Protestation

Liam Mellows: The people who are in favour of the Treaty, are not in favour of the Treaty on its merits, but are in favour of the Treaty because they fear what is to happen if it be rejected. That is not the will of the people, that is the fear of the people.

Karl Marx: To leave error unrefuted is to encourage intellectual immorality.

Louis Pierre Althusser: To become ‘ideologists of the working class’—‘organic intellectuals’ of the proletariat—intellectuals have to carry out a radical revolution in their ideas: a long, painful and difficult re-education. An endless external and internal struggle.

Che Guevara: There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us.

Fidel Castro: Capitalism, its market economy, its values, its categories, and its methods can never pull socialism out of its present difficulties or rectify whatever mistakes have been made.

Karl Marx: Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labor and the external conditions of labor belong to private individuals. But according that these private individuals are laborers or not laborers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes.

Felix Dzerzhinsky: It would not be worthwhile living if the star of socialism, the star of the future were not shining down on mankind. For the “ego” cannot live if in itself it does not contain the rest of the world and the people. Such is the nature of this “ego.

Ho Chi Minh: You may read thousands of books on theory, but if you don’t learn to apply those theories in real life, you’re nothing but a bookshelf.

Karl Marx: The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.

Rafael Correa: Forbidden to forget.

Ernest Hemingway: No men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain.

Karl Marx: Communists have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

Bill Gates: If you are born poor it’s not your mistake, but if you die poor it’s your mistake.

Alan Greenspan: The Fabians laid the groundwork for modern social democracy, and their influence on the world would end up being at least as powerful as that of Marx.

Malcolm X: Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children.

Georgi Dimitrov: Fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class...

Angela Davis: The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?

Ernest Hemingway: Every human being who loves freedom owes to the Red Army more than he will be able to pay in a lifetime!

Idi Amin: There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.

Marlon Brando: Would people applaud me if I was a good plumber?

Joseph Goebbels: We are reproached with having no programme, or that the one we have is full of contradictions. But just because of this we shall gain the victory.

Gus Hall: A true Marxist is one who not only knows the experience of the past, knows theory, understands the Marxist dialectical-historical method, but applies it to the specific situation as a good scientist should. The first prerequisite for such application is to know the specific—to be close to it; to understand it not superficially but in its many-sidedness—its past, present and future, to know what caused it and what effects it will have; to know in what direction it is moving, how it is related to other surrounding specific phenomena.

Gus Hall: As in the case of all fields of science, the study of Marxism is not a matter of studying or memorizing set phrases or formulas. The study and the development of this science, as well as the growth of one’s own understanding, is itself a living continuous process. It is the study of the laws of motion or social development.

Lenin: A United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists ... but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe.

Lenin: Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world-the capitalist world-attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states. The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic, which will more and more concentrate the forces of the proletariat of a given nation or nations, in the struggle against states that have not yet gone over to socialism. The abolition of classes is impossible without a dictatorship of the oppressed class, of the proletariat. A free union of nations in socialism is impossible without a more or less prolonged and stubborn struggle of the socialist republics against the backward states.

Lenin: Old legends contain various moving instances of friendship. The European proletariat may say that its science was created by two scholars and fighters, whose relationship to each other surpasses the most moving stories of the ancients about human friendship. Engels always – and, on the whole, quite justly – placed himself after Marx. “In Marx’s lifetime,” he wrote to an old friend, “I played second fiddle.” His love for the living Marx, and his reverence for the memory of the dead Marx were boundless. This stern fighter and austere thinker possessed a deeply loving soul.

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya: Hey, comrades! Why are you looking so sad? Be brave, fight, beat the Germans, burn, wipe them out! I'm not afraid to die, comrades. It is happiness to die for one's people!

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya: You hang me now, but I'm not alone. There are two hundred million of us. You can't hang us all. They will avenge me.

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya: Farewell, comrades! Fight, do not be afraid! Stalin is with us! Stalin will come!

Hillary Clinton: China has disrupted the market. China is not a free market economy. We tried. We let them into the WTO. We sent businesses over there. We made trade deals. They are a controlled top-down economy. You will never compete and win against them unless you take back the means of production.

Moissaye J. Olgin: Where capitalism is organized in big corporations to control the markets, we have monopoly capitalism; the states that are dominating oppressed nations and are driving towards war to control foreign markets, are imperialist powers. This is capitalism in its modern form. This is capitalist civilization. A palace built on crushed human bones.

Friedrich Engels: If we abandon private property, then all these unnatural divisions disappear. The difference between interest and profit disappears; capital is nothing without labour, without movement. The significance of profit is reduced to the weight which capital carries in the determination of the costs of production, and profit thus remains inherent in capital, in the same way as capital itself reverts to its original unity with labour.

