Protestation

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.

Muhammad Ali: 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.

Ronald Reagan: Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television, as I did, to see those, those monkeys from those African countries - damn them - they're still uncomfortable wearing shoes!

George Sand: Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social. 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: "Combat or Death: bloody struggle or extinction. It is thus that the question is inexorably put."

Fidel Castro: We are a very small country situated on this side of the Atlantic, next to the United States. The United States thought that it could easily crush the Cuban revolution, first through economic blockade measures and later on by military aggression. This was a small and underdeveloped country. They thought it was easy. But we had the Soviet Union’s solidarity from the very first moment. This must be said. The Soviets created a market for the products which we were exporting to the United States and which the United States refused to buy. The Soviets supplied us with essential raw materials, such as machinery, fuel and foodstuffs. They supplied us the arms needed for the defense of the country. This made it possible for the Cuban revolution to survive. It was an extraordinary demonstration of internationalist spirit which in turn implanted in our people the internationalist spirit that we practice today.

Lenin: The genius of Marx and Engels expressed itself in that they despised the pseudo-erudite play upon new words, wise terms, cunning "isms." They simply and explicitly said that there is a materialist and idealist division in philosophy, and between them there are various shades of agnosticism.

Lenin: The genius of Marx and Engels consisted in the very fact that in the course of a long period, nearly half a century, they developed materialism, that they further advanced one fundamental trend in philosophy, that they did not stop at reiterating epistemological problems that had already been solved, but consistently applied-and showed how to apply-this same materialism in the sphere of the social sciences, mercilessly brushing aside as litter and rubbish the pretentious rigmarole, the innumerable attempts to "discover" a "new" line in philosophy, to invent a "new" trend and so forth. The verbal nature of such attempts, the scholastic play with new philosophical "isms," the clogging of the issue by pretentious devices, the inability to comprehend and clearly present the struggle between the two fundamental epistemological trends-this is what Marx and Engels persistently pursued and fought against throughout their entire activity.

Karl Marx: Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.

Fidel Castro: In workers’ and university circles, the first Marxist-Leninist groups were organized, which some years later founded Cuba’s first communist party. This party had a great influence on the struggle being waged during those days, which coincided with a great economic crisis in the 1930’s and had a great influence on the formation of a revolutionary awareness among the exploited classes of our country.

Fidel Castro: Thus, the vanguards, the more conscious elements of the working class and the intellectual circles were greatly inspired by the October Revolution. It happens with all of us, not only in workers’ circles but also in student’s circles, in intellectual circles. We can add that the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin had decisive influence on the revolutionary nucleus which organized the armed struggle against Batista’s tyranny and against neocolonialism in our country. Because of this, we can say that the event which had the greatest influence on the Cuban revolution was precisely the glorious October Revolution.

Fidel Castro: I must add that without the October Revolution it would have been absolutely impossible to carry out the Cuban revolution some 42 years later, because the October Revolution precisely created the conditions and the historical circumstances and the correlation of forces that made the Cuban revolution possible. In other words, the process initiated by the October Revolution and which continued with the building of the first socialist state in the world–the 1,000 times heroic struggle of the Soviet people against imperialist aggressions and against the fascist aggression–precisely created the conditions that made the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959 possible.

Albert Einstein: Our time is rich in inventive minds, the inventions of which could facilitate our lives considerably. We are crossing the seas by power and utilize power also in order to relieve humanity from all tiring muscular work. We have learned to fly and we are able to send messages and news without any difficulty over the entire world through electric waves. However, the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized so that everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle, in this way suffering for the want of everything. Further more, people living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason any one who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror. This is due to the fact that the intelligence and character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who produce some thing valuable for the community. I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.

Teresa of Calcutta: There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.

Teresa of Calcutta: You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus - a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you.

Teresa of Calcutta: If you have no suffering and no trouble, the devil is taking it easy. You are in his hand.

Teresa of Calcutta: You can and you must expect suffering.

Teresa of Calcutta: Suffering, if it is accepted together, borne together, is joy.

Teresa of Calcutta: A beautiful death is for people who have lived like animals to die like angels.

Teresa of Calcutta: Suffering, pains sorrow, humiliation, feelings of loneliness, are nothing but the kiss of Jesus, a sign that you have come so close that He can kiss you.

