Xi Jinping: Some people believe that Marxist political economy is outdated and Capital is outdated. This conclusion is arbitrary and wrong. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The first task on the order of the day is the continued work of the socialist education, organisation, and unification of the politically-conscious masses of the proletariat. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Adam Smith: Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part, can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Love for the people is permitted the lackey only to a very modest degree, of course, and only on the imperative condition that he expresses humble and servile feelings in addition to his readiness to comfort the working and exploited people. Let it be said in parenthesis that Feuerbach gave a very neat answer to those who defended religion as a source of comfort for people; to comfort the slave, he said, is to the advantage of the slave-owner, while the real friend of the slaves teaches them indignation and revolt, teaches them to cast off the yoke and does not comfort them. The lackey paints and prettifies the artificial flowers that serve to comfort the slaves who are fettered by wage-slavery. Champions of the emancipation of people from wage-slavery tear away the artificial flowers from the fetters they decorate so that the slave can learn to hate his fetters more consciously and more strongly, the quicker to throw them off and reach out his hand for living flowers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Marxism and anarchism are based upon entirely different principles, irrespective of the fact that they both enter the arena of struggle under a socialist flag. The cornerstone of anarchism is the individual, whose emancipation, according to it, is the main prerequisite for the emancipation of the mass, i.e., according to anarchism the emancipation of the mass is impossible until the individual is free; hence its slogan: "Everything for the individual." The cornerstone of Marxism, on the contrary, is the mass, the emancipation of which, according to it, is the main prerequisite for the emancipation of the individual, i.e., according to Marxism, the emancipation of the individual is impossible without the emancipation of the mass. Hence its slogan, "Everything for the mass." wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Edward Luttwak: A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Rousseau: There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom, for in that way one captures volition itself. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Herbert Schiller: The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Aldous Huxley: Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Montesquieu: The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William H. Hastie: Democracy is a process, not a static condition. It is becoming rather than being. It can easily be lost, but is never fully won. Its essence is eternal struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
The American Heritage Dictionary: Establishment: An exclusive group of powerful people who rule a government or society by means of private agreements or decisions. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Samuel Johnson: Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and consistent. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bertram Gross: The term "welfare state'' ... contains a germ of truth. Under pressure from communist regimes and movements, the governments of all major capitalist countries have out-Bismarcked Bismarck in taking over socialist demands and enacting a host of programs to provide state-ordained floors under living and working standards. In a broader sense, however, the "welfare state" idea is fundamentally misleading. The welfare provided is not the general well-being of the people. It is welfare, rather, in the narrow and restrictive sense of public assistance to the poor and other programs (usually financed by the lower and middle classes themselves) to take the rough edge off capitalist exploitation, promote docility among the exploited, and thereby help form a more perfect capitalism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Adam Smith: Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
James Madison: I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: The internal and external aims of Fascism are inseparable. Fascism, the system of violent rule of the most reactionary big monopolist interests, is inevitably at the same time the system of organisation of the State and economy for aggressive war. For many years Fascism succeeded in deceiving, or at any rate in winning the support of large numbers of respectable, influential and educated people in all countries. Blinded by its claim to represent their bulwark against Communism or democratic advance, they became its apologists and sycophants; they palliated its crimes and extolled its supposed virtues. Statesmen, financiers and arms merchants vied with one another in supplying the armaments to Fascism which were subsequently to be used against their own peoples. The worst infamies of Fascism were kept out of the official press; the consular reports on the concentration camps, which were available in the official pigeon-holes through all these years, were not made public property until after the outbreak of war. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: Hitlerism is German Fascism. A fascist régime is inseparable from war. Fascism is a criminal régime imposed upon people by the most powerful reactionary forces in a country the big trusts, landowners, military caste, etc., for the purpose, first, of holding down the people in absolute and terrorised subjection to their rule, when all other means of checking the advance of the people to freedom have failed; and second of conquering other countries and advancing to the domination of the world. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Wholesale slaughter of the man power of the nations, wholesale ruin and want, destruction of once flourishing towns and villages, wholesale starvation and lapse into savagery, all in order that a handful of crowned and uncrowned robbers may pillage foreign lands and rake in untold millions-this is where the war is tending. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man - greetings! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone -- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Victor Klemperer: No, the most powerful influence was exerted neither by individual speeches nor by articles or flyers, posters or flags; it was not achieved by things which one had to absorb by conscious thought or conscious emotions. Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously. … Language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it. And what happens if the cultivated language is made up of poisonous elements or has been made the bearer of poisons? Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