Lenin: After the death of Marx, Engels continued alone as the counsellor and leader of the European socialists. His advice and directions were sought for equally by the German socialists, whose strength, despite government persecution, grew rapidly and steadily, and by representatives of backward countries, such as the Spaniards, Rumanians and Russians, who were obliged to ponder and weigh their first steps. They all drew on the rich store of knowledge and experience of Engels in his old age.

Friedrich Engels: I accuse the English bourgeoisie before the entire world of murder, robbery and all sorts of other crimes on a mass scale.

Stalin: In the epoch of bourgeois rule, a proletarian party can grow and gain strength only to the extent that it combats the opportunist, anti-revolutionary and anti-party elements in its own midst and within the working class.

Lenin: After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world. From the time that fate brought Karl Marx and Frederick Engels together, the two friends devoted their life’s work to a common cause. And so to understand what Frederick Engels has done for the proletariat, one must have a clear idea of the significance of Marx’s teaching and work for the development of the contemporary working-class movement. Marx and Engels were the first to show that the working class and its demands are a necessary outcome of the present economic system, which together with the bourgeoisie inevitably creates and organises the proletariat. They showed that it is not the well-meaning efforts of noble-minded individuals, but the class struggle of the organised proletariat that will deliver humanity from the evils which now oppress it. In their scientific works, Marx and Engels were the first to explain that socialism is not the invention of dreamers, but the final aim and necessary result of the development of the productive forces in modern society. All recorded history hitherto has been a history of class struggle, of the succession of the rule and victory of certain social classes over others. And this will continue until the foundations of class struggle and of class domination – private property and anarchic social production – disappear. The interests of the proletariat demand the destruction of these foundations, and therefore the conscious class struggle of the organised workers must be directed against them. And every class struggle is a political struggle.

Lenin: The more proletarians there are, the greater is their strength as a revolutionary class, and the nearer and more possible does socialism become. The services rendered by Marx and Engels to the working class may be expressed in a few words thus: they taught the working class to know itself and be conscious of itself, and they substituted science for dreams.

Joseph Schumpeter: The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U. S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation-if I may use that biological term-that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

Joseph Schumpeter: Capitalism is being killed by its achievements.

Andrew Bacevich: We live in a country where if you want to go bomb somebody, there's remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost. But when you have a discussion about whether or not we can assist people who are suffering, then suddenly we become very cost-conscious.

Ho Chi Minh: To reap a return in ten years, plant trees. To reap a return in 100, cultivate the people.

Edward Abbey: Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Khalil Gibran: Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Joe Tzu: If you do not know what you're doing neither does your enemy.

Friedrich Engels: Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends.

Angela Davis: I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.

Fred Hampton: We sayin’ something like this—we saying that theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit. You got to have both of them—the two go together.

Karl Marx: Mathematicians and mechanicians, and in this they are followed by a few English economists, call a tool a simple machine, and a machine a complex tool.

Karl Marx: All fully developed machinery consists of three essentially different parts, the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and finally the tool or working machine. The motor mechanism is that which puts the whole in motion. It either generates its own motive power, like the steam-engine, the caloric engine, the electromagnetic machine, &c., or it receives its impulse from some already existing natural force, like the water-wheel from a head of water, the wind-mill from wind, &c. The transmitting mechanism, composed of fly-wheels, shafting, toothed wheels, pullies, straps, ropes, bands, pinions, and gearing of the most varied kinds, regulates the motion, changes its form where necessary, as for instance, from linear to circular, and divides and distributes it among the working machines. These two first parts of the whole mechanism are there, solely for putting the working machines in motion, by means of which motion the subject of labour is seized upon and modified as desired. The tool or working machine is that part of the machinery with which the industrial revolution of the 18th century started. And to this day it constantly serves as such a starting-point, whenever a handicraft, or a manufacture, is turned into an industry carried on by machinery.

Fidel Castro: Our revolution has made Marxism-Leninism its banner. No one forced us and no one guided us from another continent. Life itself showed us the way and we followed it without hesitation. Every real revolution must inevitably lead to Marxism-Leninism, the only genuine revolutionary truth which repudiates colonial slavery, imperialist domination and exploitation of man by man.

Lenin: Capitalism creates its own grave-digger, itself creates the elements of a new system, yet, at the same time, without a "leap" these individual elements change nothing in the general state of affairs and do not affect the rule of capital. It is Marxism, the theory of dialectical materialism, that is able to encompass these contradictions of living reality, of the living history of capitalism and the working-class movement.

