Deng Xiaoping: According to Marxism, communist society is based on material abundance. Only when there is material abundance can the principle of a communist society - that is, 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' be applied. Socialism is the first stage of communism. Of course, it covers a very long historical period. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Chris Hedges: We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Parenti: While having little of substance to say about the causes of strikes, the press greatly emphasizes the damage they do to the economy and the inconveniences inflicted upon the public. Little is said about the conditions of working people and their struggles in the face of the increasingly difficult economic conditions imposed on them by corporate power and government policies. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: There is no escape for capitalism save the escape of death. Do what they may, they cannot get out of the continual circle of ever-rising prices, piling debts, unemployment, war and threats, of war, and all the time the rising tide of the anger of the people at home and in the subject countries abroad. It is their knowledge of this which inspires their panic fear of Bolshevism, even when the actual movement is as weak as a child; until by the very noise of their panic they help to create what they are seeking to destroy. It is their knowledge of this which is making them fight with all the ferocity and violence of a trapped animal. They are in panic because they know their failure; they are violent because they know they are not strong. And it is this same knowledge, which gives the confidence of absolute assurance to the Communist struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Aimé Césaire: ... no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only as a necessity, and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them, to explain the inseparable connection existing between capital and the imperialist war, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Vladimir Putin: Who gave NATO right to kill Gaddafi? Libya was the only country in the world with zero debt before the conflict. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Carlin: Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn't want you to know something, it won't be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lyndon B. Johnson: Light at the end of the tunnel? We don't even have a tunnel; we don't even know where the tunnel is. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lyndon B. Johnson: The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George W. Bush: I will never apologize for the United States - never, ever! I don't care what the facts are... I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Benjamin: Capitalism is presumably the first case of a blaming, rather than a repenting cult. ... An enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the cult, not in order to repent for this guilt, but to make it universal, to hammer it into consciousness and finally and above all to include God himself in this guilt. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Benjamin: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Benjamin: A religion may be discerned in capitalism—that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: All the literature of Reformism - of the so-called "British School of Socialism'' or "Evolutionary Socialism" or "Democratic Socialism" - without exception rests on the permanent assumption of the Empire. The vast overseas tribute income is taken for granted. The problem is seen as one of "distribution." Just as Churchill, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, openly proclaimed the social services to be based on the overseas investment income, so Reformism assumes the same permanent basis for its social services and proclaims the outcome as the "Welfare State." wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: Marxism is always moving, is always growing. It is the exact opposite of a ready-made, fixed body of dogmas as its enemies always present it. It cannot be that because it is an interpretation of the real world. The real world is always changing and moving, and therefore the theory has always to develop with the development of the real world. Marxism can never stand still. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Bourgeois authors have been using up reams of paper praising competition. As a matter of fact, however, capitalism replaced small production by large-scale factory production. Under such capitalism, competition means the brutal suppression of energy of the population. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Clara Zetkin: The proletariat will be able to attain its liberation only if it fights together without the difference of nationality and profession. In the same way it can attain its liberation only if it stands together without the distinction of sex. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
