As a class, it is the working class themselves who are the revolutionary subject because they work and toil and if they organise and come together they can halt production. Whereas the professionals such as teachers and engineers not doing something will not result in gains for us (nor should we be focusing on their organising as there was an actual working class strike wave that got ignored in Winter 2021) because they are trying to maintain their professional status when they organise (usually tends to not have a working class nature, but we need to make it such and organise them to ally with the working class). While if we look at the petty-bourgeoisie (and peasantry) if they organise it is just for individual benefit even if they are really poor (which the majority are as they are a dying class, but they do need to be mobilised as well). While the lumpen is almost impossible to organise as a whole because they are the criminal elements at the bottom of society. As this is a ‘dog eat dog world’, this manifests most harshly at the bottom because they are the people in society who are oppressed by their position to society under which they go unnoticed and lurk in the shadows of society. This reflects on their worldview and the lumpen as a class are highly individualised, atomised and are act ‘dog eat dog’ towards everyone else in their position unless in an organised gang, or in rare cases, enlightened lumpen (can be organised) who are in the minority (but have no influence over the class). It is the working class, the proletariat who are the revolutionary subjects, who made the revolutions of the 20th century and will make the revolutions of the 21st century!

The capitalist class WILL use violence to stop the revolution. The only way to effectively counter violence is violence. Revolutionaries do not want violence, but they must be prepared to defend the revolution from the assaults of counter-revolutionary forces. Violence in revolutions must be used as self-defense when necessary. Excesses of violence must be avoided, the kind arising from anger, disgust and hatred. Torture, no quarter, physical/psychological/verbal/sexual abuse/harassment of POWs, deliberate use of lethal force against unarmed civilian populations, deliberate use of weapons of mass destruction, deliberate targetting of basic infrastructure such as water treatment facilities, power plants, farms, crop lands, food banks, hospitals and schools, posing as humanitarian aid workers and medical professionals to trick the enemy, deliberately devastating the enemy’s local ecosystem, deliberate killing of children and extrajudicial executions should be strictly forbidden and those guilty should be tried in the revolution’s own courts for war crimes or crimes against humanity.

Finally with regard the so called ‘reformists’ who oppose us. Ironically, us Marxist-Leninists do reform better than the reformists, while building up a revolutionary movement as we are actually genuine. Fundamentally we abide by the Communist principle of taking up the gun to put down the gun.

We must focus on building a new, as opposed to focusing on tearing everything down. We must be optimistic, only then can we win the masses and be victorious.

– Quotes -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -10 -11 -12

“What is Patriotism? Love of country, someone answers. But what is meant by ‘love of country’? ‘The rich man,’ says a French writer, ‘loves his country because he conceives it owes him a duty, whereas the poor man loves his country as he believes he owes it a duty.’ The recognition of the duty we owe our country is, I take it, the real mainspring of patriotic action; and our ‘country’, properly understood, means not merely the particular spot on the earth’s surface from which we derive our parentage, but also comprises all the men, women and children of our race whose collective life constitutes our country’s political existence. True patriotism seeks the welfare of each in the happiness of all, and is inconsistent with the selfish desire for worldly wealth which can only be gained by the spoliation of less favoured fellow-mortals. It is the mission of the working class to give to patriotism this higher, nobler, significance. This can only be done by our working class, as the only universal, all-embracing class, organising as a distinct political party, recognising in Labour the cornerstone of our economic edifice and the animating principle of our political action" - James Connolly

“In fighting for the right of nations to self-determination, the aim of Social-Democracy is to put an end to the policy of national oppression, to render it impossible, and thereby to remove the grounds of strife between nations, to take the edge off that strife and reduce it to a minimum. This is what essentially distinguishes the policy of the class-conscious proletariat from the policy of the bourgeoisie, which attempts to aggravate and fan the national struggle and to prolong and sharpen the national movement. And that is why the class-conscious proletariat cannot rally under the ‘national’ flag of the bourgeoisie. That is why the so-called ‘evolutionary national’ policy advocated by Bauer cannot become the policy of the proletariat. Bauer’s attempt to identify his ‘evolutionary national’ policy with the policy of the ‘modern working class’ is an attempt to adapt the class struggle of the workers to the struggle of the nations. The fate of a national movement, which is essentially a bourgeois movement, is naturally bound up with the fate of the bourgeoisie. The final disappearance of a national movement is possible only with the downfall of the bourgeoisie. Only under the reign of socialism can peace be fully established. But even within the framework of capitalism it is possible to reduce the national struggle to a minimum, to undermine it at the root, to render it as harmless as possible to the proletariat. This is borne out, for example, by Switzerland and America. It requires that the country should be democratised and the nations be given the opportunity of free development” - J.V. Stalin

“During the consultations which the Central Committee of the CPSU held on questions of Soviet music, Zhdanov said in part: ‘He cannot be an internationalist who does not love and respect his own people.’ A bitter struggle is now being pursued in the Soviet Union under this slogan against bourgeois cosmopolitanism in art, philosophy and in science. In the editorial already quoted in No. 2 of the ‘Voprossy Filosofii’, cosmopolitanism is defined as follows: ‘Cosmopolitanism is a reactionary ideology which preaches renunciation of national traditions, disparagement of national individuality in the development of different peoples, rejection of feelings of national honour and national pride.’ Of course, we can agree completely with this definition of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism today is a weapon in the hands of American imperialism, a mean’s of spiritual disarmament of a people who are, or are to come, under its domination. Cosmopolitanism proceeds hand in hand with the most unbridled nationalism which belittles, humiliates and rejects all that is foreign, and proclaims everything of its own as ‘racially pure’ and original; nationalistic cosmopolites or cosmopolitan nationalists are seeking ‘proofs’ in all corners of the globe and in all fields of human activity of the decisive spiritual influence of their nation upon which to base their exceptional rights to definite territories. Cosmopolitanism as spiritual quislingism is expressed in the slave-like imitation of all that is foreign, in the fettering of the development of national culture, in the servile discrediting of oneself, in reducing the cultural achievements of one’s nation to the passive copying of foreign examples. The general laws of social development appear only through the specific forms of development in every individual country. Each nation with its share, with its achievements of material and spiritual culture, participates in the building of universal world culture. Living connections with one’s fatherland and nation are, therefore, the pre-requisite for every progressive movement of science, philosophy and art. It is possible to penetrate into the essence of a phenomenon only by making a thorough study of the different specific forms of its manifestation. The generalisation of revolutionary theory becomes fuller and more profound in content, they deepen upon taking concrete form in the specific conditions of time and place, through application in the revolutionary activity of the national parties of the proletariat. Classics of Marxism-Leninism teach that national nihilism is alien to the working class, that the working class cannot and must not be indifferent to its fatherland and to its nation, to the positive traditions of its nation, to the national culture of its country. On the contrary, the working class of every country is the lawful heir to all the great and the significant that has been created in that country for the development of the nation and all of mankind. Engels, in the preface to the first edition of his work ‘The Development of Socialism from A Utopia to A Science’, stresses: ‘We German socialists are proud of having our source not only in Saint Simon, Fourier and Owen, but also in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.’ In his article ‘Bellicose Militarism and Anti- Militaristic Tactics of the Social-Democrats’, written in 1908, Lenin said: ‘The proletariat cannot bear itself with indifference and with equanimity towards the political, social and cultural conditions of its struggle, and, hence, it cannot be indifferent to the fate of its country.’ By its profundity, sincerity, and warmth, Lenin’s article ‘On the National Pride of the Great Russians’ is a unique example of deep love for one’s fatherland and for one’s people for their cultural heritage and for their great progressive traditions. Comrade Stalin, in his works, and especially in his addresses delivered during the Second World War, fired the national consciousness of the Soviet peoples by pointing to their magnificent traditions of struggle for the freedom and independence of their homeland, by calling upon them to be worthy of their great ancestors, thinkers, poets, patriot-generals” - (Boris Ziherl, Communism and Fatherland)

“There are few times when the human word would appear to be as limited and deficient as it does today, to express the series of feelings, emotions, and ideas born in the heat of the great display of patriotism we have witnessed this morning, moments of emotions similar to those experienced on other occasions when we have had the chance to meet with large crowds. We consider tonight’s event as a victory for Cuba, a victory for Cubans. And the fame of the virtue and the patriotism of our people will grow throughout New York and the prestige of Cuba will grow. As the Apostle said, help the martyr, the martyr who asks for help, who awaits help, who relies on help, who wants to redeem himself with help. Not just today, but every day, not with the patriotism of a single day but with the pure patriotism of an entire lifetime, not just in a moment of fleeting enthusiasm” - Fidel Castro

“We commemorate Deng Xiaoping by learning from his immense love for the Chinese people. His entire life is an expression of love for the people, which is an inexhaustible source of strength for Chinese Communists… He once said, ‘I am a son of the Chinese people. I have a deep love for my people and my country.’ It was his love for the people that fostered his love for the Party and the country. That is why he said, ‘My life belongs to the party and the country’” - Xi Jinping

Posts For Ultra-Leftists Masterpost:

– ‘Socialist Billionaires’ – Class Struggle – Populism – Land Reform – Coups

– ‘Globalism’ – Post-Stalin U.S.S.R. Reading List – Chinese Socialism – Russia

– Socialist Patriotism – Caleb Maupin – SwAC – Definition of Socialism – The ‘Nazbol’ Vortex

– Memes – Music – TV – Games – Subreddits – Youtubers – Podcasts – Extra Books – ML Resources