Teresa of Calcutta: I often wonder that if innocent people did not suffer so much what would happen to the world? They are the ones who are interceding the whole time. Their innocence is so pleasing to God. By accepting suffering, they intercede for us.

Teresa of Calcutta: Help us to accept the pains and conflicts that come to us each day as opportunities to grow as people and become more like You.

Teresa of Calcutta: Suffering is a gift.

Jean-Paul Marat: DESPOTISM owes its support greatly to ignorance. It is ignorance which, by obstructing the sight of the people, prevents them from being acquainted. with their own rights, and vindicating, them. It is ignorance which, concealing from them the ambitious designs, the secret practices, the low artifices of Princes, presents them from obviating tyranny, from stopping the progress of lawless power, and ruining it entirely. It is ignorance which, enforcing obedience to many false maxims, ties the hands of the people, subjects their necks to the yoke, and makes them submit with reverence to arbitrary commands. It is ignorance, in a word, which induces the people to pay willingly to tyrants all those duties they arrogantly require, and the credulous vulgar to reverence them as if they were Gods. In order to subdue his subjects, the Prince labours to blind them. Conscious of the unlawfulness of his own designs, and sensible of what he has to fear from clear-sighted men, he endeavours to deprive the people of every means of acquiring knowledge. How many crafty devices have not Princes employed to oppose the progress of learning ? Some banish science out of their dominions; others prohibit their subjects from travelling into * foreign countries; others again divert the people from reflecting, by continually entertaining them + with feasts and shews, or keeping up among them the spirit of gaming +; and all stand up against men of spirit, who dedicate either their voice or their pen to defend the cause of liberty.

Jean-Paul Marat: They never give to things the real names. They term the art of governing, that of spreading everywhere terror and desolation; they call magnificence pageantry and odious prodigality; they cover usurpations under the fair names of extension of power, addition of privileges, and new prerogatives acquired by the crown; extortions, rapacity, robberies, under that of conquest; craft, duplicity, treachery, perfidiousness, treason, under that of the art of negotiating; and outrages, murders, poisoning, under that of acts of great policy. Thus they succeed in destroying that impression of horror, which the bare sight of those actions ever excites in the spectator. But as if the false pictures offered in history were not sufficient, there is every where a multitude of writers who, actuated by their base passions, are ever ready to vindicate tyranny. Authors in their dedications, poets in their verses, orators in their speeches, every one with emulation basely offers his incense; they give Princes the most flattering appellations, they call them fathers of the people, benefactors of mankind, the glory of the age, and we are so silly as to credit them.

Karl Marx: Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

Gramsci: Educate yourselves because we'll need all your intelligence. Stir yourselves because we'll need all your enthusiasm. Organize yourselves because we'll need all your strength.

Booker T. Washington: A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority.

R. Palme Dutt: Many would-be reformers of capitalism (including the Labour Party propagandists and the Independent Labour Party) urge that if only the capitalists would pay higher wages to the workers, enabling them to buy more of what they produce, there would be no crisis. This is utopian nonsense, which ignores the inevitable laws of capitalism-the drive for profits, and the drive of competition. The drive of capitalism is always to increase its profits by every possible means, to increase its surplus, not decrease it.

Anton Pannekoek: The government makes laws for the protection of "honest" businessmen against "thieves" and "murderers". Against strikers and revolutionists, who are far more dangerous to the existing social order, laws even more drastic are made. For the enforcing of these laws, the police and jail are used. In every strike, in every political demonstration, the workers find the police arrayed against them, clubbing and throwing them into jail for the benefit of the capitalist class and to protect the capitalists profits. Gangs of hired thugs are sworn in as deputy sheriffs and given police authority; and when the workers cannot be subdued in this way, militia and citizen guards are mobilized against them.

Anton Pannekoek: In each capitalist country the army is the strongest force in the service of the capitalist class, because for its wars with other countries, it needs the fighting power of the whole country, all classes included. The army is an organized body bound together by the strictest military discipline, provided with the most cruel, refined and effective means of killing and destroying. If it is used in political wars, where in the worst case the capitalist class suffers only heavy losses, is it not to be used then in case of revolution where the capitalist class is menaced with complete loss of all it possesses?