Karl Marx: Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

Richard D. Wolff: Fascism is capitalism's harsh, savage response to the divisive social crises it imposes on society (depressions, extreme racial and economic inequalities, etc.) ... Capitalism will likely confront us with fascism again. Unless system change intervenes.

Rosa Luxemburg: When the majority of working people realise … that wars are barbaric, deeply immoral, reactionary, and anti-people, then wars will have become impossible.

Fred Hampton: We don't hate the motherfucking white people, we hate the oppressor, whether he be white, black, brown or yellow.

Lenin: Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.

Bill Hicks: The problem isn't a lack of money, food, water or land. The problem is that you've given control of these things to a group of greedy psychopaths who care more about maintaining their own power than helping mankind.

Malcolm X: Turning my back on Malcolm was one of the mistakes that I regret most in my life. I wish I’d been able to tell Malcolm I was sorry, that he was right about so many things. But he was killed before I got the chance... He was a visionary — ahead of us all.

Karl Marx: Wages, therefore, are not a share of the worker in the commodities produced by himself. Wages are that part of already existing commodities with which the capitalist buys a certain amount of productive labour-power.

Mao Zedong: Women Hold Up Half the Sky.

Dolores Ibárruri: They shall not pass!

Friedrich Engels: The meat diet, however, had its greatest effect on the brain, which now received a far richer flow of the materials necessary for its nourishment and development, and which, therefore, could develop more rapidly and perfectly from generation to generation. With all due respect to the vegetarians man did not come into existence without a meat diet, and if the latter, among all peoples known to us, has led to cannibalism at some time or other (the forefathers of the Berliners, the Weletabians or Wilzians, used to eat their parents as late as the tenth century), that is of no consequence to us today.

Karl Marx: After the triumph of the bourgeoisie, there was no longer any question of the good or the bad side of feudalism. The bourgeoisie took possession of the productive forces it had developed under feudalism. All the old economic forms, the corresponding civil relations, the political state which was the official expression of the old civil society, were smashed.

Karl Marx: The bourgeoisie begins with a proletariat which is itself a relic of the proletariat of feudal times. In the course of its historical development, the bourgeoisie necessarily develops its antagonistic character, which at first is more or less disguised, existing only in a latent state. As the bourgeoisie develops, there develops in its bosom a new proletariat, a modern proletariat; there develops a struggle between the proletarian class and the bourgeoisie class, a struggle which, before being felt, perceived, appreciated, understood, avowed, and proclaimed aloud by both sides, expresses itself, to start with, merely in partial and momentary conflicts, in subversive acts. On the other hand, if all the members of the modern bourgeoisie have the same interests inasmuch as they form a class as against another class, they have opposite, antagonistic interests inasmuch as they stand face-to-face with one another. This opposition of interests results from the economic conditions of their bourgeois life. From day to day it has becomes clearer that the production relations in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a simple, uniform character, but a dual character; that in the selfsame relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is also produced; that in the selfsame relations in which there is a development of the productive forces, there is also a force producing repression; that these relations produce bourgeois wealth — i.e., the wealth of the bourgeois class — only by continually annihilating the wealth of the individual members of this class and by producing an ever-growing proletariat.

Karl Marx: The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class, just as the condition for the liberation of the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates and all orders. (Estates here in the historical sense of the estates of feudalism, estates with definite and limited privileges. The revolution of the bourgeoisie abolished the estates and their privileges. Bourgeois society knows only classes. It was, therefore, absolutely in contradiction with history to describe the proletariat as the "fourth estate".) ( — Engels, 1885 German edition.)

Karl Marx: An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself, it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. The organization of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society.

Karl Marx: Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social.

Frankie Boyle: If you're a political journalist who has regular contact with people in power, and your analysis is always aligned with prevailing orthodoxy, then you're not really a journalist, you're a courtier.

Karl Marx: It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: "Le combat on la mort; la lutte sanguinaire ou le neant. C'est ainsi que la question est invinciblement posee." ("Combat or Death: bloody struggle or extinction. It is thus that the question is inexorably put.")

Dennis Skinner: No figure in my 40-plus years in Parliament encapsulated the poison and nastiness of the Conservative Party more than Margaret Thatcher. The record of what she did to Britain – deliberately breaking people, communities and industries to impose her brand of casino capitalism, impoverishing a swollen group at the bottom as she rewarded her City friends – was unforgivable. Thatcher ruined millions of lives. Not out of ignorance, or as an unintentional by-product of her policies. But in a systematic war on decent working people.

Peadar O'Donnell: If Communism was the enemy-in-chief in the eyes of the Fascists then it clearly was a fighting formation to which anti-Fascists should rally.