“We also know that for a time following the Russian February Revolution, in view of the specific conditions of the time, Lenin did adopt the policy of peaceful development of the revolution. He considered it ‘an extraordinarily rare opportunity in the history of revolutions’ and grasped tight hold of it. The bourgeois Provisional Government and the White Guards, however, destroyed this possibility of peaceful development of the revolution and drenched the streets of Petrograd in the blood of the workers and soldiers marching in a peaceful mass demonstration in July. Lenin, therefore, pointed out: The peaceful course of development has been rendered impossible. A non-peaceful and most painful course has begun. We know too that when there was a widespread and ardent desire for peace among the people throughout the country after the conclusion of the Chinese War of Resistance to Japanese Aggression, our Party conducted peace negotiations with the Kuomintang, seeking to institute social and political reforms in China by peaceful means, and in 1946 an agreement on achieving internal peace was reached with the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang reactionaries, however, defying the will of the whole people, tore up this agreement and, with the support of U.S. imperialism, launched a civil war on a nationwide scale. This left the Chinese people with no option but to wage a revolutionary war. As we never relaxed our vigilance or gave up the people’s armed forces in our struggle for peaceful reform but were fully prepared, the people were not cowed by the war, but those who launched the war were made to-eat their own bitter fruit. It would be in the best interests of the people if the proletariat could attain power and carry out the transition to socialism by peaceful means. It would be wrong not to make use of such a possibility when it occurs. Whenever an opportunity for ‘peaceful development of the revolution’ presents itself, Communists must firmly seize it, as Lenin did, so as to realise the aim of socialist revolution. However, this sort of opportunity is always, in Lenin’s words, ‘an extraordinarily rare opportunity in the history of revolutions.’ When in a given country a certain local political power is already encircled by revolutionary forces or when in the world a certain capitalist country is already encircled by socialism - in such cases, there might be a greater possibility of opportunities for the peaceful development of the revolution. But even then, the peaceful development of the revolution should never be regarded as the only possibility and it is therefore necessary to be prepared at the same time for the other possibility, i.e., non-peaceful development of the revolution. For instance, after the liberation of the Chinese mainland, although certain areas ruled by slave-owners and serf-owners were already surrounded by the absolutely predominant people’s revolutionary forces, yet, as an old Chinese saying goes, ‘Cornered beasts will still fight,’ a handful of the most reactionary slave-owners and serf-owners there still gave a last kick, rejecting peaceful reforms and launching armed rebellions. Only after these rebellions were quelled was it possible to carry out the reform of the social systems; It can thus be seen that the proletariat is compelled to resort to the means of armed revolution. Marxists have always been willing to bring about the transition to socialism by the peaceful way. As long as the peaceful way is there to adopt, Marxist-Leninists will never give it up. But the aim of the bourgeoisie is precisely to block this way when it possesses a powerful, militarist-bureaucratic machine of oppression; It is necessary to take part in parliamentary struggles, but not place a blind faith in the bourgeois parliamentary system. Why? Because so long as the militarist-bureaucratic state machine of the bourgeoisie remains intact, parliament is nothing but an adornment for the bourgeois dictatorship even if the working-class party commands a majority in parliament or becomes the biggest party in it. Moreover, so long as such a state machine remains intact, the bourgeoisie is fully able at any time, in accordance with the needs of its own interests, either to dissolve parliament when necessary, or to use various open and underhand tricks to turn a working-class party which is the biggest party in parliament into a minority, or to reduce its seats in parliament, even when it has polled more votes than before in an election. It is, therefore, difficult to imagine that changes will take place in the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie itself as a result of votes in parliament and it is just as difficult to imagine that the proletariat can adopt measures in parliament for a peaceful transition to socialism just because it has won a certain number of votes in parliament. The experience in a series of capitalist countries long ago proved this point fully and the experience in various European and Asian countries since World War II has provided fresh proof of it” - (Lu Dingyi, Long live Leninism!)

“[He quotes Stalin in saying] ‘to achieve socialism in a new way, without the dictatorship of the proletariat; the situation has radically changed with respect to our revolution, what’s needed is to apply different methods and forms […]. You shouldn’t fear accusations of opportunism. This isn’t opportunism, but the application of Marxism to the current situation.’ [And to Tito] ‘in our time socialism is possible even under the English monarchy. The revolution is no longer necessary everywhere […]. Yes, socialism is even possible under an English king.’ [For his part, the historian who recorded these declarations adds:] ‘As these observations show, Stalin was actively rethinking the universal validity of the Soviet model of revolution and socialism’” - (Domenico Losudro, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend)

Now when it comes to the topic of Chinese Socialism. In the west it is the normal view that China is capitalist, state capitalist to be exact. However the ruling Chinese Party, the CPC, completely disagree with this assessment and have actively been engaged in the construction of their own socialism since 1949. The Chinese understanding of Marxism is among the least dogmatic, China is in real time innovating and discovering what socialism is and means:

“But the idea of ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ means that socialism does not really have a fundamental developmental model, and instead consists of a handful of basic principles and ideas. These principles and ideas must be continually explored and developed in practice following the advance of time. ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ is not adding Chinese characteristics to an already defined ‘socialist framework.’ Rather, it uses China’s lived experience to explore and define what, in the final analysis, ‘socialism’ is. For this reason, ‘socialism’ is not ossified dogma, but instead an open concept awaiting exploration and definition. China is not blindly following socialist ideas and institutions produced by the Western experience of socialism, but rather is charting the socialist developmental path on the basis of a greater self-confidence, taking the project of the modernisation of socialist construction to its third phase. For this reason, the report of the Eighteenth National Congress correctly talked about ‘self-confidence in the path,’ ‘self-confidence in the theory,’ and ‘self-confidence in the institutions’ involved in the construction of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” - Jiang Shigong

Even when it comes to dogmatic definitions of Socialism: I have proven that China is still socialist according to them when you bend the rules of these dogmatic criteria to actually apply to material reality.

However when it comes to the question of socialism today, the burning question of the inevitability of socialism must be addressed. It is the monopolisation of capital inherent (capital accumulation) of the capitalist system as well as the conditions that arise from that monopolisation (socialisation of production) which make inevitable the development of socialism, this is how us Marxists know that socialism is inevitable, and in just the same way it is the contradictions that arise in socialism which make Communism inevitable. So from this it is no wonder that capitalists would try and remain in power with some kind of bourgeois socialism as the processes they themselves created from their own system necessitate the development of socialism. Profit (while still a still a significant determinant in smaller firms) no longer dominates society, there is no anarchy of production. Social control (social end) and holding onto their power is far more important to the capitalist elite.

Engels himself referred to bourgeois socialists (which he distinguished from us Communists) as one type of socialist in the ‘The Principles of Communism’:

“[Bourgeois Socialists:] The second category consists of adherents of present-day society who have been frightened for its future by the evils to which it necessarily gives rise. What they want, therefore, is to maintain this society while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it. To this end, some propose mere welfare measures - while others come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organising society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society. Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of Communists and protect the society which Communists aim to overthrow” - Friedrich Engels

As did Marx in ‘The Communist Manifesto’:

“A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems; The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie. A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government; It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois - for the benefit of the working class” - Karl Marx

Martin Luther King Jr. also referred to the concept of socialism for the rich:

“We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor” - Martin Luther King Jr.

It is up to the Communist party to seize power and scientifically (serve social ends) guide this process of socialisation in the interests of the proletariat (gear society towards the implemention of serving the working masses), as either way we are heading into some kind of bourgeois socialism (or arguably have been for a long time since the Wall Street Crash due to the falling rate of profit).

As Lenin said:

“Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation” - V.I. Lenin

The foremost proof of this (and beginning of this process) was the end of the gold standard in 1931 by the Bank of England. This was done due to Great Depression that occured from the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which caused the bank to nearly run out of gold. Gold was the direct measure of value as understood by Marx as all commodities were tied to it:

“[Measure of Value] The first phase of circulation is, as it were, a theoretical phases preparatory to real circulation. Commodities, which exist as use-values, must first of all assume a form in which they appear to one another nominally as exchange-values, as definite quantities of materialised universal labour-time. The first necessary move in this process is, as we have seen, that the commodities set apart a specific commodity, say, gold, which becomes the direct reification of universal labour-time or the universal equivalent; gold is converted into money by commodities” - Karl Marx

Marx himself stated that as soon as labour in it’s direct form has ceased to be the creation of wealth, that exchange value breaks down. I will explain this in further detail later:

“As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down” - Karl Marx

Marx also recognised that gold was the one true universal commodity. In order for money to serve as the universal measure of value, it has to contain intrinsic value, i.e. it has to itself be a commodity imbued with a definite magnitude of labour. Marx stated that it would be impossible for the capitalist class to get around this:

“Money - the common form into which all commodities as exchange values are transformed, i.e. the universal commodity - must itself exist as a particular commodity alongside the others, since what is required is not only that they can be measured against it in the head, but that they can be changed and exchanged for it in the actual exchange process. The contradiction which thereby enters, to be developed elsewhere. Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same; Gold becomes the measure of value because the exchange-value of all commodities is measured in gold, is expressed in the relation of a definite quantity of gold and a definite quantity of commodity containing equal amounts of laobur-time. To begin with, gold becomes the universal equivalent, or money, only because it thus functions as the measure of value and as such its own value is measured directly in all commodity equivalents; Their golden equivalent reflects the universal character of the labour-time contained in them” - Karl Marx

“But it should never be forgotten, that money, in the first place, in the form of precious metals, remains the basis from which the credit system naturally can never detach itself; Secondly, that the credit system presupposes the monopoly of social means of production by private persons; capitalist production forever strives to overcome this metallic barrier, the material and fantastic barrier of wealth and its movements, in proportion as the credit system develops, but forever breaks its head on this same barrier” - Karl Marx

This is also further elaborated on in ‘An Introduction to Karl Marx’s Capital’:

“In Capital, Marx assumes that money always has to be linked to a particular commodity. During Marx’s time, gold played the role of this ‘money commodity.’ But even back then it was hardly the case that pieces of gold were widely used in everyday commerce; small sums were paid with silver or copper coins, larger sums with ‘banknotes.’ Banknotes were originally issued by individual banks, which promised to honour the notes in gold. Ultimately, banknotes were only issued by state central banks, which also promisesd to honour the notes in gold. As a rule, the central banks of individual countries were not allowed to print an arbitrary amount of banknotes, but rather had to ensure that the banknotes were covered by a proportionate amount of gold reserves. Gold was hardly circulated, but the paper money in circulation acted as a representative of gold. At the end of the Second World War, at a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, an international currency system was agreed upon that was still based upon a gold standard. But only the U.S. dollar was covered by gold, thirty-five dollars corresponding to an ounce of gold. All other currencies had a fixed exchange rate to the dollar. However, the obligation to honour dollars in gold was not valid for private individuals, only for state central banks. At the end of the 1960s, it had become clear that the massive amount of dollars in circulation had rendered the coupling of the dollar to gold a fiction. At the beginning of the 1970s, the gold standard was formally abolished, as were fixed currency exchange rates. Since then, there is no longer any commodity that functions at a national or international level as a money commodity. Now money is essentially the paper money issued by the state central banks, and there is nothing for which this paper money can be redeemed. Of course, one can still buy gold with this paper money, but now gold is just another commodity like silver or iron, and no longer plays the special role of a money commodity, neither legally nor by default. Marx could not imagine a capitalist system existing without a money commodity, but the existence of such a commodity is in no way a necessary consequence of his analysis of the commodity and money. Within the framework of the analysis of the commodity form, he developed the form-determinations of the general equivalent, and the analysis of the exchange process yields the result that commodity owners do in fact have to relate their commodities to a general equivalent. But that the general equivalent must be a specific commodity was not proven by Marx, merely assumed. That which serves as a general equivalent (whether an actual physical commodity or merely paper money) cannot be determined at the level of simple commodity circulation (for a more extensive analysis, see Heinrich 1999, 233). Only when the capitalist credit system is taken into consideration does it become clear that the existence of a money commodity is merely a historically transitional state of affairs, but does not correspond to ‘the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average’ that Marx sought to analyse” - (Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to Karl Marx’s Capital)

Where it is stated that “Marx could not imagine a capitalist system existing without a money commodity”. The collapse of the exchange value means the collapse of the countervailing tendency for the rate of profit, Marx talks about this in Capital Volume 3. Clearly you do not understand the LTV if you think otherwise. Surplus value is not guiding the economy. Capitalists make more money off of ground rent, which Marx predicted would be the last bit of surplus value left. the prerequisite of exchange value is commodity money.