Anton Pannekoek: Thus the nation is the stronghold of capitalism. As a strongly organized power, nation-wide, directed by the uniform will of the central government, provided With a powerful army, it protects the capitalist class. Physical force, however, is not sufficient to subdue a people or a class. How many strong governments in history, though well-armed, have been overthrown by rebellions. Spiritual forces in most cases are decisive above mere physical power. In capitalism the rule holds good that in the long run it is more effectual to fool people than to beat them.

Anton Pannekoek: he power of the capitalist class is enormous. Never in history was there a ruling class with such power. Their power is first, money power. All the treasures of the world are theirs, and modern capital, produced by the ceaseless toil of millions of workers, exceeds all the treasures of the old world. The surplus value is partly accumulated into ever more and new capital; partly it must be spent by the capitalists. They buy servants for their personal attendants; they also buy People to defend them, to safeguard their power and their dominating position. In capitalism everything can be bought for money; muscles and brain as well as love and honor have become market goods.

Anton Pannekoek: So capitalist power consists thirdly in its intellectual power. The ideas of a ruling class pervade the majority of the members of society. Certainly the capitalist class could not buy guards and intellectuals if these fellows did not share its ideology and sentiments. Capitalist government could not govern, even with its strong physical force, if the mass of the people were not filled with the same spirit as the government itself. How is it possible that in the mass of the people, even in the working class, this capitalist spirit prevails?

Anton Pannekoek: The main force is tradition and inheritance. The ideology of the capitalist class is nothing but the ideology of the former middle classes, the petty producers. The idea of private property as a natural right, the belief that everyone should build his own fortune and that free competition guarantees the best results, the maxim that everyone has only to care for himself and God will take care of the rest, the conviction that thrift and industry are the virtues which secure prosperity, and that America is the best country and should be defended against other nations, all these beliefs are inherited from the time and the class of small business. And this is the very creed big business wants the masses to believe in as eternal truths today.

Anton Pannekoek: This science, Marxism, is a proletarian science. The capitalist class rejects it; its scientists deny its truth. Indeed, it is impossible for the capitalist class to accept it. No class can accept a theory that proclaims its own collapse and death; for by accepting it, it could not fight with full confidence and with full force. To fight against annihilation is a primary instinct, in a class as well as in an organism.

Anton Pannekoek: The capitalist class cannot see beyond the horizon of capitalism. So it sees the growing concentration of capital, the growing power of big finance, the heavy crises and the impending world wars, the rising tide of the proletarian fight with its threat of revolution, it sees all these phenomena without drawing one rational conclusion from them. It sees no sense in history, though its ablest scientists investigate every detail; it sees no light in the future, uncertainty and mysticism fill its mind. But it has one determination, to fight for its supremacy.

Aldous Huxley: Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya: The workers of all lands know that they can rely on none but themselves, that they themselves must win a better fate on earth; that each on his own is completely powerless and defenseless but once united all together in a huge army they are a power which no state can withstand.

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just: One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of doing so is evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper.

Anton Pannekoek: Capitalist power in the second place is political. The State is the organization of the capitalist class. Its task is to render possible private production, and to enable the individual capitalists to carry on their businesses by protecting and regulating their intercourse.

Jose Marti: But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.

Lenin: The social revolution can come only in the form of an epoch in which are combined civil war by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries and a whole series of democratic and revolutionary movements, including the national liberation movement, in the undeveloped, backward and oppressed nations. Why? Because capitalism develops unevenly, and objective reality gives us highly developed capitalist nations side by side with a number of economically slightly developed, or totally undeveloped, nations.

Lenin: All national oppression calls forth the resistance of the broad masses of the people; and the resistance of a nationally oppressed population always tends to national revolt. Not infrequently (notably in Austria and Russia) we find the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations talking of national revolt, while in practice it enters into reactionary compacts with the bourgeoisie of the oppressor nation behind the backs of, and against, its own people. In such cases the criticism of revolutionary Marxists should be directed not against the national movement, but against its degradation, vulgarisation, against the tendency to reduce it to a petty squabble.

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 every struggle against imperialism that we should support. We will not support a struggle of the reactionary classes against imperialism; we will not support an uprising of the reactionary classes against imperialism and capitalism.

Randall Wray: Capitalism has always been celebrated for its presumed efficiency. In fact, it is supremely inefficient. It survives only because it is the greatest system ever developed for exploitation of man and nature.

