lenin.json

["The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed\r\nup in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of\r\nsocial labour, and the socialisation of that labour. But both these\r\nfacts manifest themselves in extremely diverse processes in different\r\nbranches of the national economy. \n\r\nLenin, The\r\nDevelopment of Capitalism in Russia, The \u201cThe\r\nMission of Capitalism\u201d (1899)", "Perhaps the profoundest cause of disagreement with the\r\nNarodniks is the difference in our fundamental views on social and\r\neconomic processes. When studying the latter, the Narodnik usually\r\ndraws conclusions that point to some moral; he does not regard the\r\ndiverse groups of persons taking part in production as creators of\r\nvarious forms of life; he does not set out to present the sum-total of\r\nsocial and economic relationships as the result of the mutual relations\r\nbetween these groups, which have different interests and different\r\nhistorical roles. ... \n\r\nLenin, The\r\nDevelopment of Capitalism in Russia, The \u201cThe\r\nMission of Capitalism\u201d (1899)", "If the writer of these lines has succeeded in providing some\r\nmaterial for clarifying these problems, he may regard his labours as\r\nnot having been fruitless.\n\r\nLenin, The\r\nDevelopment of Capitalism in Russia, The \u201cThe\r\nMission of Capitalism\u201d (1899)", "In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon,\r\nthat the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has\r\nfrom national become international.\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cDogmatism And \u2018Freedom of\r\nCriticism\u2019\u201d (1901)", "If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class\r\ndomination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole\r\nbourgeois world by orations on class collaboration?\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cDogmatism And \u2018Freedom of\r\nCriticism\u2019\u201d (1901)", "Those who are really convinced that they have made progress\r\nin science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side\r\nby side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cDogmatism And \u2018Freedom of\r\nCriticism\u2019\u201d (1901)", "We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and\r\ndifficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are\r\nsurrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost\r\nconstantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted\r\ndecision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating\r\ninto the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very\r\noutset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an\r\nexclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of\r\nthe path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let\r\nus go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort:\r\nWhat backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the\r\nliberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You\r\nare free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will,\r\neven into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper\r\nplace, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there.\r\nOnly let go of our hands, don\u2019t clutch at us and\r\ndon\u2019t besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are\r\n\u201cfree\u201d to go where we please, free to fight not\r\nonly against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards\r\nthe marsh! \n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cDogmatism And \u2018Freedom of\r\nCriticism\u2019\u201d (1901)", "In a country ruled by an autocracy, with a completely\r\nenslaved press, in a period of desperate political reaction in which\r\neven the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest is\r\npersecuted, the theory of revolutionary Marxism suddenly forced its way\r\ninto the censored literature before the government\r\nrealised what had happened and the unwieldy army of censors and\r\ngendarmes discovered the new enemy and flung itself upon him. \n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cCriticism in Russia\u201d (1901)", "This fear of criticism displayed by the advocates of freedom\r\nof criticism cannot be attributed solely to craftiness. No, the\r\nmajority of the Economists look with sincere resentment upon all\r\ntheoretical controversies, factional disagreements, broad political\r\nquestions, plans for organising revolutionaries, etc.\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cCriticism in Russia\u201d (1901)", "History has now confronted us with an immediate task which\r\nis the most revolutionary of all the immediate tasks confronting the\r\nproletariat of any country. The fulfilment of this task, the\r\ndestruction of the most powerful bulwark, not only of European, but (it\r\nmay now be said) of Asiatic reaction, would make the Russian\r\nproletariat the vanguard of the international revolutionary\r\nproletariat. And we have the right to count upon acquiring this\r\nhonourable title, already earned by our predecessors, the\r\nrevolutionaries of the seventies, if we succeed in inspiring our\r\nmovement, which is a thousand times broader and deeper, with the same\r\ndevoted determination and vigour.\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cCriticism in Russia\u201d (1901)", " Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology\r\nformulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their\r\nmovement, the only choice is \u2013 either bourgeois or socialist\r\nideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a\r\n\u201cthird\u201d ideology).