Eduardo Galeano: The capitalist "head office" can allow itself the luxury of creating and believing its own myths of opulence, but the poor countries on the capitalist periphery know that myths cannot be eaten. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: More freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: But what sort of "national bourgeoisie" was ours, composed of landlords, big wheelers and dealers and speculators, frock-coated politicos and intellectuals of borrowed cultures? Latin America quickly gave birth to bourgeois constitutions well varnished with liberalism, but there was no creative bourgeoisie in the European or U.S. style to accompany them, one which would undertake as its historical mission the development of a strong national capitalism. The bourgeoisies of our countries came into being as mere instruments of international capitalism, liberally oiled cogs in the global mechanism that bled the colonies and semicolonies. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: Marx wrote in Chapter 3 of the first volume of Capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Naomi Shulman: Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than "politics.". They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: It is not enough that the class struggle be comes real, consistent and developed only when it embraces the sphere of politics. In politics, too, it is possible to restrict oneself to minor matters, and it is possible to go deeper, to the very foundations. Marxism recognises a class struggle as fully developed, “nation-wide”, only if it does not merely embrace politics but takes in the most significant thing in politics—the organisation of state power. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: We know that the opportunists, slaves to the ideas of liberalism, understood these profound words of Marx incorrectly and tried to put a distorted interpretation on them. Among the opportunists there were, for instance, the Economists, the elder brothers of the liquidators. The Economists believed that any clash between classes was a political struggle. The Economists therefore recognised as "class struggle" the struggle for a wage increase of five kopeks on the ruble, and refused to recognise a higher, more developed, nation-wide class struggle, the struggle for political aims. The Economists, therefore, recognised the embryonic class struggle but did not recognise it in its developed form. The Economists recognised, in other words, only that part of the class struggle that was more tolerable to the liberal bourgeoisie, they refused to go farther than the liberals, they refused to recognise the higher form of class struggle that is unacceptable to the liberals. By so doing, the Economists became liberal workers' politicians. By so doing, the Economists rejected the Marxist, revolutionary conception of the class struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The bourgeoisie “want” to curtail the class struggle, to distort and narrow the conception and blunt its sharp edge. The proletariat “wants” this deception exposed. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: On the other hand, the liberals, when the working-class movement has grown a little stronger, dare not deny the class struggle but attempt to narrow down, to curtail and emasculate the concept of class struggle. Liberals are prepared to recognise the class struggle in the sphere of politics, too, but on one condition—that the organisation of state power should not enter into that sphere. It is not hard to under stand which of the bourgeoisie’s class interests give rise to the liberal distortion of the concept of class struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Issac Asimov: There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Thierry Meyssan: The idea that it is possible to “democratise” from the exterior, not only the institutions of a state, but the political practises of a People, is quite simply contradictory and grotesque. For the Trotskyists who run the NED, it is the old fantasy of “world revolution”. The peoples, countries and histories do not matter, the revolution is for all, and the power is for the revolutionary elite. During the Bolshevik revolution, Leon Trotsky and his secretary were encouraged by the British to massacre their compatriots on a massive scale, thus weakening Russia. In the Greater Middle East, his US disciples followed in his footsteps – spouting extreme-left wing gibberish, they organised massive crimes in the service of imperialism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Thierry Meyssan: During the whole of the “Arab Spring”, MI6 specialised in war propaganda. A sensible division of labour, since the use of modern psychology to hoodwink your own population and obtain their support was an English invention, developed well before the USSR and the Third Reich. In 1914, London created the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House. One of its methods was to use artists, since images are direct and untrammelled by logic. In 1914, they also recruited the great writers of the day – Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling – to publish screeds ascribing imaginary crimes to the German enemy. Then they recruited the editors of their major newspapers to publish the imaginary tales served up by the writers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Thierry Meyssan: Brzeziński set up “Operation Cyclone” in Afghanistan. Between 17,000 and 35,000 Muslim Brothers from about 40 countries came to fight the USSR, which had come to the defence of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, at its request. There had never been a “Soviet invasion”, as US propaganda pretended. The men of the Brotherhood came to reinforce a local coalition of conservative combatants and the local Muslim Brotherhood, including the Pashtun Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud. They received the major part of their armament from Israel – officially their sworn enemy, but now their partner. All these forces were commanded from Pakistan by General Muhammad Zia-ul- Haq, and financed by the United States and Saudi Arabia. This was the first time that the Brotherhood had been used by the Anglo-Saxons to wage war. Among the combatants present were the future commanders of the wars in the Caucasus, of the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah, the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, and of course al-Qaeda and Daesh. In the United States, the anti-Soviet operation was supported by the Republican Party and a small group from the extreme left, the Trotskyists of Social Democrats USA. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fidel Castro: Imperial plans of domination are preceded by huge sums assigned to the tasks of lying and misinforming public opinion. They have the total complicity of the oligarchy, the bourgeoisie, the intellectual right and the mass media of dissemination. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Gramsci: To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is to achieve a communist and revolutionary act. The formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” must cease to be only a formula, an occasion for outbursts of revolutionary phraseology. Whoever wants the ends, should want the means. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the inauguration of a new state, typically proletarian, in which combine the institutional experiences of the oppressed class, in which the social life of the worker and peasant class becomes a widespread and strongly organized system. This state is not improvised: the Russian Bolshevik communists have worked for eight months to propagate and make concrete the watchword: all power to the soviets, and the soviets have been known to Russian workers since 1905. The communists must treasure the Russian experience and save time and effort: the work of reconstruction will require for itself much time and much effort, to which every day and every act must be destined. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The exchange value of a commodity estimated in money is called its price. Wages therefore are only a special name for the price of labour-power, and are usually called the price of labour; it is the special name for the price of this peculiar commodity, which has no other repository than human flesh and blood. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Samir Amin: Nowadays capitalism in its long-lasting period of decline is ruled by an oligarchy. Unless the political power of this capitalist oligarchy is broken down, all political and social struggles won't show any results. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Consequently, labour-power is a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to the capitalist. Why does he sell it? It is in order to live. But the putting of labour-power into action – i.e., the work – is the active expression of the labourer's own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Kim Il Sung: For the Korean revolution to be victorious there must be a Marxist-Leninist party as the General Staff of the revolution. Only a revolutionary party can formulate a correct line, strategy and tactics, mobilize the broad masses for struggle against the Japanese imperialists, and build a socialist and communist society. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Steven Weinberg: With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: On all sides, at every step one comes across problems which man is quite capable of solving immediately, but capitalism is in the way. It has amassed enormous wealth—and has made men the slaves of this wealth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Civilisation, freedom and wealth under capitalism call to mind the rich glutton who is rotting alive but will not let what is young live on. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George L. Jackson: Fascism has temporarily succeeded under the guise of reform. The only way we can destroy it is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its ruling class. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The characteristic feature of imperialism is that the whole world, as we see, is now divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, which command colossal wealth and powerful armed forces. The overwhelming majority of the world's population, more than a thousand million people, and very probably 1,250 million - if we take the world's total population at 1,750 million - or about seventy per cent of the world's population, belong to the oppressed nations, which are either in a state of direct colonial dependence or are semi-colonies such as Persia, Turkey and China, or else, having been defeated by the armies of a big imperialist power, have become greatly dependent on that power by virtue of peace treaties. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
James Connolly: Socialists are always accused of trying to create ill feeling, to bring about a class struggle, to "set class against class". Of course, the real fact is, we only point out what already exists, analysing the political and industrial institutions under which we live and critically noting the forces which produce them in any given phase. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Our task now is to make a careful study of the forces, the classes, that revealed themselves in the crisis, and to draw the relevant lessons for our proletarian party. For it is the great significance of all crises that they make manifest what has been hidden; they cast aside all that is relative, superficial, and trivial; they sweep away the political litter and reveal the real mainsprings of the class struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
