Friedrich Engels: These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes result in weighty struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but they are the strongest proof that the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is approaching. They are the military school of the working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided; they are the pronunciamentos of single branches of industry that these too have joined the labour movement. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Being a school of communism in general, the trade unions must, in particular, be a school for training the whole mass of workers, and eventually all working people, in the art of managing socialist industry (and gradually also agriculture). wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The trade unions were a tremendous step forward for the working class in the early days of capitalist development, inasmuch as they marked a transition from the workers’ disunity and helplessness to the rudiments of class organisation. When the revolutionary party of the proletariat, the highest form of proletarian class organisation, began to take shape (and the Party will not merit the name until it learns to weld the leaders into one indivisible whole with the class and the masses) the trade unions inevitably began to reveal certain reactionary features, a certain craft narrow-mindedness, a certain tendency to be non-political, a certain inertness, etc. However, the development of the proletariat did not, and could not, proceed anywhere in the world otherwise than through the trade unions, through reciprocal action between them and the party of the working class. The proletariat’s conquest of political power is a gigantic step forward for the proletariat as a class, and the Party must more than ever and in a new way, not only in the old, educate and guide the trade unions, at the same time bearing in mind that they are and will long remain an indispensable “school of communism” and a preparatory school that trains proletarians to exercise their dictatorship, an indispensable organisation of the workers for the gradual transfer of the management of the whole economic life of the country to the working class (and not to the separate trades), and later to all the working people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Miriam Makeba: The conqueror writes history. They came, they conquered, and they wrote. Now you don’t expect people who came to invade us to write the truth about us. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: The political spinelessness of the opportunists is no mysterious growth. It springs from the irresistible striving to adapt oneself to the tastes of the bourgeoisie, a striving to please the "masters" and earn their praise. Such is the psychological basis of the opportunist tactics of adaptation. And so, to stand well with the "gentry," to please them, or at all events to avert their wrath over the murder of the Exarch, our Menshevik opportunists grovel like flunkeys before them and take upon themselves the function of police sleuths! Tactics of adaptation could not go further than that! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Muammar Gaddafi: Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called "Capitalism". wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of studying and apprehending them, is dialectical, while its interpretation of the phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena, its theory, is materialistic. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Russell Jacoby: To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing them over. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Russell Jacoby: To fasten on the facts while forgetting the social content is to fall prey to a mystifying immediacy. In an antagonistic society, appearance and essence, immediacy and mediacy, diverge; things are not what they seem to be. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Russell Jacoby: The concept of "human existence" suggests an abstract human condition; "class existence" indicts bad conditions. The former suggests a nonexistent egalitarianism, as if master and slave, owner and worker, bomber and bombed all participate in the same universal abstraction. ... The human condition for the rich is the inhuman one for the impoverished. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Russell Jacoby: The laws of social development are not identical with the laws in the natural sciences. The content of the social laws is not nature but second nature: coagulated history. They are manmade, but they also make men; they are dialectical, at once subject and object. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mao Zedong: Communism is at once a complete system of proletarian ideology and a new social system. It is different from any other ideological and social system, and is the most complete, progressive, revolutionary and rational system in human history. The ideological and social system of feudalism has a place only in the museum of history. The ideological and social system of capitalism has also become a museum piece in one part of the world (in the Soviet Union), while in other countries it resembles "a dying person who is sinking fast, like the sun setting beyond the western hills", and will soon be relegated to the museum. The communist ideological and social system alone is full of youth and vitality, sweeping the world with the momentum of an avalanche and the force of a thunderbolt. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Silvia Federici: The construction of a new patriarchal order, making of women the servants of the male work-force, was a major aspect of capitalist development. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Arthur Scargill: Over 2,000 of our members have been injured on picket lines. Two have been killed and one man is in intensive care with a fractured skull. Don’t talk to me about violence. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: The substitution of one social system for another is a complicated and long revolutionary process. It is not simply a spontaneous process, but a struggle, it is a process connected with the clash of classes. Capitalism is decaying, but it must not be compared simply with a tree which has decayed to such an extent that it must fall to the ground of its own accord. No, revolution, the substitution of one social system for another, has always been a struggle, a painful and a cruel struggle, a life and death struggle. And every time the people of the new world came into power they had to defend themselves against the attempts of the old world to restore the old power by force; these people of the new world always had to be on the alert, always had to be ready to repel the attacks of the old world upon the new system. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mao Zedong: The road is winding. Lenin’s Soviet Union changed under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. In future, it will still return to the Lenin’s path. The same goes for China. It could become revisionist in the future, but eventually it will follow the path set by Marx and Lenin. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Gus Hall: The ultimate solution to the grave problem of pollution and destruction of our environment can come only with the replacement of the capitalist system by a socialist society. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Ludo Martens: On August 6, 1945, having learned that Hiroshima was destroyed by the bomb, Truman declared to the people around him that it was the 'greatest achievement of organized science in history'. Truman dared to write that in his memoirs! The decision of U.S. imperialism to indiscriminately exterminate hundreds of millions of Japanese civilians shows its inhuman and barbaric nature; it had taken up the torch from the fascist powers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Plato: Since those who rule in the city do so because they own a lot, I suppose they're unwilling to enact laws to prevent young people who've had no discipline from spending and wasting their wealth, so that by making loans to them, secured by the young people's property, and then calling those loans in, they themselves become even richer and more honored. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Rodney: Patriotism must be understood in a class context—one can be patriotic in defense of a capitalist state or in defense of a workers’ state. These are two different things, for when a worker is patriotic in a capitalist state he is just serving as his own oppressor. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit thus become the most potent means of driving capitalist production beyond its own limits, and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Maynard Keynes: For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