\n\r\n(This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in\r\ncreating such an ideology. They take part, however, not as workers, but\r\nas socialist theoreticians, as Proudhons and Weitlings, to the extent\r\nthat they are able to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop\r\nthat knowledge.)\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cThe Spontaneity of the Masses and the\r\nConsciousness of the Social-Democrats\u201d (1901)", "To belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to\r\nturn aside from it in the slightest degree means to\r\nstrengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But\r\nthe spontaneous development of the working-class\r\nmovement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology; for the\r\nspontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, and trade\r\nunionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the\r\nbourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to\r\ncombat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from\r\nthis spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the\r\nbourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social\r\nDemocracy.\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cThe Spontaneity of the Masses and the\r\nConsciousness of the Social-Democrats\u201d (1901)", "Revolutionary Social-Democracy has always included the\r\nstruggle for reforms as part of its activities. But it utilises\r\n\u201ceconomic\u201d agitation for the purpose of presenting\r\nto the government, not only demands for all sorts of measures, but also\r\n(and primarily) the demand that it cease to be an autocratic government.\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cTrade-Unionist Politics And\r\nSocial-Democratic Politics\u201d (1901)", "A basic condition for the necessary expansion of political\r\nagitation is the organisation of comprehensive political exposure.\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cPolitical Exposures And \u2018Training\r\nIn Revolutionary Activity\u2019\u201d (1901)", "It is particularly necessary to arouse in all who\r\nparticipate in practical work, or are preparing to take up that work,\r\ndiscontent with the amateurism prevailing among\r\nus and an unshakable determination to rid ourselves of it.\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cThe Primitiveness of the Economists and the\r\nOrganization of the Revolutionaries\u201d (1901)", "This struggle must be organised, according to \u201call\r\nthe rules of the art\u201d, by people who are professionally\r\nengaged in revolutionary activity. The fact that the masses are\r\nspontaneously being drawn into the movement does not make the\r\norganisation of this struggle less necessary. On\r\nthe contrary, it makes it more necessary. \n\r\nLenin, The\r\nPrimitiveness of the Economists and the Organization of the\r\nRevolutionaries (1901)", "This struggle must be organised, according to \u201call\r\nthe rules of the art\u201d, by people who are professionally\r\nengaged in revolutionary activity. \n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cThe Primitiveness of the Economists and the\r\nOrganization of the Revolutionaries\u201d (1901)", "Attention, must be devoted principally to raising\r\nthe workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task to\r\ndescend to the level of the \u201cworking\r\nmasses.\u201d\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cThe Primitiveness of the Economists and the\r\nOrganization of the Revolutionaries\u201d (1901)", "Every question \u201cruns in a\r\nvicious circle\u201d because political life as a whole is an\r\nendless chain consisting of an infinite number of links. The whole art\r\nof politics lies in finding and taking as firm a grip as we can of the\r\nlink that is least likely to be struck from our hands, the one that is\r\nmost important at the given moment, the one that most of all guarantees\r\nits possessor the possession of the whole chain.\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cThe Plan For an All-Russia Political\r\nNewspaper\u201d (1901)", "A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a\r\ncollective agitator, it is also a collective organiser. \n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cThe Plan For an All-Russia Political\r\nNewspaper\u201d (1901)", "If the Congress was a struggle between the Iskra-ist and the\r\nanti-Iskra-ist elements, were there no intermediate, unstable elements\r\nwho vacillated between the two? Anyone at all familiar with our Party\r\nand with the picture generally presented by congresses of every kind\r\nwill be inclined a priori to answer the question in the affirmative.\n\r\nLenin, One Step\r\nForward, Two Steps Back, (1904)", "But every little difference may become a big one if it is\r\ninsisted on.\n\r\nLenin, One Step\r\nForward, Two Steps Back, \u201cParagraph One of the\r\nRules\u201d (1904)", "Are we to build the Party on the basis of that already\r\nformed and welded core of Social-Democrats which\r\nbrought about the Party Congress, for instance, and which should\r\nenlarge and multiply Party organisations of all kinds; or are we to\r\ncontent ourselves with the soothing phrase that\r\nall who help are Party members? \n\r\nLenin, One Step\r\nForward, Two Steps Back, \u201cParagraph One of the\r\nRules\u201d (1904)", "In the beginning we had to teach the workers the ABC, both\r\nin the literal and in the figurative senses. Now the standard of\r\npolitical literacy has risen so gigantically that we can and should\r\nconcentrate all our efforts on the more direct Social-Democratic\r\nobjectives aimed at giving an organised direction to the revolutionary\r\nstream.