Karl Marx: It will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. The petty bourgeoisie will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. ... the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The revolution made progress, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to make the existing society as tolerable for themselves as possible. ... The rule of capital is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers; in short, they hope to bribe the workers ... wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because natural need has been replaced by historically produced need. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Let us first of all take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows what this example is. It is Germany. Here we have “the last word” in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Alexandra Kollontai: Then came the great days of the October Revolution. (…) The sleepless nights, the permanent sessions. And, finally, the stirring declarations: ‘The Soviets take power!’ ‘The Soviets (have) put an end to the war.’ ‘The land is socialized and belongs to the peasants! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Otto Kuusinen: The speed with which a party passes from one stage to another depends on objective conditions, as well as on the correctness of its own policies and the ability of its leadership. The aggravation of the general crisis of capitalism and the successes of the forces of socialism, and the increase in the political maturity and experience of the party membership, create in our days the prerequisites for all Communist Parties of the capitalist countries to rise to a higher level of development. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: It is impossible to finish off capitalism without having finished off social democracy in the working-class movement. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor.... wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Marx's philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: For all arms with which to fight must be drawn from society as it is and the fatal conditions of this struggle have the misfortune of not being easily adapted to the idealistic fantasies which these doctors in social science have exalted as divinities, under the names of Freedom, Autonomy, Anarchy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: The whole propaganda of imperialism, of the Governments and the press, teaches the people on both sides to see as the main enemy the aggressive designs of the foreign imperialism, never of their own. Therefore, they remain, in fact, enslaved to imperialism and its wars. The mutual fears of the aggressive aims of the enemy imperialism cancel out the common desire of the overwhelming majority of the people in both countries for peace. The imperialist gangsters take advantage of these fears of the people, of this natural desire for national independence, to trap the people into support of their war of spoliation. Under the pretence that the war is for national defence, for the defence of the independence of the nation, they send the armies, the warships and planes to the furthest ends of the earth for the enslavement of other nations and for the battle against rival exploiters over the spoils and conquests of foreign domination. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: Thus, this war is a war of one set of exploiters against another set of exploiters. It is a war of rival capitalist Great Powers, like the last war: a war for world domination : for the largest share in the exploitation of the world; for possessions, profits, markets and spheres of influence; for the new division of the world. The interests of the working people in all countries are wholly opposed to this conflict of imperialist Powers for world domination, in which the people are sacrificed for the profit of the exploiters. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: Only Socialism can finally end imperialist wars by ending their cause-the class system of society. The victory of Socialism in the leading countries of the world means the end of war, because it ends the jungle-fight of the exploiters over the spoils; it ends the fight for profits, spheres of influence, colonies, markets and monopolist domination. Socialism means the freedom and brotherhood of all nations without distinction of race or colour. Socialism means that all peoples freely organise their production for use, for common advantage. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The petty bourgeoisie, believing in “peaceful” capitalism, continues to this day to advance all these demands in a utopian way, without seeing the class struggle and the fact that it has become intensified under democracy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Erich Hartmann: War is a place where the young kill one another without knowing or hating each other, because of the decision of old people who know and hate each other, without killing each other. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: For the revolution of a nation, and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the estate of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class, a particular estate must be the estate of the general stumbling-block, the incorporation of the general limitation, a particular social sphere must be recognized as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: The strength of Soviet patriotism lies in the fact that it is based not on racial or nationalistic prejudices, but on the peoples' profound loyalty and devotion to their Soviet Motherland, on the fraternal partnership of the working people of all the nationalities in our country. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Ugh... I am sick of finances right now... my cat had an emergency followed by my sibling/roommate having emergencies and I have been running in poverty mode for weeks now with at least a whole month to go...
Latest issue: gotta pay rent and my phone bill on the 5th, but only enough money to cover on... Need to scrounge up $150 or so before Tuesday ($10-$20 more if after Friday because some other things are hitting) or they're going to put restrictions on our phones (yes it's alot, it's 3 phone lines + 4 device payments). And it's not that I don't really have the money... I just have the money 3 days later...
Lenin: Compared to feudalism, capitalism was an historical advance along the road of "liberty", "equality", "democracy" and "civilisation". Nevertheless capitalism was, and remains, a system of wage-slavery, of the enslavement of millions of working people, workers and peasants, by an insignificant minority of modern slave-owners, landowners and capitalists. Bourgeois democracy, as compared to feudalism, has changed the form of this economic slavery, has created a brilliant screen for it but has not, and could not, change its essence. Capitalism and bourgeois democracy are wage-slavery. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The gigantic progress of technology in general, and of means of transport in particular, and the tremendous growth of capital and banks have resulted in capitalism becoming mature and over mature. It has outlived itself. It has become the most reactionary hindrance to human progress. It has become reduced to the absolute power of a handful of millionaires and multimillionaires who send whole nations into a bloodbath to decide whether the German or the Anglo-French group of plunderers is to obtain the spoils of imperialism, power over the colonies, financial "spheres of influence" or "mandates to rule", etc. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The capitalists, the bourgeoisie, can at "best" put off the victory of socialism in one country or another at the cost of slaughtering further hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants. But they cannot save capitalism. The Soviet Republic has come to take the place of capitalism, the Republic which gives power to the working people and only to the working people, which entrusts the proletariat with the guidance of their liberation, which abolishes private property in land, factories and other means of production, because this private property is the source of the exploitation of the many by the few, the source of mass poverty, the source of predatory wars between nations, wars that enrich only the capitalists. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Kwame Ture: They think that Marx and Lenin invented the science known as Marxism-Leninism. Marx and Lenin did not invent. They merely observed and recorded. That's all they did. They're no different to Newton. We call the laws of gravity Newton's Laws. But Newton did not invent the laws of gravity. He merely observed and recorded. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Wilhelm Reich: If, by being revolutionary, one means rational rebellion against intolerable social conditions, if, by being radical, one means "going to the root of things," the rational will to improve them, then fascism is never revolutionary. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Wilhelm Reich: Fascist rebelliousness always occurs where fear of the truth turns a revolutionary emotion into illusions. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
