Alexandra Kollontai: There are individuals – a mere handful in the history of mankind – who, while themselves being the product of an imminent catastrophic change, leave their mark upon an entire epoch. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is one such giant mind, one such giant will... wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The petty-bourgeois democrats, those sham socialists who replaced the class struggle by dreams of class harmony, even pictured the socialist transformation in a dreamy fashion — not as the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class, but as the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority which has become aware of its aims. This petty-bourgeois utopia, which is inseparable from the idea of the state being above classes, led in practice to the betrayal of the interests of the working classes, as was shown, for example, by the history of the French revolutions of 1848 and 1871, and by the experience of “socialist” participation in bourgeois Cabinets in Britain, France, Italy and other countries at the turn of the century. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Joe Biden: We should announce there's going to be American casualties. We should go to Belgrade and we should have a Japanese-German style occupation of that country. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Joe Biden: Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Nguyễn Cao Kỳ: People ask me who my heroes are. have only one -- Hitler. I admire Hitler because he has pulled his country together when it was in a terrible state in the early thirties. But the situation here is so desperate now that one man would not be enough. We need four or five Hitlers in Vietnam. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Hence, if it is not to err in policy, the party of the proletariat must both in drafting its programme and in its practical activities proceed primarily from the laws of development of production, from the laws of economic development of society. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Assata Shakur: Throughout amerika's history, people have been imprisoned because of their political beliefs and charged with criminal acts in order to justify that imprisonment. Those who have dared to speak out against the injustices in this country, both Black and white, have paid dearly for their courage, sometimes with their lives. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Ludo Martens: For thirty-five years, the revisionists worked to destroy Stalin. Once Stalin was demolished, Lenin was liquidated with a flick of the wrist. Khrushchev fought mercilessly against Stalin. Gorbachev carried on by leading, during his five years of glastnost, a crusade against `Stalinism'. Notice that the dismantling of Lenin's statues was not preceded by a political campaign against his work. The campaign against Stalin was sufficient. Once Stalin's ideas were attacked, vilified and destroyed, it became clear that Lenin's ideas had suffered the same fate. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Assata Shakur: All you have to do is ask yourselves, who controls the government? And who are the victims of that control? wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Assata Shakur: And it is that one percent, the heads of large corporations, who control the policies of news media and determine what you and I hear on radio, read in the newspapers, see on television. It is more important for us to think about where the media gets its information. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Assata Shakur: Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn from them. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Augusto Monterroso: The ideas that Christ bequeathed us are so good that it was necessary to create the entire organization of the Church to combat them. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Cardinal Sarah: The ideology of liberal individualism promotes a mixing that is designed to erode the natural borders of homelands and cultures, and leads to a post-national and one-dimensional world where the only things that matter are consumption and production. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Rodney: The capitalists misinformed and miseducated workers in the metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial exploitation. In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves with bargaining for small wage increases, which were usually counter-balanced by increased costs of living. They ceased to be creative and allowed bourgeois cultural decadence to overtake them all. They failed to exercise any independent judgment on the great issues of war and peace, and therefore ended up by slaughtering not only colonial peoples but also themselves. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: But the social status of professors in bourgeois society is such that only those are allowed to hold such posts who sell science to serve the interests of capital, and agree to utter the most fatuous nonsense, the most unscrupulous drivel and twaddle against the socialists. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Assata Shakur: People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Assata Shakur: Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: There are reformists in all countries, for everywhere the bourgeoisie seek, in one way or another, to corrupt the workers and turn them into contented slaves who have given up all thought of doing away with slavery. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Malcolm X: The Democrats who are conservative, vote with the Republicans who are conservative. The Democrats who are liberal vote with the Republicans that are liberal. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Felix Dzerzhinsky: One has to have the inner consciousness of the need to go to one’s death for the sake of life, to go to prison for the sake of freedom and to have the strength to go through all the hell of life with open eyes, feeling in one’s heart the great and exalted, paean of beauty, truth and happiness derived from that life. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The feudal organisation of social labour rested on the discipline of the bludgeon, while the working people, robbed and tyrannised by a handful of landowners, were utterly ignorant and downtrodden. The capitalist organisation of social labour rested on the discipline of hunger, and, notwithstanding all the progress of bourgeois culture and bourgeois democracy, the vast mass of the working people in the most advanced, civilised and democratic republics remained an ignorant and downtrodden mass of wage-slaves or oppressed peasants, robbed and tyrannised by a handful of capitalists. The communist organisation of social labour, the first step towards which is socialism, rests, and will do so more and more as time goes on, on the free and conscious discipline of the working people themselves who have thrown off the yoke both of the landowners and capitalists. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: If we translate the Latin, scientific, historico-philosophical term "dictatorship of the proletariat” into simpler language, it means just the following: Only a definite class, namely, the urban workers and the factory, industrial workers in general, is able to lead the whole mass of the working and exploited people in the struggle to throw off the yoke of capital, in actually carrying it out, in the struggle to maintain and consolidate the victory, in the work of creating the new, socialist social system and in the entire struggle for the complete abolition of classes. (Let us observe in parenthesis that the only scientific distinction between socialism-and communism is that the first term implies the first stage of the new society arising out of capitalism, while the second implies the next and higher stage.) wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The proletariat does not cease the class struggle after it has captured political power, but continues it until classes are abolished -- of course, under different circumstances, in different form and by different means. And what does the "abolition of classes” mean? All those who call themselves socialists recognise this as the ultimate goal of socialism, but by no means all give thought to its significance. Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy. Clearly, in order to abolish classes completely, it is not enough to overthrow the exploiters, the landowners and capitalists, not enough to abolish their rights of ownership; it is necessary also to abolish all private ownership of the means of production, it is necessary to abolish the distinction between town and country, as well as the distinction between manual workers and brain workers. This requires a very long period of time. In order to achieve this an enormous step forward must be taken in developing the productive forces; it is necessary to overcome the resistance (frequently passive, which is particularly stubborn and particularly difficult to overcome) of the numerous survivals of small-scale production; it is necessary to overcome the enormous force of habit and conservatism which are connected with these survivals. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
