Karl Marx: We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Always be on the alert against Trotskyism, reformism and revisionism / Soyez toujours en alerte contre le trotskysme, le réformisme et le révisionnisme / Seid immer wachsam gegen Trotzkismus, Reformismus und Revisionismus
David Ricardo: LABOUR, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, on with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
David Ricardo: It has been my endeavour to show in this work that a fall of wages would have no other effect than to raise profits. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Kenneth Galbraith: It is David Ricardo's unique position in history that he was an innovating force in both capitalist and socialist thought. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
David Ricardo: Possessing utility, commodities derive their exchangeable value from two sources: from their scarcity, and from the quantity of labour required to obtain them. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: The workers have taken it into their heads that they, with their busy hands, are the necessary, and the rich capitalists, who do nothing, the surplus population. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bertolt Brecht: In fascist countries capitalism only survives as Fascism, and Fascism can only be resisted as capitalism, as the most naked, brazen, offensive, and deceitful form of capitalism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Kaysone Phomvihane: The aim of the revolutionary struggle is to remove all forms of bourgeois exploitation and parasitism, ... suppress any opposition or attempts to revive the remnants of the reactionary forces, defend our national independence and build socialism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Georgi Dimitrov: American fascism is trying to direct the disillusionment and discontent of these masses into reactionary fascist channels. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bashar al-Assad: For us, those veterans who fought in that ferocious war - and the Soviet Union made great sacrifices, for it offered over 26 million martyrs, and as far as we know the number was closer to 30 million - were the main force; and today they offer a role model for the present generation and for future generations. They provide a role model of resilience and standing fast. Who could expect the siege of Stalingrad at that time to end the way it did without the steadfastness of those heroes? Who could expect that the initial retreat of the Soviet army would turn into a victory later? Without the victory of the Soviet Union, the Normandy landings for Western states wouldn't have been possible. This is what many in the West are trying to obscure, i.e. the more important role played by the peoples of the Soviet Union at that time - including your people - in defeating Nazism. Today, these veterans play a vital role in strengthening the spirit of steadfastness, because you too are facing something similar to what Syria has been facing for decades. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bashar al-Assad: The war fought today by our people is not only against the terrorists, but also against those who sponsor terrorism. Terrorism is only an instrument used by those Western states which want to apply the same Nazi mentality which aims at dominating everyone else and turning states and nations into slaves, turning them into satellites and controlling everything they have, materially and morally. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Malcolm X: That white person that you see calling himself a liberal is the most dangerous thing in the entire Western Hemisphere. He’s the most deceitful. He’s like a fox and a fox is always more dangerous in the forest than the wolf. You can see the wolf coming. You know what he’s up to, but the fox will fool you. He comes at you with his mouth shaped in such a way that even though you see his teeth you think he’s smiling and take him for a friend. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
General Smedley Butler: I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Grover Furr: Above everything else Domenico Losurdo was a fighter for the truth. His contribution to the eventual liberation of the oppressed and exploited remains with us and with the generations of fighters that will come after us. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
David Bacon: Society exists to serve the social needs of people, not the productivity needs of capital. Those two needs are in basic conflict - a conflict of class interest. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Philip Agee: But what counter-insurgency really comes down to is the protection of the capitalists back in America, their property and their privileges. US national security, as preached by US leaders, is the security of the capitalist class in the US, not the security of the rest of the people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Edward Herman: ... the NSS (National Security State) is an instrument of class warfare, organized and designed to permit an elite, local and multinational, to operate without any constraint from democratic processes. This allows the bulk of the population to be treated as a mere cost of production. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Robert McChesney: The range of debate between the dominant U.S. (political) parties tends to closely resemble the range of debate within the business class. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Capital must protect itself in every way...Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd. - anonymous wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Rivero: The big lie about capitalism is that everyone can be rich. That's impossible. Capitalism works only if the vast majority of the population are kept poor enough to never quit working, are kept poor enough to accept distasteful jobs society cannot function without. If everyone were a millionaire, who would empty the trash or repair the sewers? It follows that the poorer the general population is made, the greater the worth of the money held by the wealthy, in terms of the lives which may be bought and sold with it. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Holly Sklar: The dream of capitalism is to co-opt people with higher living standards without redistributing any wealth. Without co-optation, widespread repression is the only guarantor of gross inequality. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Ellen Meiksins-Wood: Imperialism today is taking place in the context of...the 'universalization' of capitalism. It is not now primarily a matter of territorial conquest or direct military or colonial control. It is not now a matter of capitalist powers invading non-capitalist powers in order to bleed them dry directly and by brute force. Now it is more a matter of ensuring that the forces of the capitalist market prevail in every corner of the world (even if this means marginalizing and impoverishing parts of it), and of manipulating those market forces to the advantage of the most powerful capitalist economies and the United States in particular." ... "Military force is still central to the imperialist project, in some ways more than ever. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Philip Agee: American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force - without a secret police force. Now, more than ever, each of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the international order. It's harder now not to realize that there are two sides, harder not to understand each, and harder not to recognize that like it or not we contribute day in and day out either to the one side or to the other. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Alexis de Tocqueville: Can it be believed that the democracy which overthrew the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
