Socialism
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Here are a collection of quotes to combat Revisionists and Ultra-Leftists.

Part 4 of This Series:

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call Communism the real movement which sublates the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence” - Karl Marx

“We must announce to the governments: We know you are the armed power which is directed against the proletarians; we will against you in peaceful way where it is possible, and with arms if it should become necessary” - Karl Marx

“To confine Marxism to the theory of class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle and the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat” - V.I. Lenin

“Owing to the present circumstances the whole world is developing faster than we are. While developing, the capitalist world is directing all its forces against us. That is how the matter stands! That is why we must devote special attention to this struggle” - V.I. Lenin

“Some people believe that Marxism and Anarchism are based on the same principles and that the disagreements between them concern only tactics, so that, in the opinion of these people, no distinction whatsoever can be drawn between these two trends. This is a great mistake. We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism. Accordingly, we also hold that a real struggle must be waged against real enemies” - J.V. Stalin

“You are wrong if you think that the Communists are enamoured of violence. They would be very pleased to drop violent methods if the ruling class agreed to give way to the working class. But the experience of history speaks against such an assumption” - J.V. Stalin

“It is difficult for me to imagine what ‘personal liberty’ is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible” - J.V. Stalin

“The People’s Communes were to represent a shortcut to Communism. Three years of toil would lead to ten thousand years of happiness. Poetry was displacing Marxism as a guide to economics” - R. Palme Dutt

“The socialist society could probably be divided into two phases. The first one is undeveloped socialism and the second one is relatively developed socialism. The latter may need much longer time to be achieved than the former” - Mao Zedong

“In a country such as China completing socialist construction is a tough task. Hence it’s still early to say we’ve completed our socialist construction” - Mao Zedong

“Understanding China’s realities is the fundamental basis for understanding all the problems of the revolution” - Mao Zedong

“Oppose book worship; Seek truth from facts; No investigation, no right to speak” - Mao Zedong

“People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs! People of the world, be courageous, and dare to fight, defy difficulties and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the people. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed!” - Mao Zedong

“If the imperialists insist on launching WW3, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists; it’s also likely that the whole structure of imperialism will utterly collapse” - Mao Zedong

“A new upsurge in the struggle against U.S. imperialism is now emerging throughout the world. Ever since the Second World War, U.S. imperialism and its followers have been continuously launching wars of aggression and the people in various countries have been continuously waging revolutionary wars to defeat the aggressors. The danger of a new world war still exists, and the people of all countries must get prepared. But revolution is the main trend in the world today” - Mao Zedong

“The Soviet people and Government helped us both morally and materially in the years of our struggle for independence, and. they continue to help us in every way: with credits, industrial plants and specialists” - (President Henri Boumedienne of Algeria, in New Times, June 9, 1965)

“The progress of the African peoples is unthinkable without the fraternal and sincere assistance of the Soviet Union" - (President Sekou Toure of Guinea, October 2, 1965)

“There never was and never will be an anti-Soviet Communism” - Janos Kadar

“What fool (durak) invented this word perestroika? Why rebuild the house? Is there anything wrong in the Soviet Union? We are fine! What is there to rebuild? It is necessary to improve, reorganise, but why, if the house is not falling apart, why does it need to be rebuilt?” - Volodymyr Shcherbytsky

“All levels of society contribute to the impetus for social revolution. Within the base, advancments in the means of production precipitate conflicts with the relations of production. The inherent revolutionary nature of capitalism at work within the means of production runs counter to the institutional path dependencies found in the relations of production. This conflict ultimately provides the magnitude of revolutionary impetus but no direction. Direction emerges as the resultant sum of all applied ideological vectors emanating from the superstructure. Chief among these vectors is the reactionary. This is the tendency which must be overcome” - Louis Althusser

“With the revolution progressing and getting into its stride our view on and attitude towards the role of the young people and students changed radically. We defined the young people and students as constituting the fully-fledged main force of the revolution, thus breaking away from the old viewpoint according to which the motive force of the revolution had been defined with the main emphasis on the workers and peasants. This is proved to be correct by the course of the youth and student movement… the old theory which did not regard students even as a social stratum does not conform with the actual situation in our country” - Kim Il-sung