Marx explains the collapse of exchange value via absolute overproduction of capital. Commodities can still be sold, but capitalists would not make a profit by selling them. Production based on exchange value has become incompatible with production for profit; which is to say, the capitalist cannot make a profit selling commodities at their values. How can surplus value be said to drive the economy when products are no longer profitable? Hence the M-C-M’ circuit no longer applies. Price has drastically fallen below value… so much so that it cannot be said wage labour is the primary driver of the economy. This is why Marx introduced a theory of absolute overproduction of capital, and why capitalists become national capitalists. Both Marx and Engels said “the expropriators expropriate themselves…”. Clearly something fundamental occurs in the production of commodity’s, however Commodity-Money does not exist today. Meaning the value of money is socially and politically determined, not rooted in a universal commodity. What we have since 1971 is Fiat currency. Fiat has no value in a Marxist sense because the more that is printed the less valuable it becomes as it is not tied to a universal commodity.

The point is the money made from surplus today, is not commodity money or even money as Marx defined it, it is government credit being redistributed through speculative market signals. Financial profits are nothing more than redistributed government credit, backed not by any ‘real profits’ or even production, but information signals that themselves direct production. Marx explicitly outlied how, as a prerequisite for general commodity production, abstract labour and universal exchange, there has to be a universal commodity that crystalises a definite magnitude of labour value. The need to ‘socialise’ production by using the state so as to fulfill ‘social’ interests of any kind, was precisely why Marx said socialism was inevitable, and arising out of capitalist production itself.

The idea that socialism was not inevitable is revisionism. Capital transformed into an alien, occult object of socialist planning, sustained by institutions and U.S. military violence, not economics. MMT is the Hitlerite theory of economics, made by theorists of the American Empire which is trying to save its economy through the raw power of state violence (war). Mao discovered there is still class antagonism under socialism. Socialism is not the fulfillment of your ideological, moral and psychological aspirations. It is a mode of production. The question is why does there remain a class antagonism? That was Mao’s question:

“In China, although in the main socialist transformation has been completed with respect to the system of ownership, and although the large-scale and turbulent class struggles of the masses characteristic of the previous revolutionary periods have in the main come to an end, there are still remnants of the overthrown landlord and comprador classes, there is still a bourgeoisie, and the remolding of the petty-bourgeoisie has only just started. The class struggle is by no means over. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the different political forces, and the class struggle in the ideological held between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue to be long and tortuous and at times will even become very acute. The proletariat seeks to transform the world according to its own world outlook, and so does the bourgeoisie. In this respect, the question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is still not really settled” - Mao Zedong

‘Socialism’ is not heaven on earth, it is a mode of production, production for social ends. I can see dogmatic responses to this which hold onto dogma of Marxism specific to another era:

“…Volume One of Marx’s Capital gives a detailed description of the condition of the British working class for about 1865, i.e. the time when Britain’s industrial prosperity had reached its peak. I would therefore have had to repeat what Marx says. It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical standpoint of this book - philosophical, economical, political, - does not exactly coincide with my standpoint of today” - Friedrich Engels

Which Mao further elaborates on with his opposition to dogmatism and book worship:

“The dogmatists do not observe this principle; they do not understand that conditions differ in different kinds of revolution and so do not understand that different methods should be used to resolve different contradictions; on the contrary, they invariably adopt what they imagine to be an unalterable formula and arbitrarily apply it everywhere, which only causes setbacks to the revolution or makes a sorry mess of what was originally well done” - Mao Zedong

Marx, Engels and Lenin all spent significant time debating fellow ‘socialists’ because of an adherence to dogmatism:

“Marx and myself have fought harder all one’s life long against the alleged socialists than against anyone else (for we only regarded the bourgeoisie as a class and hardly ever involved ourselves in conflicts with individual bourgeois)” - Friedrich Engels

“But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism” - V.I. Lenin

Now I know that is controversial, but to put it simply, the capitalism from Marx’s day is long dead due to its innate contradictions. We now live in a socialistic centrally planned economy for the elites. We call ourselves Communists because we want a Communist party that can implement a planned economy for society. Yes, I know socialism is synonymous with the state explicitly calling itself socialist, establishing common ownership of the means of production by directly attaching them to some political power (or co-operative) that directly controls them, etc. This view of ‘socialism’ does not recognise socialism as an actual mode of production. It only conceives socialism as a political, not economic force. Stalin explicitly rejected this notion in Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.:

“Some comrades deny the objective character of laws of science, and of laws of political economy particularly, under socialism. They deny that the laws of political economy reflect law-governed processes which operate independently of the will of man. They believe that in view of the specific role assigned to the Soviet state by history, the Soviet state and its leaders can abolish existing laws of political economy and can ‘form,’ ‘create,’ new laws; These comrades are profoundly mistaken. It is evident that they confuse laws of science, which reflect objective processes in nature or society, processes which take place independently of the will of man, with the laws which are issued by governments, which are made by the will of man, and which have only juridical validity. But they must not be confused; It is said that some of the economic laws operating in our country under socialism, including the law of value, have been ‘transformed,’ or even ‘radically transformed,’ on the basis of planned economy. That is likewise untrue. Laws cannot be ‘transformed,’ still less ‘radically’ transformed. If they can be transformed, then they can be abolished and replaced by other laws. The thesis that laws can be ‘transformed’ is a relic of the incorrect formula that laws can be ‘abolished’ or ‘formed.’ Although the formula that economic laws can be transformed has already been current in our country for a long time, it must be abandoned for the sake of accuracy. The sphere of action of this or that economic law may be restricted, its destructive action - that is, of course, if it is liable to be destructive - may be averted, but it cannot be ‘transformed’ or ‘abolished’” - J.V. Stalin

Do not think of socialism as an ideal but an objective mode of production. I am saying that the capitalism of the 19th and 20th century gradually evolved through the course of history. The cycle of capitalist crisis eventually led to an increasing socialisation of production. We can observe this not only in 1929 but in 1947, 1972, 2004, and 2008 and even today as we speak. So the contradictions of capitalism led to the transformation of itself. It is only that the political and ideological superstructure has not replicated this fundamental change in the relations of production:

“Man, who moved from the simple and coarse Communism of primitive times, returns to a complex and scientific Communism; capitalist civilisation elaborates the elements, having removed the personal character from private property; Capitalist civilisation, which begins to put together the economic form of Communism, also brings into the social and political field, the institutions and customs of it. Universal suffrage, which the savages-men and women-used to choose their sachems and their military leaders, after having been suppressed, was put back in force by the bourgeoisie, who limited it to one sex, but boast of it as the sole source of public powers. It presupposes, at least in appearance that equality and freedom of citizens, which really existed in the bosom of primitive Communism. The dwellings of the Communist tribes were common; common also were the meals, and the education of the children. Communal school children are educated in common at the expense of the municipality; they are likewise fed together, at common expense, in socialist municipalities. The civilised, on the other hand, are poisoned and robbed in common in the inns and quartered together in the six - or seven-story houses, of the big cities. So far, universal suffrage has been a deception; if the houses are nothing but rooms where people get sad and fever-generating centers, if the other institutions having a Communist form are backwards, i.e., directed against those who are forced to endure them, he is that these institutions were introduced into bourgeois society only to give profit to the capitalists; however, in spite of their imperfections and all the drawbacks they draw with them, they weaken and erase the individualistic feelings of the civilised, and adapt them to the customs and mores of Communism” - Paul Lafargue

All that socialism boils down to is the sublation of production for profits sake to transform into production for social ends. That has already happened. The Socialism of the United States is a kind of Socialism for the rich. We as Communists want a socialism for the people. Socialism won the cold war. What remains now is a socialist civil war between the West and China.

Further proof of this comes from Michael Hudson. In his work ‘Super Imperialism’ he states that through the institutions of the IMF and the World Bank that the Western elite effectively plan the economies of the third world for the benefit of themselves. The states of today are planned by the bourgeoisie for their own benefit directly, profit is no longer the primary determinant of society. Since the end of the Vietnam War, imperialism has moved from capital exports to primarily keeping third-world countries indebted, old metrics of determining imperialist powers such as net-capital exports, no longer apply as even the United States, the foremost imperialist power in the world since the establishment of Bretton Woods, has net capital imports. The imperialism of the 21th Century is based in America’s ability to borrow, not invest. What changed was that in 1971 the gold/dollar convertability was terminated (and Bretton Woods), instead it was replaced by the petrodollar (Fiat), which pegged all petroleum exports (and essentially all trade as a result, due to the importance of energy to the economy) to the U.S. dollar. This process took two years to complete, and was the beginning of neoliberalism, where before the pioneers of bourgeois socialism wanted to implement some social-reforms at home to keep the first-world in check, others wanted to self-imperialise the country at home. It was not just privatisation but it was privatisation for the benefit of the capitalist elite who were subsidised by the government to complete the tasks previously performed by the state, planning actually increased it just became more alienated. It also has to be said that the anarchy of production does not exist to the dominating degree it once did, and as Lenin stated, imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism, a transitional phase between capitalism and what came next, we have passed to that new social order and it is socialism, albeit bourgeois socialism. James Connolly spoke all the way back in 1916 as living in the “last days of capitalism”. Rosa Luxemburg stated that it would either be “barbarism or socialism”.

Since the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash the system we live under has been synarchy, bourgeois socialism or simply put barbarism. None of this would be possible if not for the bourgeois-socialists to implement it. For example, Andrew Carnegie, who made his fortune in the steel industry, and today would have wealth valued at $310 billion by today’s standards, proclaimed himself in favour of socialistic doctrines. As did John D. Rockefeller who was stated to ‘sound more like Marx than our classical image of a capitalist’. Henry Ford was stated by Kojeve “as the one great authentic Marxist of the twentieth century”. Elon Musk also proclaims himself to be a socialist, which obviously at first seems contradictory given that he is a monopoly capitalist, however given what has just been elaborated as well as all of the government subsidies his companies benefit from, it is of no suprise.

This has been a gradual process which actually was completed in 1971 with the diminishing of profit and the start of the neoliberal era which effectively brings imperialism home to the developed countries. There is no free market, for example BlackRock manage assets worth over a total of $21 Trillion with it’s Aladdin portfolio management tool, it effectively is planning these assets on a rational level. BlackRock seeks complete control, ‘surplus value’, in the Marxist sense, only matters to BlackRock insofar as it is a measure of their general investment success, as represented by the return to investors. What is more important to a BlackRock executive, how much ‘profit’ they receive as a return on investment, or the general confidence in their brand? Inspiring confidence is how acquisitions are made in this day and age. They are interested in ground rent, not surplus value, so they will prioritise their image of good management over profit, since what matters is owning everything. Amazon is also known for it’s internal planning and has been unprofitable since it’s founding and is heavily subsidised by the government while effectively being an oligopoly of ecommerce. Also companies cannot just do what they want, they have to go along with government sanctions even if that means loss, as social ends of the capitalist elite dominate.

Economically the system is (bourgeois) socialist but it is politically capitalist (as in led by the bourgeoisie), whereas China is both economically and politically socialist (as it is led by the proletariat and is ruled by a Communist system). What we need is to seize power for our class (proletariat) and scientifically address the contradictions of our society, while gearing society towards the well-being of the people as opposed to a few parasites on top.

