Obey and Eat

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.

Leon Trotsky (1937, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?)

Marxist Society

The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work and equality of pay.

Nikolai Lenin (1917, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution)

Communism and Fascism

The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism, has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, non-economic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following.  Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same.  Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Stalinist Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany

Peter Drucker (1939, The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism)

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Marxism

Marxism has led to Fascism and National Socialism, because, in all essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism.

F.A. Voigt (Unto Caesar, 1938)

China's Private Enterprises

The diversity of production, commodity economy, and all sorts of small enterprises boomed in the countryside, as if a strange army had appeared suddenly from nowhere. This is not the achievement of our central government.

Deng Xiaoping, People's Daily, 13 June 1987

An Industrial Population

There are today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil with them by day and share their places of sleep at night. Such Asiatic standards, and such unmechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an industrial revolution.

T.S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution (1961)

Homo Sovieticus

They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we are working,

Popular Russian saying during the Soviet Years.

On the Worry of Communism

We have nothing to worry about; the place is one big Department of Motor Vehicles.

Jim Bennett of George Mason University, after traveling through the Soviet Bloc (early 1980's)