“So, to build socialism it is necessary to develop the productive forces. Poverty is not socialism. To uphold socialism, a socialism that is to be superior to capitalism, it is imperative first and foremost to eliminate poverty. True, we are building socialism, but that doesn’t mean that what we have achieved so far is up to the socialist standard. Not until the middle of the next century, when we have reached the level of the moderately developed countries, shall we be able to say that we have really built socialism and to declare convincingly that it is superior to capitalism. We are advancing towards that goal” - Deng Xiaoping

“The socialist system has been basically established in China, the principal contradiction within the country was no longer the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but the one resulted from the need of the people for rapid economic development” - Deng Xiaoping

“It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat” - Deng Xiaoping

“Without the existence of the Soviet Union the socialist revolution in Cuba could not have been possible" - (Fidel Castro, speech in the Red Square, April 28, 1963)

“Lucanamarca. Neither they nor we have forgotten it, to be sure, because they got an answer that they didn’t imagine possible. More than 80 were annihilated, that is the truth. And we say openly that there were excesses, as was analysed in 1983. But everything in life has two aspects. Our task was to deal a devastating blow in order to put them in check, to make them understand that it was not going to be so easy. On some occasions, like that one, it was the Central Leadership itself that planned the action and gave instructions. That’s how it was. In that case, the principal thing is that we dealt them a devastating blow, and we checked them and they understood that they were dealing with a different kind of people’s fighters, that we weren’t the same as those they had fought before. This is what they understood. The excesses are the negative aspect… If we were to give the masses a lot of restrictions, requirements and prohibitions, it would mean that deep down we didn’t want the waters to overflow. And what we needed was for the waters to overflow, to let the flood rage, because we know that when a river floods its banks it causes devastation, but then it returns to its riverbed… [T]he main point was to make them understand that we were a hard nut to crack, and that we were ready for anything, anything” - Abimael ‘Gonzalo’ Guzmán

“No theory in history can match Marxism in terms of rationale, truth, and spread, and no theory has exerted such a huge influence on the world as Marxism. This proves the truth and vigor in Marxism and its irreplaceable role in understanding, reshaping and advancing the world” - Xi Jinping

“Although there is a vast ocean between China and Latin America, we are connected heart and soul. We are bound together not only be profound traditional friendship and close interests, but also by our common pursuit of beautiful dreams” - Xi Jinping

“I believe that, for real Communists, Stalin weighs no less than Lenin, and in a percentage of right decisions, he doesn’t even have an equal in world history” - Xi Jinping

Part 5:

  • enigma@lemmygrad.mlOP
    1·
    2 years ago

    “…[Engels] is proved by his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1892. Here he speaks of an ‘aristocracy among the working class’, of a ‘privelaged minority of the workers’, in contradistinction to the ‘great mass of working people’. ‘A small, privelaged, protected minority’ of the working class alone was ‘permanently benefitted’ by the privelaged position of England in 1848-1868, whereas ‘the great bulk of them experienced at best but a temporary improvement’; In the nineteenth century the ‘mass organisations’ of the English trade unions were on the side of the bourgeois labour party. Marx and Engels did not reconcile themselves to it on this ground; they exposed it. They did not forget, firstly, that the trade union organisations directly embraced a minority of the proletariat. In England then, as in Germany now, not more than one-fifth of the proletariat was organised. No one can seriously think it possible to organise the majority of the proletariat under capitalism; But we know for certain that the ‘defenders of the fatherland’ in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices” - V.I. Lenin

    “Imperialism is as much our mortal enemy as is capitalism. That is so. No Marxist will forget, however, that capitalism is progressive compared with feudalism and that imperialism is progressive compared with pre-monopoly capitalism. Hence, it is not our duty to support every struggle against imperialism. We will not support the struggle of the reactionary classes against imperialism: We will not support an uprising of the reactionary classes against imperialism and capitalism” - V.I. Lenin

