Protestation

Lenin: The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to obtain profits. And they divide it "in proportion to capital", "in proportion to strength", because there cannot be any other method of division under commodity production and capitalism.

Karl Marx: Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.

Michael Parenti: If we communists merely hunger for power, why do we side with the powerless?

Michael Parenti: During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism didn't work" is to ignore that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in the living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.

Michael Parenti: Our fear that Communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has.

Michael Parenti: Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a "New Order" while serving the same old moneyed interests. Its leaders are not guilty of confusion but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled.

Michael Parenti: In every class society that's ever existed, the ruling element does not rule nakedly. They always adorn their rule with myths, themes and symbols to justify their position at the apex of the social pyramid.

Michael Parenti: Ideological orthodoxy so permeates the plutocratic culture, masquerading as "pluralism," "democracy," and the "open society," that it is often not felt as indoctrination. The worst forms of tyranny are those so subtle, so deeply ingrained, so thoroughly controlling as not even to be consciously experienced. So, there are Americans who are afraid to entertain contrary notions for fear of jeopardizing their jobs, but who still think they are "free."

Muhammad Ali: I have not seen a hitchhiker on the road, and I have not seen a single beggar on the streets of Soviet Russia. I had never felt so safe: no risk of being robbed. I was told that there is no freedom of religion in the Soviet Union, but Muslims, Christians and Jews worship freely here. I think the relationship between our people is bad just because of false propaganda.

Muhammad Ali: I was a little nervous when I landed in Russia. I thought I'd see the country in ruins, with a crowd of gloomy people who think like robots, and intelligence agents, who would follow my every step. Instead, I saw a country populated by a hundred nationalities, who are living together in harmony.

Paulo Freire: Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence?

Peter Ustinov: Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.

Giordano Bruno: Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.

Giordano Bruno: The fools of the world have been those who have established religions, ceremonies, laws, faith, rule of life. The greatest asses of the world are those who, lacking all understanding and instruction, and void of all civil life and custom, rot in perpetual pedantry.

Mao Zedong: Without a People's army, the people have nothing.

Denis Diderot: From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.

Lenin: In its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation. Disunited by the rule of anarchic competition in the bourgeois world, ground down by forced labour for capital, constantly thrust back to the "lower depths" of utter destitution, savagery, and degeneration, the proletariat can, and inevitably will, become an invincible force only through its ideological unification on the principles of Marxism being reinforced by the material unity of organisation, which welds millions of toilers into an army of the working class.

Karl Marx: Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.

Tom Mann: In short, as Karl Marx long ago explained, the capitalist is always after the “surplus” ie that the largest possible amount of the total value produced in the establishment shall come to him as profits, and therefore that the least possible should be absorbed as wages, expenses of management and general upkeep of the establishment.

Felix Dzerzhinsky: It is necessary to instil in the masses our own confidence in the inevitable bankruptcy of evil, so that they will be left with no doubt, so that they will come through this moment in serried ranks, prepared for battle. This is the task of the theoreticians. But the tasks of the others are to lay bare and show up this evil, to lay bare the sufferings and torments of the masses and of the individual fighters torn from their midst by the enemy, to give them the meaning they actually have and which gives them the strength to bear everything courageously, without wavering. Only in this way is it possible to instil in the masses courage and understanding of the need for struggle. Those who influence the mind and those who put confidence in victory into the heart and mind are both needed. Scientists and poets, teachers and propagandists are needed.

Malcolm X: Concerning non-violence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

Mao Zedong: In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.

Lenin: The Great French Revolution ushered in a new epoch in the history of mankind. From that time to the Paris Commune, from 1789 to 1871, one of the types of wars were wars of a bourgeois-progressive, national-liberating character. In other words, the chief content and historical significance of these wars were the overthrow of absolutism and feudalism, the undermining of these institutions, the overthrow of alien oppression. Therefore, those were progressive wars, and during such wars, all honest, revolutionary democrats, and also all Socialists, always sympathised with the success of that country (i.e., with that bourgeoisie), which had helped to overthrow, or sap, the most dangerous foundation of feudalism, absolutism and the oppression of other nations.

Lenin: Imperialism is the highest stage in the development of capitalism, reached only in the twentieth century. Capitalism now finds the old national states, without the formation of which it could not have overthrown feudalism, too tight for it. Capitalism has developed concentration to such a degree that whole branches of industry have been seized by syndicates, trusts and associations of capitalist billionaires, and almost the entire globe has been divided up among the "lords of capital, either in the form of colonies, or by enmeshing other countries in thousands of threads of financial exploitation. Free trade and competition have been superseded by the striving for monopoly, for the seizure of territory for the investment of capital, for the export of raw materials from them, and so forth. From the liberator of nations that capitalism was in the struggle against feudalism, imperialist capitalism has become the greatest oppressor of nations. Formerly progressive, capitalism has become reactionary; it has developed the forces of production to such a degree that mankind is faced with the alternative of going over to Socialism or of suffering years and even decades of armed struggle between the "great powers for the artificial preservation of capitalism by means of colonies, monopolies, privileges and national oppression of every kind.

Lenin: Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics possible for a revolutionary class, tactics that follow logically from, and are dictated by, the whole objective development of capitalist militarism. Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap. And the proletariat will undoubtedly do this, but only when this condition has been fulfilled, certainly not before.

Lenin: An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves.

Lenin: In every class society, whether based on slavery, serfdom, or, as at present, wage-labor, the oppressor class is always armed.

Kim Jong-il: The more the imperialists have intensified their counterrevolutionary and anti-socialist offensives to stifle the independent interests of the masses, the more resolutely our Party has defended and implemented revolutionary principles.

Tom Mann: We socialists declare that the whole world bears witness to the truth of the statement as to the effects of production for profit for capitalists, and that being so we declare the present system stands condemned.

Bashar al-Assad: The price for rejection or resistance is much less than the price of submission and surrender.

Tom Mann: A socialist is one who, having investigated the causes of present day social discord, decides that these causes are found in the private ownership of the means of wealth production and who therefore endorses the necessity for co-operative ownership in order to eliminate private or sectional monopoly, and secure the advantages for the whole people.

Lenin: Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy; Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic.