Skip to content

"Socialism or Barbarism!" was the cry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but in the age of the Anthropocene, when capitalism’s contradictions are fully playing out on a planetary scale, this phrase today would have to be recast as "Socialism or Ecological Collapse!"

— Steven Best

Another quote →

Topics

Socialism

More quotes by Steven Best

In just 10,000 years' time, a millisecond of geological time, Homo sapiens civilization, embodied by the repulsively rapacious paradigm of Western speciesist capitalism and anthropocentrism, has managed to push the planet to the brink of ecological collapse.

The Pied Pipers of Pacifism: Lee Hall, Gary Francione, and the Betrayal of Animal Liberation (2009)

In the aftermath of 10,000 years of incessant growth and endless wars that humanity waged upon itself, other species, and the earth, we now live amidst unsustainable global capitalism and a system of growth that is driving natural systems to an irreversible tipping point.

Like the "war on drugs," the "war on terrorism" is phony, a front for the war on privacy, liberty, and democracy. Only counter-terrorists can defeat terrorists. May the armies of the animal, earth, and human liberationists rise and multiply in a perfect war against the oppressors of the earth.

Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (2004)

A civil war is unfolding — one between forces hell-bent on exploiting animals and the earth for profit whatever the toll, and activists steeled to resist this omnicide tooth and nail. We are witnessing not only the long-standing corporate war against nature, but also a new social war about nature.

Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (2004)

We are now living in the era of the sixth extinction crisis in the history of the planet, the last one occurring 65 million years ago when a meteor struck the Gulf of Mexico and annihilated half of existing species including the dinosaurs. Unlike the last five, however, the sixth extinction crisis is caused by human activity.

All Steven Best quotes →

You may also like

Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Winston Churchill

In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.

George Orwell

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Steven Best (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.