    “On the one hand, there is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into ‘eternal’ parasites on the body of the rest of mankind, to ‘rest on the laurels’ of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism. On the other hand, there is the tendency of the masses, who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie. The fact that is that ‘bourgeois labour parties,’ as a political phenomenon, have already been formed in all the foremost capitalist countries, and that unless determined and relentless struggle is waged all along the line against these parties - or groups, trends, etc., it is all the same - there can be no question of a struggle against imperialism, or of Marxism, or of a socialist labour movement” - V.I. Lenin

    “Can a class-conscious worker forget the democratic struggle for the sake of the socialist struggle, or forget the latter for the sake of the former? No, a class-conscious worker calls himself a Social-Democrat for the reason that he understands the relation between the two struggles. He knows that there is no other road to socialism save the road through democracy, through political liberty. He therefore strives to achieve democratism completely and consistently in order to attain the ultimate goal - socialism. Why are the conditions for the democratic struggle not the same as those for the socialist struggle? Because the workers will certainly have different allies in each of those two struggles. The democratic struggle is waged by the workers together with a section of the bourgeoisie, especially the petty-bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the socialist struggle is waged by the workers against the whole of the bourgeoisie. The struggle against the bureaucrat and the landlord can and must be waged together with all the peasants, even the well-to-do and the middle peasants. On the other hand, it is only together with the rural proletariat that the struggle against the bourgeoisie, and therefore against the well-to-do peasants too, can be properly waged” - V.I. Lenin

    “Capitalism in its imperialist phase is a system which considers war to be a legitimate instrument for settling international disputes, a legal method in fact, if not in law” - J.V. Stalin

    “The United States has set up hundreds of military bases in many countries all over the world. China’s territory of Taiwan, Lebanon and all military bases of the United States on foreign soil are so many nooses around the neck of U.S. imperialism. The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, it is they themselves who have put these nooses round their own necks, handing the ends of the ropes to the Chinese people, the peoples of the Arab countries and all the peoples of the world who love peace and oppose aggression. The longer the U.S. aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses around their necks will become” - Mao Zedong

    “No matter what classes, parties or individuals in an oppressed nation join the revolution, and no matter whether they themselves are conscious of the point or understand it, so long as they oppose imperialism, their revolution becomes part of the proletarian-socialist world revolution and they become its allies” - Mao Zedong

    “The basic cause of development in a thing is not external, but internal, and lies in internal contradictions. Everything has its internal contradictions, hence motion and development. Contradictions within a thing are the basic cause of its development, while its relationship with other things, their interconnection and interaction, is a secondary cause; There are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions. For instance, in capitalist society the two forces in contradiction, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, form the principal contradiction. The other contradictions, such as those between the remnant feudal class and the bourgeoisie, between the peasant petty-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie, between the proletariat and the peasant petty-bourgeoisie, between the non-monopoly capitalists and the monopoly capitalists, between bourgeois democracy and bourgeois fascism, among the capitalist countries and between imperialism and the colonies, are all determined or influenced by this principal contradiction. In a semi-colonial country such as China, the relationship between the principal contradiction and the non-principal contradictions presents a complicated picture. When imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, all its various classes, except for some traitors, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. At such a time, the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned becomes the principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various classes within the country (including what was the principal contradiction, between the feudal system and the great masses of the people) are temporarily relegated to a secondary and subordinate position. So it was in China in the Opium War of 1840, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Yi Ho Tuan War of 1900, and so it is now in the present Sino-Japanese War. But in another situation, the contradictions change position. When imperialism carries on its oppression not by war, but by milder means - political, economic and cultural - the ruling classes in semi-colonial countries capitulate to imperialism, and the two form an alliance for the joint oppression of the masses of the people” - Mao Zedong

    “Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food and replace it with American style thievery called ‘capitalism,’ but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world and the people suffer” - Muammar Gaddafi