Alexander Zinoviev Quotes

It follows from what has just been said that communism is neither the product, nor the continuation, nor the outcome of capitalism. They have different origins. It is no coincidence that communism burst onto the scene of history, not in the highly developed West but in a Russia that was backward from a capitalist point of view and highly developed in terms of community phenomena. : centralized and powerful state apparatus, important class of civil servants, masses accustomed to submitting to power, peasant community. By liquidating the weakened classes of landowners and the not yet solid classes of capitalists, the October revolutions were to sweep away the terrain of community relations. It is also not by chance that communism has attracted countries with weak capitalist development. p. 14-16

The problem with slavery is not why people are forced to become slaves, but why they allow themselves to be enslaved. p. 67

Unlike science, an ideology is constructed of conventional ambiguous expressions, which require interpretation. It is impossible to verify or experimentally confirm an ideological statement, one cannot refute these for they are meaningless. […] While arising, an ideology may have pretensions to be scientific. But having become an ideology, it loses all the major characteristics of science.

Historical judgment focuses attention on phenomena from which we must above all abstract ourselves if we want to understand what this new society born in a given historical context really is. The historical process is also, of course, a reality, but it is a reality which disappears into the past. The new society which has matured within him quickly got rid of a historical covering which encumbered it and had become foreign to him. It constitutes another historical environment more in keeping with its nature. Sociological reality is designed to remain. She is looking to the future. p. 41

Current science is not only concerned with seeking the truth. His part of scientific spirit, which in no way resembles science as it is commonly conceived, is far from equaling that of an anti-scientific spirit hostile to the first, but apparently much more scientific than him. p.287

Whatever the case, the community phenomena themselves are general, universal. They are determined by the simple fact that a fairly large number of individuals find themselves forced to live, over generations, forming a whole, a community. (…) These community phenomena are in turn governed by certain objective laws. p. 14-16

Nothing takes root so well in people's minds as misconceptions that become prejudices. Ignorance is strength ! p. 673

But the [communist] authorities acquire from Marxism a splendid method and abounding phraseology to justify whatever piggery.

Western society is undemocratic, totalitarian in its very essence - at the level of production cells. And that is why it is democratic in its superstructure, in its ideology. There is a sort of law of constancy of the sum of democracy and totalitarianism.

Communist totalitarianism was sensitive to criticism from the West, and the West was also influenced by communism, particularly through its communist parties. Today we live in a world dominated by a single ideology, a single fact, by a single globalist party.

The S-F is a very powerful, very modern tool, [...]. p. 143

You probably know that, in my books, many characters - to make the possible happen - fight against the impossible. But if we gather 100,000 people, if we lock them in an enclosure, if we let them live there for a year while feeding them normally, I can guarantee you that I know in advance what will happen from here there. I can write it down for you somewhere, in a small envelope that we will open in a year, in order to check if I was wrong. Because such experiences are innumerable: every time you try to organize a very large mass of people, the methods of organization are always and everywhere the same. And a year from now, when you find these people locked up, you will find subordinates, superiors, you will find inequality, you will find a mafia and a small local “KGB”.

Communist society is a veritable paradise for parasites. p. 42

[...] the dialectical method is nothing other than scientific thinking in conditions where, to paraphrase Marx, the methods of experimental and empirical investigation must give way to the force of abstraction, to theoretical postulates and deductions applied to a changing and complex interconnection of relationships and processes. John Stuart Mill had already attempted to describe such a method, but God knows why it was never compared to dialectics p. 323

the end of communism also marked the end of democracy, our era today is not only post-communist, it is also post-democratic. Today we are witnessing the establishment of democratic totalitarianism, or if you prefer, the establishment of totalitarian democracy.