Socialism is an objective mode of production, detractors of this piece who hold socialism as an ideal are debunked by the dialectical materialist outlook of Marxism which recognises that matter is constantly in motion:

“The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. In exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first of the class directly suffering under it, the working class” - Friedrich Engels

“Needless to say, of course, all boundaries in nature and in society are conventional and changeable, and it would be absurd to argue, for example, about the particular year or decade in which imperialism ‘definitely’ became established” - V.I. Lenin

In this bourgeois socialism the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production still dominates, carries on from the old system:

The contradiction between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie; With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual. Then the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based upon the nature of the modern means of production: upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of production - on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of subsistence and of enjoyment” - Friedrich Engels

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“It is the business of the International Working Men’s Association to combine and generalise the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever. The Congress should, therefore, proclaim no special system of co-operation, but limit itself to the enunciation of a few general principles. (a.) We acknowledge the co-operative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers. (b.) Restricted, however, to the dwarfish forms into which individual wages slaves can elaborate it by their private efforts, the co-operative system will never transform capitalist society. to convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves. (c.) We recommend to the working men to embark in co-operative production rather than in co-operative stores. The latter touch but the surface of the present economical system, the former attacks its groundwork. (d.) We recommend to all co-operative societies to convert one part of their joint income into a fund for propagating their principles by example as well as by precept, in other words, by promoting the establishment by teaching and preaching. (e.) In order to prevent co-operative societies from degenerating into ordinary middle-class joint stock companies (societes par actions), all workmen employed, whether shareholders or not, ought to share alike. As a mere temporary expedient, we are willing to allow shareholders a low rate of interest” - Karl Marx

“The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in the virgin state in which it supplies man with necessaries or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him, and is the universal subject of human labour. All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connexion with their environment, are subjects of labour spontaneously provided by Nature. Such are fish which we catch and take from their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin forest, and ores which we extract from their veins. If, on the other hand, the subject of labour has, so to say, been filtered through previous labour, we call it raw material; such is ore already extracted and ready for washing. All raw material is the subject of labour, but not every subject of labour is raw material: it can only become so, after it has undergone some alteration by means of labour” - Karl Marx

“The Communist peasant community no less than the feudal corvée farm and similar institutions maintain their economic organisation by subjecting the labour power, and the most important means of production, the land, to the rule of law and custom” - Rosa Luxemburg

“Capitalism would not be capitalism if the ‘pure’ proletariat were not surrounded by a large number of exceedingly motley types intermediate between the proletarian and the semi-proletarian (who earns his livelihood in part by the sale of his labour power), between the semi-proletarian and the small peasant (and petty-artisan, handicraft worker and small master in general), between the small peasant and the middle peasant, and so on, and if the proletariat itself were not divided into more developed and less developed strata, if it were not divided according to territorial origin, trade, sometimes according to religion, and so on. And from all this follow the necessity, the absolute necessity, for the vanguard of the proletariat, for its class-conscious section, for the Communist Party, to resort to manoeuvres, agreements and compromises with the various groups of proletarians, with the various parties of the workers and small masters” - V.I. Lenin

“Particular attention should be paid to Marx’s extremely profound remark that the destruction of the bureaucratic-military state machine is ‘the precondition for every real people’s revolution’. This idea of a people’s revolution seems strange coming from Marx, so that the Russian Plekhanovites and Mensheviks, those followers of Struve who wish to be regarded as Marxists, might possibly declare such an expression to be a ‘slip of the pen’ on Marx’s part. They have reduced Marxism to such a state of wretchedly liberal distortion that nothing exists for them beyond the antithesis between bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolution, and even this antithesis they interpret in an utterly lifeless way. If we take the revolutions of the 20th century as examples we shall, of course, have to admit that the Portuguese and the Turkish revolutions are both bourgeois revolutions. Neither of them, however, is a ‘people’s’ revolution, since in neither does the mass of the people, their vast majority, come out actively, independently, with their own economic and political demands to any noticeable degree. By contrast, although the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 displayed no such ‘brilliant’ successes as at time fell to the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions, it was undoubtedly a ‘real people’s’ revolution, since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that was being destroyed. In Europe, in 1871, the proletariat did not constitute the majority of the people in any country on the Continent. A ‘people’s’ revolution, one actually sweeping the majority into its stream, could be such only if it embraced both the proletariat and the peasants. These two classes then constituted the ‘people’. These two classes are united by the fact that the ‘bureaucratic-military state machine’ oppresses, crushes, exploits them. To smash this machine, to break it up, is truly in the interest of the ‘people’, of their majority, of the workers and most of the peasants, is ‘the precondition’ for a free alliance of the poor peasant and the proletarians, whereas without such an alliance democracy is unstable and socialist transformation is impossible. As is well known, the Paris Commune was actually working its way toward such an alliance, although it did not reach its goal owing to a number of circumstances, internal and external. Consequently, in speaking of a ‘real people’s revolution’, Marx, without in the least discounting the special features of the petty-bourgeois (he spoke a great deal about them and often), took strict account of the actual balance of class forces in most of the continental countries of Europe in 1871. On the other hand, he stated that the ‘smashing’ of the state machine was required by the interests of both the workers and the peasants, that it united them, that it placed before them the common task of removing the ‘parasite’ and of replacing it by something new” - V.I. Lenin

“Can the majority of the peasants in Russia demand and carry out the nationalisation of the land? Certainly it can. Would this be a socialist revolution? It would not. It would still be a bourgeois revolution, for the nationalisation of the land is a measure that is not incompatible with the existence of capitalism. It is, however, a blow to private ownership of the most important means of production. Such a blow would strengthen the proletarians and semi-proletarians far more than was the case during the revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” - V.I. Lenin

“Indeed, is it not clear that as far as the proletariat is concerned the struggle for the republic is inconceivable without an alliance with the petty-bourgeois masses? Is it not clear that without the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry there is not a shadow of hope for the success of this struggle?; Whatever the form, whatever the origin, whatever the conditions, one thing at any rate is clear - that the provisional revolutionary government must have the support of definite classes. One has only to remember this simple truth to realise that the provisional revolutionary government can be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” - V.I. lenin

“To love your country, and be willing to sacrifice and battle for it, that is patriotism. To have no home, to be unable to provide self and loved ones with food, clothing and shelter, that is poverty. At first sight it would appear that a man afflicted with poverty could not possibly be a patriot. He owns no part of any country, and patriotism means love of one’s own country, not love of a country owned by others. What matters it to the poor devil who is starving whether the country in which he is hungry is owned by this ruler or that ruler, if his miserable status changes not? But we see that poverty, instead of crushing patriotism. actually appears to produce it. The troops who left New York yesterday to fight the Chinese were mostly men who own nothing in the way of property in this country. They are not going to fight for love of their country. That have none. Their very poverty gave birth to the bastard patriotism of the Hessian. Here is a sample of the leave-takings between the soldiers and their wives: 'Oh, why did you go and enlist, Charlie? And now you have to go and leave me and the child all alone,” said a weeping young wife, as she held her strapping soldier husband about the neck. ‘It had to be done, Lizzie.’ he replied. ‘You know I could not find any work.’ The capitalist papers which contain the above item also contain the usual silly talk about the ‘patriotism of our volunteers,’ and thus furnish proof for the socialist contention that the capitalist class is at once ignorant and corrupt. Ignorant in not knowing that this paid-for bastard patriotism portends the doom of their class, and corrupt in attempting to pass this counterfeit for the genuine article. Capitalism attacks and destroys all the finer sentiments of the human heart; it ruthlessly sweeps away old traditions and ideas opposed to its progress, and it exploits and corrupts those things once held sacred. Instead of the American freeman bidding his wife be of good cheer that he was going to fight for his country, we have the wage-slave driven by hunger to fight for a hireling’s pittance. Instead of repelling a foreign foe, he goes to loot and ravage a peaceful race, so as to swell the coffers of his own capitalist masters. The patriotism which poverty produces is as yellow as the gold which buys it” - Daniel De Leon

“No honest man will consider anything he gives to the socialist movement a sacrifice. It is no sacrifice at all to invest all our time, wealth, knowledge, and all else, so as to leave our children the estate of the socialist or cooperative Commonwealth” - Daniel De Leon

“We live in the capitalist system, so called because it is dominated by the capitalist class. In this system the capitalists are the rulers and the workers are the subjects. The capitalists are in a decided minority and yet they rule because of the ignorance of the working class” - Eugene V. Debs

“On this May Day let us stand upright and be counted. We need to be united. We need to get together. We need to feel the common touch. The world will always be against us if we are not for ourselves. You who produce everything, you who really create, you who are conserving civilisation - how can you endure to think that you are the bottom class, the lower order? When you go for a job to the master class you work upon conditions which they prescribe. You depend upon them for tools, you work for their benefits” - Eugene V. Debs

“They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. And here let me emphasise the fact - and it cannot be repeated too often - that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace” - Eugene V. Debs

“It is ‘patriotism’ of the workers of one nation to fall upon and foully murder the workers of another nation to enlarge the possessions of their masters and increase the piles of their bloodstained riches, and as long as the poor, deluded toiling masses are fired by this brand of ‘patriotism,’ they will serve as cannon fodder and no power on earth can save them from their sodden fate. We socialists are not wanting in genuine patriotism, but we are deadly hostile to the fraudulent species which is ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’ and which prompts every crook and grafter and every blood -sucking vampire to wrap his reeking carcass in the folds of the national flag that he may carry on his piracy and plunder in the name of ‘patriotism.’ Ours is a wider patriotism - as wide as humanity. We abhor murder in uniform even more than we do in midnight assassination. We stand with Garrison upon the proposition that the world is our country and that all mankind are our countrymen. We stand for peace and for the only system that makes peace possible. They, who support a system that breeds war cannot consistently say they are for peace, and they who prate so much about their ‘patriotism’ have, as a rule, the hearts of poltroons and the souls of cowards. Patriotism, like brotherhood, must be international and all embracing to be at all. Socialism rightly understood is the most profound patriotic movement on the planet” - Eugene V. Debs

“It seems paradoxical that the recent avalanche of books and articles portraying the Black condition in the U.S. as that of a colony has been issued by the same monopoly-controlled book and newspaper publishers who use most of the rest of their ideological output to deny the imperialist nature of U.S. state monopoly capitalism. It seems paradoxical but it is not. This development marks a new state of sophistication in the ideological offensive of U.S. imperialism. The colony theory is particularly useful to the monopolists because it appears to be so radical; in fact, it contains the admission that the oppression of Black people in the U.S. is comparable to colonial oppression in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This emphasis on the intensity of Black oppression gives the colony theory its ring of authenticity. But this admission of oppression is not as candid (one might even say benign) as it might seem. By promoting the colony theory, the white ruling class aims to define and determine the direction of the Black liberation movement. In yet another form, the monopolists are striving to prevent Black people themselves from defining the specific features that constitute the special oppression they experience. By analogy, this theory directs attention to those aspects of the Black condition in the U.S. which most closely resemble colonial conditions. These similarities are so powerful that one’s attention may be diverted from what is unique in the status of the triply-oppressed Black peoples in colonial or semi-colonial situations, past or present. Via the colony analogy, and variations on this unscientific, anti-Marxist theme, U.S. imperialism’s ideologists are trying to influence the Black liberation movement into adopting a self-defeating strategy. While the U.S. ‘internal Black colony’ theory resembles a winning strategy for an oppressed majority living in a colony, it would mean certain defeat for an oppressed minority - which has indeed been the Black condition for more than 350 years in this part of the world. The supposedly ‘revolutionary’ (even so-called ‘Marxist’!) books on the colony analogy, now in mass circulation, were written by white radicals who have abandoned the struggle against racism, and by Black radicals who seek theoretical short cuts to liberation. By portraying the status of the Black people in the U.S. as a colony, these radicals assist the ruling class’ aim of diverting the Black liberation movement from a winning strategy: one that would advance the self-organisation of the Black liberation movement, and simultaneously combine this independent of strength with that of allies - the working class, Black, Brown, Yellow, Red and white, together with all the poor and exploited - in a new formation. This is the basis for an anti-monopoly coalition, the only strategy that opens the way to a future without racism, exploitation, or oppression” - Henry M. Winston