Lenin: The Fabian Society is undoubtedly the most consummate expression of opportunism and of Liberal-Labour policy. The reader should look into the correspondence of Marx and Engels with Sorge (two Russian translations of which have appeared). There he will find an excellent characterisation of that society given by Engels, who treats Messrs. Sidney Webb & Co. as a gang of bourgeois rogues who would demoralise the workers, influence them in a counter-revolutionary spirit. One may vouch for the fact that no Second International leader with any responsibility and influence has ever attempted to refute this estimation of Engels’s, or even to doubt its correctness.

Lenin: Let us now compare the facts, leaving theory aside for a moment. You will see that the Fabians’ behaviour during the war (see, for instance, their weekly paper, The New Statesman(2)), and that of the German Social-Democratic Party, including Kautsky, are identical. The same direct and indirect defence of social-chauvinism; the same combination of that defence with a readiness to utter all sorts of kindly, humane and near-Left phrases about peace, disarmament, etc., etc. The fact stands, and the conclusion to be drawn—however unpleasant it may be to various persons—is inescapably and undoubtedly the following: in practice the leaders of the present-day German Social-Democratic Party, including Kautsky, are exactly the same kind of agents of the bourgeoisie that Engels called the Fabians long ago. The Fabians’ non-recognition of Marxism and its “recognition” by Kautsky and Co. make no difference whatever in the essentials, in the facts of politics; the only thing proved is that some writers, politicians, etc., have converted Marxism into Struvism. Their hypocrisy is not a private vice with them; in individual cases they may be highly virtuous heads of families; their hypocrisy is the result of the objective falseness of their social status: they are supposed to represent the revolutionary proletariat, whereas they are actually agents charged with the business of inculcating bourgeois, chauvinist ideas in the proletariat. The Fabians are more sincere and honest than Kautsky and Co., because they have not promised to stand for revolution; politically, however, they are of the same kidney.

Lenin: The British trade unions comprise about one-fifth of all wage workers. Most trade union leaders are Liberals; Marx long ago called them agents of the bourgeoisie.

John Davison Rockefeller: Everyone can be bought if you only know his price.

Anton Pannekoek: The capitalists buy young proletarians to form a fighting force. In the same way as they buy Pinkertons against strikers, they will, in times of greater danger, organize huge armies of Volunteers provided with the best modern arms, well-fed and well-paid, to defend their sacred capitalist order.

Anton Pannekoek: But capitalism cannot be defended by brutal force alone. Being itself the outcome of a high development of intellectual forces, it must consequently be defended by these same intellectual forces. Behind the physical struggle in the class war, stands the spiritual contest of ideas. Capitalists know that, often better than the workers. Hence they buy all the good brains they can. Often in a coarse, open way; most often however, indirectly. This is done, for instance, by donating money for cultural purposes. Numerous students of science the world over have profited in their researches from the "Rockefeller Foundation". Thus the name 'Rockefeller' has a reputation in the field of natural sciences where 'Ludlow' is never heard of. This kind of philanthropy serves capitalism well. Capitalists have founded universities all over the United States where among other sciences sociology is taught, to demonstrate the impossibility and wickedness of communism. The young people leave the universities imbued with these ideas and they know high salaries and public honor await them if they do not deviate from the straight path of capitalism.

Anton Pannekoek: The capitalists buy the press; they buy the editors; they buy all the means of publicity, and in this way they mould public opinion. It is an invisible spiritual despotism by which the entire nation is made to think as the capitalist class wish it to think. Money reigns over the world, thus it can buy the brain power available.

Friedrich Engels: The victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing.

Lenin: The social revolution cannot be the united action of the proletarians of all countries for the simple reason that most of the countries and the majority of the world’s population have not even reached, or have only just reached, the capitalist stage of development.

Lenin: Socialism will be achieved by the united action of the proletarians, not of all, but of a minority of countries, those that have reached the advanced capitalist stage of development.

Lenin: The victorious proletariat will reorganise the countries in which it has triumphed. That cannot be done all at once; nor, indeed, can the bourgeoisie be “vanquished” all at once.

Thomas Mann: Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Karl Marx: Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.

Friedrich Engels: If the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions.

Pablo Picasso: I have become a Communist because our party strives more than any other to know and to build the world, to make men clearer thinkers, more free and more happy.

Pablo Picasso: I have become a Communist because the Communists are the bravest in France, in the Soviet Union, as they are in my own country, Spain. I have never felt more free, more complete than since I joined.

Karl Marx: The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.