Bertrand Russell: Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat, what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: Socialism is the society that will put an end, once and for all, to the division of society into classes. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: It is the essence of bourgeois socialism to want to maintain the basis of all the evils of present-day society and at the same time to want to abolish the evils themselves. As already pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, the bourgeois socialist 'is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society,' he wants 'a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.' We have already seen that Dr. Sax formulates the question in exactly the same fashion. The solution he finds in the solution of the housing question. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Power to the Soviets implies a thorough purge of every government institution in the rear and at the front, from top to bottom. Power to the Soviets implies that every "chief" in the rear and at the front must be elected and subject to recall. Power to the Soviets implies that all "persons in authority" in town and country, in the army and navy, in "departments" and "establishments," on the railways and in post and telegraph offices must be elected and subject to recall. Power to the Soviets means the dictatorship of the proletariat revolutionary peasantry. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fidel Castro: Representative bourgeois democracy is characterized by politicking, bribery and corruption and it is a system in which only the ruling classes and the wealthy classes have access to power, aside from the accompanying anarchy of that system of government, as demonstrated by recent history, for example, in France, a country where the government changes ten times a year. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Terence McKenna: Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
James Baldwin: The state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests (…) The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Langston Hughes: They buried Lumumba In an unmarked grave. But he needs no marker– For air is his grave. Sun is his grave, Moon is, stars are, Space is his grave. My heart's his grave, And it's marked there. Tomorrow will mark it everywhere. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Anacharsis: These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: Through these White Guard corps, authorized, financed and equipped by the Social Democratic Government, the workers’ revolution was drowned in blood; Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered, the officers who murdered them going scot free and openly glorying in their crime under the Social Democratic Government; the resistance of the workers was steadily suppressed with systematic terror through the end of 1918 and through 1919. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists. We ran fake photographs that made every paper in the country. It was pure raw false propaganda to create the illusion of Communists eating babies for breakfast. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Ken Loach: How should we honour her? Let’s privatise her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It’s what she would have wanted. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: How Engels would have ridiculed the vulgar petty bourgeois, the 'Social Democrat' (in the French sense of the ‘forties and the general European sense of 1914-18), who took it into his head to talk about 'pure democracy' in a society divided into classes! But enough. It is impossible to enumerate all the various absurdities Kautsky goes to the length of, since every phrase he utters is a bottomless pit of apostasy. Marx and Engels analyzed the Paris Commune in a most detailed manner and showed that its merit lies in its attempt to smash, to break up the 'ready-made state machinery.' Marx and Engels considered this condition to be so important that this was the only amendment they introduced in 1872 in the 'obsolete' (in parts) program of the Communist Manifesto.10 Marx and Engels showed that the Paris Commune had abolished the army and the bureaucracy, had abolished parliamentarism, had destroyed 'that parasitic excrescence, the state,' etc.; but the sage Kautsky donning his nightcap repeats the fairy tale about 'pure democracy,' which has been told a thousand times by liberal professors. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Enver Hoxha: Soviet social-imperialism is a brutal, aggressive and expansionist imperialism which practices an exceedingly colonialist and neo-colonialist policy which is based on the power of capital and weapons. This new imperialism is struggling as a rival of US-imperialism in order Germany, Belgium, Italy or Japan and label it as a factor of military defence. Such views are extremely dangerous to the freedom of the peoples and for the fates of the revolution. Such theses fuel illusions about the aggressive, hegemonistic and expansionist nature of US-imperialism as well as Soviet imperialism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The class struggle is continuing; it has merely changed its forms. It is the class struggle of the proletariat to prevent the return of the old exploiters, to unite in a single union the scattered masses of unenlightened peasants. The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, a communist society. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: What are classes in general? Classes are that which permits one section of society to appropriate the labour of another section. If one section of society appropriates all the land, we have a landowner class and a peasant class. If one section of society owns the factories, shares and capital, while another section works in these factories, we have a capitalist class and a proletarian class. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Communist morality is that which serves this struggle and unites the working people against all exploitation, against all petty private property; for petty property puts into the hands of one person that which has been created by the labour of the whole of society. In our country the land is common property. But suppose I take a piece of this common property and grow on it twice as much grain as I need, and profiteer on the surplus? Suppose I argue that the more starving people there are, the more they will pay? Would I then be behaving like a Communist? No, I would be behaving like an exploiter, like a proprietor. That must be combated. If that is allowed to go on, things will revert to the rule of the capitalists, to the rule of the bourgeoisie, as has more than once happened in previous revolutions. To prevent the restoration of the rule of the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, we must not allow profiteering; we must not allow individuals to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest; the working people must unite with the proletariat and form a communist society. This is the principal feature of the fundamental task of the League and the organisation of the communist youth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The old society was based on the principle: rob or be robbed; work for others or make others work for you; be a slave-owner or a slave. Naturally, people brought up in such a society assimilate with their mother's milk, one might say, the psychology, the habit, the concept which says: you are either a slave-owner or a slave, or else, a small owner, a petty employee, a petty official, or an intellectual -- in short, a man who is concerned only with himself, and does not care a rap for anybody else. If I work this plot of land, I do not care a rap for anybody else; if others starve, all the better, I shall get the more for my grain. If I have a job as a doctor, engineer, teacher, or clerk, I do not care a rap for anybody else. If I toady to and please the powers that be, I may be able to keep my job, and even get on in life and become a bourgeois. A Communist cannot harbour such a psychology and such sentiments. When the workers and peasants proved that they were able, by their own efforts, to defend themselves and create a new society -- that was the beginning of the new and communist education, education in the struggle against the exploiters, education in alliance with the proletariat against the self-seekers and petty proprietors, against the psychology and habits which say: I seek my own profit and don't care a rap for anything else. That is the reply to the question of how the young and rising generation should learn communism. It can learn communism only by linking up every step in its studies, training and education with the continuous struggle the proletarians and the working people are waging against the old society of exploiters. When people tell us about morality, we say: to a Communist all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters. We do not believe in an eternal morality, and we-expose the falseness of all the fables about morality. Morality serves the purpose of helping human society rise to a higher level and rid itself of the exploitation of labour. To achieve this we need that generation of young people who began to reach political maturity in the midst of a disciplined and desperate struggle against the bourgeoisie. In this struggle that generation is training genuine Communists; it must subordinate to this struggle, and link up with it, each step in its studies, education and training. The education of the communist youth must consist, not in giving them suave talks and moral precepts. This is not what education consists in. When people have seen the way in which their fathers and mothers lived under the yoke of the landowners and capitalists; when they have themselves experienced the sufferings of those who began the struggle against the exploiters; when they have seen the sacrifices made to keep what has been won, and seen what deadly enemies the landowners and capitalists are -- they are taught by these conditions to become Communists. Communist morality is based on the struggle for the consolidation and completion of communism. That is also the basis of communist training, education, and teaching. That is the reply to the question of how communism should be learnt. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Edward Snowden: Arguing that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Edward Snowden: People don’t realize how hard it is to speak the truth to a world full of people that don’t realize they are Living a lie. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Frantz Fanon: Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
