowly focused on everyday issues and their immediate membership, ignored the mass of unemployed, especially the young unemployed, workers."

"Competition over shrinking resources intensifies conflict over shares of a shrinking pie."

"Anti-imperialist movements are no longer middle class dominated nationalist movements, they are class-based because imperialism is embedded in everyday work and household survival."

"In fact, the industrial workers and in particular their trade unions have been the least active and least militant component of the anti-imperialist movements…"

"The future of popular-based social and economic changes does not he in parliamentary elections, given their elitist structure and the control exercised over the process. Movement politics linked to electoral campaigns has no future; nor does simple direct action in defense of particular local terrain. The future of movements must be rooted in creating autonomous electoral power anchored and coordinated with regional or national movements of direct action—dress rehearsals for creating a new state power response to civil society."

"Proclaiming 19th Century ‘liberalism’, British opium addicted over 50 million Chinese in less than a decade."

"Most dictatorships have been anti-statist and pro-free market, today and in the past and probably in the future."

"The so-called Eurozone is, in reality, a mini-empire of tributary vassals and imperial states reforming empires has been historically demonstrated to be a futile enterprise."

"...As always with Petras, there is much repetition/recycling of articles/ideas,much polemic and hot air but also a genuine engagement with the issues of revol-utionary transformation in Latin America, albeit from the perspective of the privi-leged peripatetic professor from the North."

"Class struggle according to the most up-to-date speeches of the labor bureaucrats was superseded by modern pragmatic understandings of the common interests of labor and capital."