“[Peter] is an avowed socialist.” - New West (January 1979)
“[Post-Monkees, Peter was part of] a San Francisco-based rock band named Osceola.
‘That was a name full of significance,’ he said. ‘Osceola was chief of the Seminoles, the only tribe never to have surrendered to the federal government.’
Tork said he identifies strongly with that kind of defiance.
‘All of my early life was spent feeling out of whack. Physically I matured late and never was very athletic and always found myself on the short end of the stick. I was raised in a liberal family in the middle of the McCarthy era.’” - The Daily Oklahoman (November 11, 1983)
“The system of interplay in this country, and over the vast majority of the surface of the world, which values competition, individualism, and essentially, aggression over the forces of cooperativism and community as a system which is inherently damaging to each and every one of us, and evolutionary necessary to abandon the sucker and get on with the business of getting together. Because, as I once said in a reasonably spontaneous mode, we have to stick together or we’re all going to come unglued together.
Capitalism is on the way down, socialism and communism is the only conceivable way that we’re going to be able to get — (to camera) don’t use those words. Communityism, cooperativism. These are the things… Basically, capitalism fosters aggressiveness. […]
Insofar as there is just enough to go around, every time somebody’s got more than they need, somebody else has less than they need and is dying of starvation and lack of material wellbeing. Insofar as there is more than enough to go around, maybe there’s a little room for some people to play around with. However, until we get everybody to the level of, they all have what they need, and we’re secure, at least on that material basis, we won’t *know* whether there’s enough to go around or not.
[...] We, as a culture, tend to remove ourselves from our own support systems. And this happens interpersonally as well as *intra*personally. I don’t do very well by myself, and people do not support me and I do not support people except in rare circumstances as we are beginning to come together, as in the therapeutic group I was talking about. Now… so this brings me back to what I said earlier: we are uniquely — most of us feel that we are uniquely, deeply and specially flawed unlike anybody else. And this is a lie which has been foisted on us by those people who would like to keep us separate in order to keep us working against each other… The final thing brings me back to my political argument. The psychological and the political, of course, are not separate… As long as we keep ourselves separate and as long as we go on the basis that one person’s gain is another person’s loss, we are going to go on on a basis where we are going to regard that as true in the national economy too. But the converse is truer. That is that, as we shift over to a cooperative, where working together is the main emphasis, and individual effort is the lesser emphasis, we will all gain much more rapidly. And that is why I promote the communityist and cooperativist systems as opposed to the capitalist.” - Peter Tork, Reasonably Spontaneous Conversation with Dennis Tardan (1979)
“I’m rather to the left of Mao Zedong myself.” - Peter Tork, AA Tapes (1997)
“Thorkelson the teacher is happily planning his next course, ‘Mao, Marx and Mama.’ ‘I’m doing something important,’ he says. ‘I never do anything less than important.’” - People Magazine (April 5, 1976)
“I was baptized a socialist. My faith is in a community.” - Peter Tork, visaliatimesdelta dot com (October 29, 2010)
“Sometimes I see the world as an eternal horse race between salvation and dissolution, now one, and now the other gaining the lead.
But to the extent that we can learn, each and all of us, that the cooperative good is good for the greatest individual good (with safeguards, to be sure), that forgiveness is the route to true inner peace, and that not everything we deem wrong or bad may be so, to that extent hassles of all shapes, sizes and colors will diminish. I am so sure of all this that I would, I hope, be willing to bet my life on these principles.” - Peter Tork, Ask Peter Tork (2009)
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