“We know that the especially favourable conditions for the development of capitalism and the rapidity of this development have produced a situation in which vast national differences are speedily and fundamentally, as nowhere else in the world, smoothed out to form a single ‘American’ nation” - V.I. Lenin

“American Revolutionary workers have to play an exceptionally important role as uncompromising enemies of American imperialism” - V.I. Lenin

“Bolshevism, our reading of Marxism, actually originated in America. Daniel De Leon left the Socialist Party, he resigned, he founded a more radical party, a more truly Marxist party, which he called the Socialist Workers Party of America” - V.I. Lenin

“We are ruining the Russian language. We use foreign words with no need to use them. We use them incorrectly. So why say ‘defects’ when we can say flaws, or deficiencies, or lacunae?.. Isn’t it time to declare a war on the unnecessary use of foreign words?” - V.I. Lenin

“I daresay you yourself do not know quite clearly why you have lost these illusions You are a patriot, - as good a one as any among these super-patriots. You are very sincere in your patriotism, but so too are they. So there must be something wrong in the very conception of patriotism, which can lead men to pursue such contrary and often contradictory goals. Actuated by the same spirit of patriotism, one man reads the Gita, one sends missionaries to America to preach the gospel of Sri Ramkrishna, one orders the whole nation to spin, one cooperates in the working of the Montagu Reforms, another throws bombs, and there are even some who drink three bottles of whiskey a day. There is absolutely no reason to doubt that all of them are equally patriotic. Every one of them loves the Motherland, serves her, worships her, glorifies her, idealises her, - almost every one of these Indians believes implicitly in the providential mission of India to spiritualise the world. Yet in spite of all this, these patriots and the philosophy they preach do not satisfy you any longer, although there was a time when you accepted their teachings as infallible. This shows that there is some fundamental difference between your patriotism and that of the leaders in whom you have lost faith” - M.N. Roy

“Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following; the schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionised, being cleansed of religious, patriotic (bourgeois patriotism) and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new socialist society. Present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy” - William Z. Foster

“A truly democratic government, unless it were to fail and be crushed under the violent attacks of big business, would have no alternative but to develop into the general type of government now existing in a number of countries of Eastern and Central Europe and known as People’s Democracy. This new kind of government, in which the basic economic system is controlled by the people, the power of monopoly capital is shattered, and the working class is the leading class, is one which definitely tends to orientate toward building socialism, and not toward patching up obsolete capitalism. Socialism in the United States naturally would have some specific American characteristics. However it would embody the socialisation of all the social means of production and distribution, the carrying on a planned production for use instead of for profit, with the Government under the acknowledged leadership of the working class. Only with such a system, with the exploitation of man by man completely abolished, will American society finally be freed of the fascism, poverty, economic chaos, and warmongering that are increasingly menacing our country as well as other lands. All these socialist measures would, naturally, be legally adopted by the people’s democratically elected government, by the People’s Democracy, despite employer resistance, whatever its form and violence” - William Z. Foster

“Throughout the ages the central principle of all great systems of morals has been ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Under slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, although the ruling classes have constantly preached this maxim to their slaves as a way by which to regulate their lives, they themselves have cynically ignored it in practice. Their systems of exploitation, including present-day capitalism, have always been based upon a ruthless class ethics, condoning the most brutal violation of every principle of human solidarity. That is why Christianity has never ‘worked.’ As has been truly said, ‘It has never been tried.’ It is only with the introduction of socialism, and later of Communism, that the Golden Rule, without benefit of religion, becomes a matter of practical politics and of general acceptance by society as a whole” - William Z. Foster

“Dearborn, Kentucky, England (Ark.), Lawrence, Pittsburgh coal strike, etc., reflect the new spirit of the American class struggle. The capitalists, in the midst of the sharpening general crisis of capitalism, are determined to force the living standards of American toilers down to European levels, or lower. The workers will respond to this offensive by increasing class consciousness and mass struggle. More and more they will turn to the Communist party for leadership, and eventually they will be joined by decisive masses of the ever-more ruthlessly exploited poor farmers. The toiling masses of the United States will not submit to the capitalist way out of the crisis, which means still deeper poverty and misery, but will take the revolutionary way out to socialism. The working class of this country will tread the path of the workers of the world, to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a Soviet government. Lenin was profoundly correct when he said in his Letter to American Workingmen, of Aug. 20, 1918: ‘The American working class will not follow the lead of its bourgeoisie. It will go with us against its bourgeoisie. The whole history of the American people gives me this confidence, this conviction’” - William Z. Foster

“There is no other group as loyal to the interests of the workers and the people as the Communists. As I have pointed out earlier, the whole life of our party has been a ceaseless fight for the interests of the workers, the Negro people, the nation. In our demand for socialism for the United States, we are giving expression to the supreme interest of the overwhelming majority of the American people. It is precisely because the Communists are the very best defenders of the interests of the American people that eventually our party will be the leading party of the nation. I, as other Communists, love the American people and their glorious revolutionary democratic traditions, their splendid scientific and industrial achievements. And I love, too, our beautiful land, in every corner of which I have lived and worked. I want only the best of everything for our people and this country. I have only contempt, therefore, for the ‘foreign agent’ charge, and doubly so because it comes from reactionaries who live by exploiting the American people and whose basic principle of operation is to peddle away the national welfare for the sake of their narrow class interests. We Communists revere our country. We are ardent patriots, but not nationalists. We defend the people’s interests but we do not try to shove official American (capitalist) interests ahead at the expense of those of other peoples. For that is the road to war and general ruin. We are Marxian internationalists. We realise very well the common interests that the workers and the peoples of the whole world have together. They key to an intelligent internationalism in our day is friendly co-operation between the United States and the Soviet Union. This collaboration is indispensable if world peace is to prevail. On this basic issue we Communists stand four-square, come hell or high water! Our resolute position in this fundamental matter puts us into direct and irreconcilable collision with the imperialists” - William Z. Foster

“Conservatives pawn themselves off as being more patriotic than liberals. Liberals think they are more patriotic than socialists, but we on the left are second to nobody in our patriotism. We want Perestroika, we want fundamental restructuring and democratisation of overseas and domestic policies. We want fundamental restructuring and democratisation of the political process, values, institutions, the economy, and the class power of this country. We real patriots say along with Albert Camus, ‘I want to love my country and justice too’, and in fact, I believe that the only way you can be a real patriot is to love justice because you can’t love, you can’t be patriotic to something that’s unjust. We want to spend less time trying to save the world with bombers and battleships and more time healing ourselves. This is not a good idea of noble pronouncement; it is a historical necessity. This country does not belong to Ronald Reagan and his billionaire friends, although they act like it does. It belongs to us and sooner or later we will take it back!” - Michael Parenti

– Quotes -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9

“The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy. More insolent than autocracy. And more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies. All who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes” - Abraham Lincoln

“Wherever the class struggle is thrust aside as a distasteful, ‘crude’ manifestation, the only basis still left to socialism will be a ‘true love of mankind’ and empty phrases about ‘justice’” - Karl Marx

“This class of petty-tradesmen, the great importance and influence of which we have already several times adverted to, may be considered as the leading class of the insurrection of May, 1849. There being, this time, none of the large towns of Germany among the center of the movement, the petty-trading class, which in middling and lesser towns always predominates, found the means of getting the direction of the movement into its hands. We have moreover, seen that, in this struggle for the Imperial Constitution, and for the rights of the German Parliament, there were the interests of this peculiar class at stake” - Karl Marx

“The right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself. The practical application of man’s right to liberty is man’s right to private property” - Karl Marx

“These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world” - Friedrich Engels

“The British fleet is a knife held permanently at the throat of Europe; should any nation evince an ability to emerge from the position of a mere customer for British products, and become a successful competitor of Britain in the markets of the world, that knife is set in operation to cut that throat” - James Connolly

“The trade unions have never embraced more than one-fifth of the wage-workers in capitalist society, even under the most favourable circumstances, even in the most advanced countries, after decades and sometimes even centuries of development of bourgeois-democratic civilisation and culture. Only a small upper section were members, and of them only a very few were lured over and bribed by the capitalists to take their place in capitalist society as workers’ leaders. The American socialists called these people ‘labour lieutenants of the capitalist class’. In that country of the freest bourgeois culture, in that most democratic of bourgeois republics, they saw most clearly the roled played by this tiny upper section of the proletariat who had virtually entered the service of the bourgeoisie as its deputies, who were bribed and bought by it, and who came to form those groups of social-patriots and defence advocates of which Ebert and Scheidemann will always remain the perfect heroes” - V.I. Lenin

“The demand for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ reply to the question of secession in the case of every nation may seem a very ‘practical’ one. In reality it is absurd; it is metaphysical in theory, while in practice it leads to subordinating the proletariat to the bourgeoisie’s policy. The bourgeoisie always places its national demands in the forefront, and does so in categorical fashion. With the proletariat, however, these demands are subordinated to the interests of the class struggle. Theoretically, you cannot say in advance whether the bourgeois-democratic revolution will end in a given nation seceding from another nation, or in its equality with the latter; in either case, the important thing for the proletariat is the ensure the development of its class. For the bourgeoisie it is important to hamper this development by pushing the aims of its ‘own’ nation before those of the proletariat. That is why the proletariat confines itself, so to speak, to the negative demand for recognition of the right to self-determination, without giving guarantees to any nation, and without undertaking to give anything at the expense of another nation” - V.I. Lenin

“Leninism is Lenin’s formulation in his report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Question to the Second Congress of the Communist International: ‘It is unquestionable that the proletariat of the advanced countries can and should give help to the working masses of the backward countries, and that the backward countries can emerge from their present stage of the development when the victorious proletariat of the Soviet Republics extends a helping hand to these masses and is in a position to give them support’” - J.V. Stalin

“The Party becomes strong by purging itself of opportunist elements. The source of factionalism in the Party is its opportunists elements. The proletariat is not an isolated class. It is consistently replenished by the influx of peasants, petty-bourgeois and intellectuals proletarianised by the development of capitalism. At the same time the upper stratum of the proletariat, principally trade union leaders and members of parliament who are fed by the bourgeoisie out of the super-profits extracted from the colonies, is undergoing a process of decay. 'This stratum of bourgeoisified workers, or the ‘labour aristocracy,’ says Lenin, ‘who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and, in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class…, real channels of reformism and chauvinism’” - J.V. Stalin