Che Guevara: Those who are afraid, or who think of betraying in one way or another, are moderates.

Karl Marx: The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Lenin: Marxism is most easily, rapidly, completely and lastingly assimilated by the working class and its ideologists where large-scale industry is most developed.

Michel Clouscard: Marx exclusively devoted himself to the study of the concentration of possession: capital, because it is the principle of political economy. We will propose the study of the drift of accumulation like the principle of phenomenological knowledge for studying the change of the bourgeoisie of free enterprise into the bourgeoisie of services and functions of liberal society. Thus we will reveal an enormous unvoiced comment, that of the genealogy of this liberal society.

Michel Clouscard: Neofascism will be the ultimate expression of libertarian social liberalism, of the unit which starts in May 68. Its specificity holds in this formula: All is allowed, but nothing is possible. The permissiveness of abundance, growth, new models of consumption, leaves the place to interdiction of the crisis, the shortage, the absolute impoverishment. These two historical components amalgamate in the head, in the spirit, thus creating the subjective conditions of the neofascism. From Cohn-Bendit (libertarian leftist) to Le Pen (French extreme nationalist), the loop is buckled: here comes the time of frustrated revanchists.

Michel Clouscard: The State was the superstructural authority of capitalist repression. This is why Marx denounces it. But today, with globalisation, the inversion is total. Whereas the state-nation could be the means of oppression of a class by another, it becomes the means of resisting globalisation. It is a dialectical process.

Fidel Castro: There are problems related to a large part of the world which is poor, suffering from hunger, illiterate, underdeveloped. There are peoples still struggling for liberation. There still remain problems and tensions that should be overcome. But what has been attained in these 60 years gives us faith, optimism and enthusiasm in the struggle and the confident and secure feeling that the human society will be capable of overcoming these obstacles and that, despite reactionary forces and imperialism, justice, equality, fraternity among men and communism will win. An mankind will owe an eternal debt of gratitude to the October Revolution, Lenin and the Soviet people.

Lenin: Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then "the state... ceases to exist", and "it becomes possible to speak of freedom". Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.

Karl Marx: Consequently, it appears that the capitalist buys their labour with money, and that for money they sell him their labour. But this is merely an illusion. What they actually sell to the capitalist for money is their labour-power.

Lenin: Democracy is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organized, systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state. This, in turn, results in the fact that, at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism--the proletariat, and enables it to crush, smash to atoms, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine, the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy and to substitute for them a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of armed workers who proceed to form a militia involving the entire population.

Lenin: Democracy is of enormous importance to the working class in its struggle against the capitalists for its emancipation. But democracy is by no means a boundary not to be overstepped; it is only one of the stages on the road from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to communism.

Frantz Fanon: What matters is not so much the color of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.

Barack Obama: We occasionally have to twist the arms of countries that wouldn't do what we need them to do.

Fidel Castro: It is impossible to say in just a few minutes what the October Revolution has meant for the world. Without the October Revolution, without Lenin’s gifted vision, without the revolutionary party he forged, without the lucidity of his ideas which he analyzed and interpreted at the precise moment, at the precise time and under the precise conditions–that the time for the revolution had come–the world’s socialist revolution would have been delayed by tens of years. Without the October Revolution, fascism and imperialism would have dominated the world for a long period of time. Without the October Revolution, this colossal movement of national liberation, which put an end to colonialism and brought independence to nearly 100 new nations of the world, would not have been initiated.

Fidel Castro: Without the October Revolution, mankind would have never been able to hope for peace, because capitalism and imperialism were characterized by wars of exploitation and by the division of the world to serve their own interests.

Fidel Castro: It must be said that, following the October Revolution, the consolidation of the Soviet state and the defeat of fascism, for the first time ever in the history of mankind those wars of exploitation ended and a true possibility of attaining peace was created. Thus, we can say that without the October Revolution today there would be not even the slightest possibility of survival for mankind.

Fidel Castro: To the Soviets, we wish to convey at this time all our admiration, our love, our sympathy, our recognition and our joy in their successes. We wish to congratulate the Soviet people on the extraordinary advances attained in recent years, for their constitution, their new constitution, which is the most perfect, the most just, the most advanced of all constitutions of the world.

Fidel Castro: Never before in the history of the world has any human community attained the successes of the Soviet people in such a brief period of time.

Fidel Castro: The Soviet Union is the bulwark of science, of social progress, of the eagalitarian and just society, that marches–we can say rapidly–toward the elimination of classes, toward communism, as established by the constitution, which is the highest aspiration of the human society.