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James Petras Quotes
born 1937 United States
James Petras (born 17 January 1937) is a Greek-American sociologist, who is a retired Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who has published on political issues with particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East, imperialism, globalization, and leftist social movements.
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The inefficiency of the state is directly related to its subordination to private interests.
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.
Proclaiming 19th Century ‘liberalism’, British opium addicted over 50 million Chinese in less than a decade.
Competition over shrinking resources intensifies conflict over shares of a shrinking pie.
The trade unions, narrowly focused on everyday issues and their immediate membership, ignored the mass of unemployed, especially the young unemployed, workers.
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…
In the short run there can only be international solidarity among the workers in the vassal states: the workers in the imperial states – the U.S., Germany, the Nordic states and the UK are still bound and tied to their respected ruling classes.
Class struggle according to the most up-to-date speeches of the labor bureaucrats was superseded by modern pragmatic understandings of the common interests of labor and capital.