“The Communist bureacrat is the most dangerous type of bureaucrat. Why? Because he masks his bureaucracy with the title of Party member” - J.V. Stalin

“In all capitalist countries. The capitalists, faced with the task of drastically slashing the living standards of the workers and poor peasants and, where the political crisis is acute, the job of trying to save the capitalist system itself, no longer find adequate their bourgeois ‘democracy,’ of which the Social Democracy is a part, to hold the rebellious masses in check. Consequently, with the aid of the Social Democrats, or Social Fascists, they are transforming the masked ‘democratic’ capitalist dictatorship into open Fascist dictatorship, with its extreme demagogy and use of violence against the workers and poor peasants” - William Z. Foster

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing” - Malcolm X

“[In order to rid society of bourgeois ideas], it is necessary at the same time to criticise and repudiate those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the party, the government and the army… [and] to clear them out or transfer some of them to other positions” - Mao Zedong

“People may ask, since Marxism is accepted as the guiding ideology by the majority of the people in our country, can it be criticised? Certainly it can. Marxism is scientific truth and fears no criticism. If it did, and if it could be overthrown by criticism, it would be worthless. In fact, aren’t the idealists criticising Marxism every day and in every way? And those who harbour bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas and do not wish to change - aren’t they also criticising Marxism in every way? Marxists should not be afraid of criticism from any quarter. Quite the contrary, they need to temper and develop themselves and win new positions in the teeth of criticism and in the storm and stress of struggle. Fighting against wrong ideas is like being vaccinated - a man develops greater immunity from disease as a result of vaccination. Plants raised in hothouses are unlikely to be hardy. Carrying out the policy of letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend will not weaken, but strengthen, the leading position of Marxism in the ideological field” - Mao Zedong

“Unlike the dominant tendency within contemporary stratification theory, Marxian class analysis is less interested in the prestige, status, rank, or honorific order of individuals, their style of life, family background, and social connections, than in their economic function and power to change the mode of production and distribution and to alter the course of future history” - Donald C. Hodges

“…[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

Today no organisation represents this system more than the WEF. We cannot let the Great Reset Agenda of the WEF and Club of Rome (which are at the forefront of bourgeois socialism) win out. The proponents of this agenda are the elite of the elite, the Wall Street and City of London elite. These parasites want us to own nothing and be renters of the capitalist class in every aspect of life. They want complete control over us. They do not care about the consequences of what a nuclear war would entail and see overpopulation as the greatest threat to their existence. This malthusian agenda sees us merely as ants to be squashed, they see us as in the way of their continued existence as they recognise that even with all of the propaganda and attempts at dumbing down the masses with overdoses of dopamine, that they cannot hold back the angst of class antagonism. The Great Reset is a recognition of bourgeois socialism, it seeks the ending of democracy, ending of property rights for us commoners to the gain of the bourgeoisie, overall increasing state intervention and authoritarianism to serve the neoliberal cartels. The interesting thing is that they are doing it openly, and (almost) everyone just accepts it under the guise of ‘emergency measures’. Thing that would have been unacceptable and obviously seen as aggression of the elites and the powers that may be, are now seen as completely acceptable, even by the left. For a long time the establishment had to hide the fact that it is building capital’s socialism, but it was necessary because people intrinsically understood that this is very bad for them, but now it is becoming more and more open and the Great Reset is the proof of that.

“It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property… Success and failure both lead here to a centralisation of capital, and thus to expropriation on the most enormous scale. Expropriation extends here from the direct producers to the smaller and the medium-sized capitalists themselves. It is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals” - Karl Marx

“[Petty-bourgeois socialism] This school of socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty-bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities. In its positive aims, however, this form of socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian. Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture. Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues” - Karl Marx

We need to overcome this bourgeois socialist system and establish proletarian socialism (Communism) and scientifically guide society towards social ends for our class. There is no going back to capitalism, we have already eclipsed it economically, it is time to end this barbarism and to put power in the hands of the people themselves, not back into the hands of smaller capitalists who will just repeat the same process all over again. We must advance forward to proletarian political power!

“With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” - Friedrich Engels

“We propose that production be made to serve the needs of those who work, rather than to serve the needs of a few parasites” - Moissaye J. Olgin

– Quotes -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7

“The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades” - Karl Marx

“So the phraseology, [Marx distanced himself from what he defined as the ‘vulgar-democratic phraseology’ of Atlantic liberalism: the Manchester School of free trade and Laissez-faire and Henry Carey’s American school of Political Economoy. According to Marx, Atlantic liberalism raised the abolitionist flag of free labour against slavery only under the pressure of the ‘slave movement’ and the workers’ struggle] to which such scribbling is restricted at least distinguishes itself from the vulgar, democratic phraseology; Victoria Woodhull, who for years has had an eye on the presidency; she is president of the spiritists, preaches free love, has a banking business etc.; agitated especially for the women’s franchise; [Section 12’s ‘Appeal’] Among other things in it there was talk of personal liberty, social liberty (free love), dress regulation, women’s franchise, universal language, etc.; [should be expelled from the International Workingmen’s Association because] they give precedence to the women’s question over the question of labour and take exception to the assumption that the I.W.A. is a workingmen’s organisation.Both these sisters, millionairesses, advocates of women’s emanipation and especially ‘free love’, resolutely joined the International. Section No. 9 was set up under the leadership of Miss Claflin, Section No. 12 under that of Mrs. Woodhull; new sections soon followed in the most diverse parts of America, all set up by adherents of the two sisters. According to the currently valid arrangements, every section had the right to send a delegate to the Central Committee, which met in New York. The consequence was that, very soon, this federal council, which had originally been made up of German, Irish and French workers, was swamped by a whole host of bourgeois American adventurers of all sorts and of both sexes. The workers were pushed into the background; victory for the two speculating sisters seemed assured. Then section No. 12 took central stage and explained to the founders of the American International what it was really all about” - Karl Marx

“We therefore see that the Christianity of that time, which was still unaware of itself, was as different as heaven from earth from the later dogmatically fixed universal religion of the Nicene Council; one cannot be recognised in the other. Here we have neither the dogma nor the morals of later Christianity but instead a feeling that one is struggling against the whole world and that the struggle will be a victorious one; an eagerness for the struggle and a certainty of victory which are totally lacking in Christians of today and which are to be found in our time only at the other pole of society, among the socialists. In fact, the struggle against a world that at the beginning was superior in force, and at the same time against the novators themselves, is common to the early Christians and the socialists. Neither of these two great movements were made by leaders or prophets – although there are prophets enough among both of them - they are mass movements. And mass movements are bound to be confused at the beginning; confused because the thinking of the masses at first moves among contradictions, lack of clarity and lack of cohesion, and also because of the role that prophets still play in them at the beginning. This confusion is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight against one another with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy. So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist movement, no matter how much that worried the well-meaning worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible” - Friedrich Engels

“Volume One of Marx’s Capital gives a detailed description of the condition of the British working class for about 1865, i.e. the time when Britain’s industrial prosperity had reached its peak. I would therefore have had to repeat what Marx says. It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical standpoint of this book - philosophical, economical, political, - does not exactly coincide with my standpoint of today” - Friedrich Engels

“…They themselves do not for the most part understand the theory and treat it in doctrinaire and dogmatic fashion as something which, having once been learnt by rote, is sufficient as it stands for any and every need. To them it is a credo, not a guide to action. Besides which, they refuse to learn English on principle” - Friedrich Engels

“One must not fear criticism, or gloss over shortcomings; on the contrary, it is necessary to help to make them known and to see nothing discreditable in doing so. Only he can be discredited who conceals his shortcomings, who is unwilling to fight against evils, that is, precisely the man who ought to be discredited. It is necessary to be able to see the truth and to imbibe it from the masses and from all who are taking part in production. There is nothing worse than self-praise and self-satisfaction. It is possible to go forward only when, step by step, evils are sought out and overcome. At the same time, an end must be put to our established practice of humouring the masses – the workers. It should be remembered that in our country the workers, like ourselves, are not yet cultured, that often their group interests outweigh the interests of the working class as a whole; often they do not sufficiently realise that only their own useful labour, the productivity of their labour, can create the communist state, maintain their Soviet power. Every economic manager should wage a struggle to win prestige, to win the confidence of the working masses, but the struggle for this confidence should on no account employ the instrument of demagogy, of humouring the masses, satisfying them to the detriment and at the expense of the state, of the interests of the alliance with the peasants, of parochial requirements. The path of demagogy is perhaps the most harmful path, lulling the masses, deflecting them from the main tasks of the working class in production, diminishing the sacrifices the working class has made and, in the final analysis, one which is harmful for our industry…” - Felix E. Dzerzhinsky

“[What must every working woman do?] How are all these demands to be won? What action must be taken? Every working-class woman, every woman who reads this pamphlet, must throw off her indifference and begin to support the working-class movement, which is fighting for these demands and is shaping the old world into a better future where mothers will no longer weep bitter tears and where the cross of maternity will become a great joy and a great pride. We must say to ourselves, ‘There is strength in unity’; the more of us working women join the working-class movement, the greater will be our strength and the quicker we will get what we want. Our happiness and the life and future of our children are at stake” - Alexandra Kollontai

“Marxism is the sharpest weapon of the proletariat” - William Z. Foster

“A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect” - W.E.B. Du Bois

“The Communist Party does not fear criticism because we are Marxists, the truth is on our side, and the basic masses, the workers and peasants, are on our side” - Mao Zedong

“We’re taught from an early age to be against Communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what Communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is” - Assata Shakur

“[Reactionary] A political position that maintains a conservative response to change, including threats to social institutions and technological advances. Reaction is the reciprocal action to revolutionary movement. Reactionaries clamp down on differences of the emerging productive forces in society, and attempt to remove those differences, silence them, or segregate them in order to keep the stability of the established order” - (Encyclopedia of Marxism)

“Something is aufheben when it is superseded by something else. ‘Supersede’ and ‘transcend’ do not carry the same connotation however as ‘abolish,’ in which the old is actually terminated and got rid of by that which supersedes it; ‘sublation’ carries the connotation of ‘including’ the old in the new, but is altogether too platonic and misses the sense of ‘abolish.’ Engels authorised the use of ‘abolish’ in the English translation of The Communist Manifesto where it talks of the aufheben of the family; this however gives leeway to those who would simply ban the institutions of religion, or dismiss the very existence of spiritual needs. The translators of the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right variously used ‘abolish’ and ‘supersede’ according to context. Generally speaking, when reading English translations of Marx and Engels, the words ‘abolish,’ ‘supersede’ and ‘sublate’ are most likely translations of aufheben, and should be understood in that sense, as something being made obsolete by means of resolving the problems that gave rise to it in some new way” - (Encyclopedia of Marxism)

“Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach morality at all. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the ‘private individual’ for the sake of the ‘general’, selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination” - Karl Marx

“I have, which will surprise you not a little, been speculating; in English stocks, which are springing up like mushrooms this year; and are forced up to quite an unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapse. In this way, I have made over £400” - Karl Marx

“…Now that the complexity of the political situation affords greater scope, I shall begin all over again. It’s a type of operation that makes demands on one’s time, [but] it’s worthwhile running some risk in order to relieve the enemy of his money” - Karl Marx

“The minor panic in the money market appears to be over, consols [a type of government bond] and railway shares are again rising merrily, money is easier… I don’t believe that the crisis will this time be preceded by a rage for speculation; crucial ill-tidings from overstocked markets must surely come soon. Massive shipments continue to leave for China and India; Calcutta is decidedly overstocked; I don’t believe prosperity will continue beyond October” - Friedrich Engels

“Firstly, he saves himself the trouble of explaining the various forms of distribution which have hitherto existed, their differences and their causes; taken in the lump, they are simply of no account–they rest on oppression, on force. We shall have to deal with this before long. Secondly, he thereby transfers the whole theory of distribution from the sphere of economics to that of morality and law, that is, from the sphere of established material facts to that of more or less vacillating opinions and sentiments. He therefore no longer has any need to investigate or to prove things; he can go on declaiming to his heart’s content and demand that the distribution of the products of labour should be regulated, not in accordance with its real causes, but in accordance with what seems ethical and just to him, Herr Dühring" - Friedrich Engels

“From a scientific standpoint, this appeal to morality and justice does not help us an inch further; moral indignation, however justifiable, cannot serve economic science as an argument, but only as a symptom” - Friedrich Engels

“The moment anyone started to talk to Marx about morality, he would roar with laughter” - Karl Vörlander

“I am closely following the situation in Russia. I try to get testimonies from eyewitnesses, not from newspapers that lie non-stop. I approve of the Russian revolution because it proclaimed the principle of honesty on one-sixth of the earth’s surface. The Soviet Union is facing incredible temptations, but the state is ready to overcome them. The Russians were lucky - they have socialism and Stalin. Happy people with a wise leader. I envy the Russians and pity my compatriots who are ruled by three random people (after the assassination of Alexander, a three-member governorship took over the role of king). Only under the leadership of a wise and strong leader are the people capable of feats. If I could go back half a century, I wouldn’t think for a second, I would go to Moscow and send Bechelor and Edison to hell. In my small library, I keep a collection of texts about the October Revolution, which was given to me by Skvirski (Soviet Ambassador to the United States). I often return to the collection and think with sympathy about the country I cannot visit. Age has many advantages, but also two disadvantages - poor health and thinking in the spirit: ‘I will never succeed in this.’ If I had children or grandchildren, I would probably, for their happiness, decide to go to the U.S.S.R. To go alone, at this age, I will not. I remember saying to Skvirski on one occasion: ‘There is no point in transporting old bones across the ocean. You need to move while you are young so that the new homeland can benefit as much as possible. My departure to the U.S.S.R. would be just a burden for you’” - Nikola Tesla

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all” - John M. Keynes

“[On the industrialisation of the Soviet economy] The result is impressive” - John M. Keynes

“It is said that in that ‘will’ Comrade Lenin suggested to the congress that in view of Stalin’s ‘rudeness’ it should consider the question of putting another comrade in Stalin’s place as General Secretary. That is quite true. Yes, comrades, I am rude to those who grossly and perfidiously wreck and split the Party. I have never concealed this and do not conceal it now. Perhaps some mildness is needed in the treatment of splitters, but I am a bad hand at that. At the very first meeting of the plenum of the Central Committee after the Thirteenth Congress I asked the plenum of the Central Committee to release me from my duties as General Secretary. The congress itself discussed this question. It was discussed by each delegation separately, and all the delegations unanimously, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, obliged Stalin to remain at his post. What could I do? Desert my post? That is not in my nature; I have never deserted any post, and I have no right to do so, for that would be desertion. As I have already said before, I am not a free agent, and when the Party imposes an obligation upon me, I must obey” - J.V. Stalin

“This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole education system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals” - Albert Einstein

“The Russians have proved that their only aim is really the improvement of the lot of the Russian people; There are increasing signs the Russian trials are not faked, but that there is a plot among those who look upon Stalin as a stupid reactionary who has betrayed the ideas of the revolution” - Albert Einstein

“Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid” - Ernest Hemingway

“It was here that in 1919 he brought Nadya Alleluiev, the daughter of his old friend of early Bolshevik days, and now grown into a beautiful woman. He was at this time forty and she seventeen, but for her he was still the same hero who had once come from afar and taken refuge in her parents’ home. This was Stalin’s great love affair. He was by nature monogamous. Those in search of sexual scandal in his life will search in vain. I recall Radek speaking to me of Stalin’s reaction to the vagaries and often abominable aberrations in the sexual life of modern civilisation. Several illustrated German books dealing with the subject lay on Radek’s table, which was as usual piled with volumes newly arrived from Europe and America. Stalin was just about to leave Radek’s room when he noticed these books and began thumbing over their pages. Turning to Radek he asked: ‘Are there really people in Europe who do these kinds of things?’ ‘Yes, of course,’ answered Radek. ‘Stalin,’ Radek said to me, ‘looked utterly disgusted, shrugged his shoulders, and walked away without saying another word.’ To Stalin they reflected a diseased way of life, and he was a normal healthy man in his reactions to disease whether of the mind or of the body” - J.T. Murphy

“I think there are two swords: one is Lenin and the other is Stalin” - Mao Zedong

“Communism is not love. Communism is the hammer we use to destroy the class enemy” - Mao Zedong

“First, Stalin is disowned, now, little by little, it gets to prosecute socialism, the October Revolution, and in no time they will also want to prosecute Lenin and Marx” - Lazar Kaganovich

“There were a large number of Christian churches in our country before the outbreak of the Fatherland Liberation War against the U.S. imperialists. These churches were destroyed by the planes of Americans who they themselves professed to be the so-called ‘apostles of God.’ The crucifixes, icons, Bibles, as well as their worshippers - all destroyed by U.S. bombs. And thus, it were the Americans who destroyed our churches and killed our religious. No god rescued us from this disaster. So after the war, our religious did not hurry to rebuild their churches and temples. Instead they focused their efforts on their survival, first rebuilding what they needed most: dwellings, homes, factories, schools” - Kim Il-sung

“[Petty-bourgeois socialism] This school of socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty-bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities. In its positive aims, however, this form of socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian. Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture. Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues” - Karl Marx

“[How do Communists differ from socialists?] The so-called socialists are divided into three categories. [Reactionary Socialists:] The first category consists of adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already been destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. In one way or another, all their proposals are directed to this end. This category of reactionary socialists, for all their seeming partisanship and their scalding tears for the misery of the proletariat, is nevertheless energetically opposed by the Communists for the following reasons: (i) It strives for something which is entirely impossible. (ii) It seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guildmasters, the small producers, and their retinue of absolute or feudal monarchs, officials, soldiers, and priests - a society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day society but which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressed workers the prospect of liberation through a Communist revolution. (iii) As soon as the proletariat becomes revolutionary and Communist, these reactionary socialists show their true colors by immediately making common cause with the bourgeoisie against the proletarians. [Bourgeois Socialists:] The second category consists of adherents of present-day society who have been frightened for its future by the evils to which it necessarily gives rise. What they want, therefore, is to maintain this society while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it. To this end, some propose mere welfare measures - while others come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organising society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society. Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of Communists and protect the society which Communists aim to overthrow. [Democratic Socialists:] Finally, the third category consists of democratic socialists who favor some of the same measures the Communists advocate, as described in Question 18, not as part of the transition to Communism, however, but as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the misery and evils of present-day society. These democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about the conditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty-bourgeoisie, a class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat. It follows that, in moments of action, the Communists will have to come to an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them - provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the Communists. It is clear that this form of co-operation in action does not exclude the discussion of differences” - Friedrich Engels

“If, by the way, either of the two parties into which the educated section of the English people is split deserves any preference, it is the Tories. In the social circumstances of England the Whig is himself too much of an interested party to be able to judge; industry, that focal point of English society, is in his hands and makes him rich; he can find no fault in it and considers its expansion the only purpose of all legislation, for it has given him his wealth and his power. The Tory on the other hand, whose power and unchallenged dominance have been broken by industry and whose principles have been shaken by it, hates it and sees in it at best a necessary evil. This is the reason for the formation of that group of philanthropic Tories whose chief leaders are Lord Ashley, Ferrand, Walter, Oastler, etc., and who have made it their duty to take the part of the factory workers against the manufacturers. Thomas Carlyle too was originally a Tory and still stands closer to that party than to the Whigs. This much is certain: a Whig would never have been able to write a book that was half so humane as Past and Present” - Friedrich Engels

“There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land - the public lands - is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging - only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France - to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions. The small farmer and the petty-bourgeois will hardly ever succeed in forming a strong party; they consist of elements that change too rapidly - the farmer is often a migratory farmer, farming two, three, and four farms in succession in different states and territories, immigration and bankruptcy promote the change in personnel, and economic dependence upon the creditor also hampers independence - but to make up for it they are a splendid element for politicians, who speculate on their discontent in order to sell them out to one of the big parties afterward. The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing the Greenback humbug, is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo-Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit” - Friedrich Engels

“‘If you take food, fuel and housing out of the equation, inflation has been quite moderate’ To be sure, and if you remove a few other major items, it disappears altogether. A key reason why the United States is becoming increasingly like the Third World is because corporate America is going Third World, literally, not only downgrading jobs and downsizing, but moving whole industries to Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The aim of modern imperialism is not to accumulate colonies nor even just to provide outlets for capitalist investment and access to natural resources. The economist Paul Sweezy noted that the overall purpose is to turn Third World nations into economic appendages the industrialised countries, encouraging the growth of those kinds of economic activities, that complement the advanced capitalist economies and thwarting those kinds that might compete with them; Perhaps Sweezy relies too much on the nation-state as the unit of analysis. The truth is, the investor class also tries to reduce its own population to a client-state status. The aim of imperialism is not a national one but an international class goal, to exploit and concentrate power not only over Guatamalans, Indonesians, and Saudis, but Americans, Canadians, and everyone else” - Michael Parenti

“This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. etc. and trace their origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into ‘self-consciousness’ or transformation into ‘apparitions,’ ‘spectres,’ ‘fancies,’ etc. but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory. It shows that history does not end by being resolved into ‘self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit,’ but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances” - Karl Marx

“The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination. Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence. When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge. ‘Undoubtedly,’ it will be said, ‘religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.’ ‘There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.’ What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs” - Karl Marx

“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity” - V.I. Lenin

“Needless to say, of course, all boundaries in nature and in society are conventional and changeable, and it would be absurd to argue, for example, about the particular year or decade in which imperialism ‘definitely’ became established” - V.I. Lenin

“Unless the economic roots of this phenomenon are understood and its political and social significance is appreciated, not a step can be taken toward the solution of the practical problem of the Communist movement and of the impending social revolution” - V.I. Lenin

“Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics does not regard nature as an accidental agglomeration of things, of phenomena, unconnected with, isolated from, and independent of, each other, but as a connected and integral whole, in which things, phenomena are organically connected with, dependent on, and determined by, each other. The dialectical method therefore holds that no phenomenon in nature can be understood if taken by itself, isolated from surrounding phenomena, inasmuch as any phenomenon in any realm of nature may become meaningless to us if it is not considered in connection with the surrounding conditions, but divorced from them; and that, vice versa, any phenomenon can be understood and explained if considered in its inseparable connection with surrounding phenomena, as one conditioned by surrounding phenomena” - J.V. Stalin

“Whether or not one’s consciousness or ideas (including theories, policies, plans or measures) do correctly reflect the laws of the objective external world is not yet proved at this stage, in which it is not yet possible to ascertain whether they are correct or not; For it is this leap alone that can prove the correctness or incorrectness of the first leap in cognition, i.e., of the ideas, theories, policies, plans or measures formulated in the course of reflecting the objective external world; Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge. Among our comrades there are many who do not yet understand this theory of knowledge. When asked the sources of their ideas, opinions, policies, methods, plans and conclusions, eloquent speeches and long articles they consider the questions strange and cannot answer it. Nor do they comprehend that matter, can be transformed into consciousness and consciousness into matter, although such leaps are phenomena of everyday life” - Mao Zedong

“The old logic, coming up against the logical contradiction that it itself brought to light just because it rigorously followed its own principles, always baulked at it, retreated to analysis of the preceding movement of thought, and always strove to find an error or mistake in it leading to the contradiction. For formal logical thinking contradictions thus became an insurmountable barrier to the forward movement of thought, an obstacle in the way of concrete analysis of the essence of the matter. It therefore also came about that ‘thought, despairing of managing by itself to resolve the contradiction into which it had got itself, turns back to the solutions and reliefs that were the spirit’s lot in its other modes and forms’. It could not be otherwise, since the contradiction did not develop through a mistake. No mistake, it ultimately proved, had been made in the preceding thinking. It was necessary to go even further back, to uncomprehended contemplation, sense perception, aesthetic intuition, i.e. to the realm of lower forms of consciousness (lower, that is, in relation to conceptual thinking), where there was really no contradiction for the simple reason that it had still not been disclosed and clearly expressed. (It never hurts, of course, to go back and analyse the preceding course of argument and check whether there has not been a formal mistake, for that also happens not infrequently; and here the recommendations of formal logic have a quite rational sense and value. It may turn out, as a result of checking, that a given logical contradiction is really nothing but the result of committing an error or mistake somewhere. Hegel, of course, never dreamed of denying such a case. He, like Kant, had in mind only those antinomies that developed in thought as a result of the most formally ‘correct’ and faultless argumentation)” - E.V. Ilyenkov

“Lenin had been writing his book not only during these months, but throughout his entire preceding life. Prior to the day when he actually set pen to paper, he had already endured and suffered over this book. Throughout long winter months in Shushenskoe, where, according to the memoirs of N.K. Krupskaya, he studied the classics of world philosophy, including Hegel and his Phenomenology of Spirit; over long conversations with Plekhanov; throughout the correspondence with Lengnik and Bogdanov, in the course of which Lenin’s letters (which, alas, have been lost) grew into ‘whole long treatises on philosophy’ measuring ‘three notebooks’… And, finally, the last meeting with Bogdanov and his friends on Capri in April 1908, which once again convinced him of the urgent and inescapable necessity of giving open, final and decisive battle to Machism” - E.V. Ilyenkov

“Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself had become in essence socialised. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests. This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all decisive fields of production and in all economically decisive countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residium, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialised production with capitalistic appropriation; The first capitalists found, as we have said, wage-labour ready-made for them. But it was exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labour. The agricultural labourer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by the day, had a few acres of his own land on which he could at all events live at a pinch. The guilds were so organised that the journeyman of today became the master of tomorrow. But all this changed, as soon as the means of production became socialised and concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production, as well as the product, of the individual producer became more and more worthless; there was nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker under the capitalist. Wage-labour, aforetime the exception and accessory, now became the rule and basis of all production; aforetime complementary, it now became the sole remaining function of the worker. The wage-worker for a time became a wage-worker for life. The number of these permanent wageworkers was further enormously increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that occurred at the same time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete between the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labour-power, on the other. The contradiction between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie; With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual. Then the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based upon the nature of the modern means of production: upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of production - on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of subsistence and of enjoyment” - Friedrich Engels

“With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” - Friedrich Engels

“Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organisation and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organisations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency. Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organisational liberalism. People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well - they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work. Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution” - Mao Zedong

“‘Materialism’ as a term and as a concept is booby-trapped by its functional association with the eighteenth-century bourgeois Enlightenment and with nineteenth-century positivism. Whatever precautions are taken, it always fatally ends up projecting a determinism by matter (that is to say, the individual body or organism in isolation) rather than - as in historical materialism - a determination by the mode of production. It would be better to grasp Marxism and the dialectic as an attempt to overcome not idealism by itself, but that every ideological opposition between idealism and materialism in the first place. The work of both Sartre and Gramsci is there to argue for some position ‘beyond idealism and materialism,’ and if one does not like the projected new solution - called ‘praxis’ - then at least it would be desirable to search for something more adequate” - F. Jameson

“I am a man and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world, I am not responsible only for the slavery involved in Santo Domingo, every time man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of colour. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving some black civilisation unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. Haven’t I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the blacks of the 17th century? I as a man of colour do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallisation of guilt towards the past of my race. I as a man of colour do not have the right of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission. There is no white burden. I do not want to be victim of the rules of a black world. Am I going to ask this white man to answer for the slave traders of the 17th century? Am I going to try by every means available to cause guilt to burgeon in their souls? I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanised my ancestors. It would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the 3rd century B.C, we would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato, but we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of 8 year old kids working the cane fields of Martinique or Guadaloupe. I find myself in the world and I recognise I have one right alone: of demanding human behaviour from the other” - Frantz Fanon

“It is not only the Blacks, but also the Whites who dare to defend them, such as Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe - author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ - who are ill treated. Elijah Lovejoy was killed, John Brown hanged. Thomas Beach and Stephen Foster were presecuted, attacked, and imprisoned. Here is what Foster wrote from prison, ‘When I look at my damaged limbs, I think that, to hold me, prison will not be necessary for much longer… These last 15 months, their cells have been opened to me four times, 24 times my compatriots have dragged me out of their churches, twice they have thrown me from the second floor of their houses; they have damaged my kidneys once; another time they tried to put me in irons; twice they have made me pay fines; once 10,000 people tried to lynch me, and dealt me 20 blows on my head, arms and neck…’ In 30 years, 708 Whites, including 11 women, have been lynched. Some for having organised strikes, others for having espoused the cause of the Blacks. Among the collection of the crimes of American ‘civilisation,’ lynching has a place of honour” - Hồ Chí Minh

“There are no socially significant inherited characteristics among different ethnic groups or nations. Blacks are in no way inherently more lazy, less creative, more musical or cooperative, Jews or Chinese are in no way inherently more crafty, sly, or intelligent; whites are in no way inherently antagonistic to people of dark skin; and no members of any socially defined ‘race’ or ethnic group have any inherent predisposition to identify or feel solidarity with other members of the same group and hostility to, or lack of solidarity with, members of other groups. All manifest differences between different people’s, ethnic groups, nations, etc., are a product of the logic of the mode of production that generates ‘races’; The relationship between capital and especially exploited menial workers (such as Blacks and Hispanics) in the U.S. is the essence of racism. This antagonist relationship is a source of considerable profit for capital. Such exploitative relationships can only be dissolved through revolutionary activity which destroys such antagonistic relationships. Capitalism generates a racist ideology which is not only used to legitimate the special exploitation of ethnic minorities and nations in the eyes of the exploiters, but also to convince the members of the majority ethnic group workers that it has ‘white skin privilege,’ i.e., that it has more in common with ‘white capitalists’ than it does with Black or Hispanic workers. This ideology is implanted both by control of the education and mass media which perpetuates racist ideologies, and by the ability of the capitalist class to structure the labour force in such a way as majority group workers have slightly better jobs, slightly better pay than minority group workers, and further receive somewhat better treatment by the police, in the courts, by welfare agencies etc. The illusion that all whites benefit from racist structures is thus created in both the majority group workers. But in reality, the ability of the capitalists to turn the different segments of the working class against each other seriously hurts the condition of all the working class, both its majority and minority members (although of course it hurts the minority group workers relatively more). The only beneficiaries of racist structures are those that employ minorities and thus make extra profits from: the special exploitation of minorities and, the weak class consciousness, lack of strong unions, absence of a militant socialist movement, etc., which racial divisiveness brings to the majority group. It should be remembered that white workers in the U.S. are the best off in states such as Michigan where their relative advantage over Black workers is the least in the country (and which have a strong militant interracial union tradition) and worse off in Mississippi where whites are at the same time the best off vis-a-vis Blacks. Where racist Ideology is strongest, working class solidarity is the weakest and all workers, white and Black are in much worse shape than where racist ideology has been overcome enough to allow multi-ethnic/national forms of class organisation to emerge and improve the conditions of the working class as a whole; It is the obligation of leftists to educate white workers about how they are being ‘suckered’ by the ‘white skin privilege’ argument of the capitalist class and how their own interests coincide with their fellow minority group workers” - Albert Szymanski

“The giant industrial monopolies, the big banks and insurance companies, the financiers and landowners, all spawn racism and use it as one of their chief class weapons to maintain and defend their regime of exploitation and oppression, of enmity among peoples, of imperialist wars of aggression. It follows that all democratic and antimonopoly forces, with the working class and Black liberation movement in the van, can effectively defend the interests of the vast majority of people only when they actively further the struggle against racism. This is an essential precondition for the development of a fighting alliance which will unite all democratic and antimonopoly [anticapitalist] forces in the country. Marx wrote long ago that ‘labour in a white skin can never be free so long as labour in the black skin is branded.’ This profound observation points up the fact that racism is the consciously employed weapon of the white imperialist oppressors, who use it to create division in the ranks of the working class. And Marx correctly suggests that white workers must take the lead in the struggle against racism. This is the path which can lead to unity of Black and white workers in struggle, which can achieve Black equality and a real improvement in the conditions of all workers” - Henry M. Winston

“The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental [is] an error only less grave than to make it fundamental” - C.L.R. James

“If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem… Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude” - Kwame Ture

“Referring to SDS’s agreement to support the petition in the ‘colonies’ (black and brown communities) but not in the ‘oppressor country’ (white America), Hilliard wrote in the Black Panther: ‘How abstract and divorced from the reality of the world around them they must be to think that the Black Panther party would allow them to leave their communities and begin to organise the colony; to control the fascists in the oppressor country is a very definite step towards white people’s power, because James Rector was not shotgunned to death in the black community. It seems they prefer to allow the already legitimate reactionary forces to take roost or sanctuary in the white communities.’ Stating that the ‘Black Panther party will not be dictated to by people who are obviously bourgeois procrastinators,’ Hilliard went on to imply that SDS, among other groups, was ‘at best national socialist’ (i.e., fascist)” - Jack A. Smith