\n\r\nLenin, New Tasks and New\r\nForces (1905)", "Social-Democracy, however, wants, on the contrary, to\r\ndevelop the class struggle of the proletariat to the point where the\r\nlatter will take the leading part in the popular Russian revolution,\r\ni.e., will lead this revolution to a the democratic-dictatorship of the\r\nproletariat and the peasantry. \n\r\nLenin, Two Tactics\r\nof Social Democracy (1905)", "The basic mistake made by those who now criticise What\r\nIs To Be Done? (1901) is to treat the pamphlet apart from\r\nits connection with the concrete historical situation of a definite,\r\nand now long past, period in the development of our Party.\n\r\nLenin, Preface to\r\nthe Collection \u201cTwelve Years\u201d (1905)", "That today, when the wave has ebbed, there remain and will\r\nremain only real Marxists, does not frighten us but rejoices us. \n\r\nLenin, Two Letters\r\n(1908)", "When the masses are digesting a new and exceptionally rich\r\nexperience of direct revolutionary struggle, the theoretical struggle\r\nfor a revolutionary outlook, i.e., for revolutionary Marxism, becomes\r\nthe watchword of the day. \n\r\nLenin, Two Letters\r\n(1908)", "1) Things exist independently of our consciousness,\r\nindependently of our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt\r\nthat alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond\r\ndoubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin\r\nand received no sensations from it.\r\n2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the\r\nphenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be no such\r\ndifference. The only difference is between what is known and what is\r\nnot yet known. And philosophical inventions of specific boundaries\r\nbetween the one and the other, inventions to the effect that the\r\nthing-in-itself is \u201cbeyond\u201d phenomena (Kant), or\r\nthat we can and must fence ourselves off by some philosophical\r\npartition from the problem of a world which in one part or another is\r\nstill unknown but which exists outside us (Hume)\u2014all this is\r\nthe sheerest nonsense, Schrulle, crotchet,\r\ninvention.\r\n3) In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we\r\nmust think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as\r\nready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge\r\nemerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact\r\nknowledge becomes more complete and more exact.\n\r\nLenin, Materialism and\r\nEmpirio-Criticism (1908)", "Once we accept the point of view that human knowledge\r\ndevelops from ignorance, we shall find millions of examples of it just\r\nas simple as the discovery of alizarin in coal tar, millions of\r\nobservations not only in the history of science and technology but in\r\nthe everyday life of each and every one of us that illustrate the\r\ntransformation of \u201cthings-in-themselves\u201d into\r\n\u201cthings-for-us.\u201d \n\r\nLenin, Materialism and\r\nEmpirio-Criticism (1908)", "It goes without saying that in examining the connection\r\nbetween one of the schools of modern physicists and the rebirth of\r\nphilosophical idealism, it is far from being our intention to deal with\r\nspecific physical theories. What interests us exclusively is the\r\nepistemological conclusions that follow from certain definite\r\npropositions and generally known discoveries. Our object, therefore,\r\nwill be confined to explaining clearly the essence of the difference\r\nbetween these various trends and the relation in which they stand to\r\nthe fundamental lines of philosophy.\n\r\nLenin, The Recent\r\nRevolution in Natural Science and Philosophical Idealism\r\n(1908)", "Behind the epistemological scholasticism of\r\nempirio-criticism one must not fail to see the struggle of parties in\r\nphilosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the\r\ntendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society.\n\r\nLenin, The Recent\r\nRevolution in Natural Science and Philosophical Idealism,\r\nConclusion (1908)", "The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his\r\nability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by\r\npresenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most\r\nconvincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly\r\nimpressive.\n\r\nLenin, The Slogans and\r\nOrganisation of Social-Democratic Work (1919)", "All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery,\r\nwhereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.\n\r\nLenin, The Three Sources\r\nand Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)", "The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is\r\ncomprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world\r\noutlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or\r\ndefence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the\r\nbest that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by\r\nGerman philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.\n\r\nLenin, The Three Sources\r\nand Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)", "Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things\r\n(the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation\r\nbetween people. \n\r\nLenin, The Three Sources\r\nand Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)", "Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the\r\nworker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed.\n\r\nLenin, The Three Sources\r\nand Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)", "By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an\r\nincrease in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly\r\nposition for the associations of big capitalists.\n\r\nLenin, The Three Sources\r\nand Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)", "Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this\r\ntriumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.\n\r\nLenin, The Three Sources\r\nand Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)", "When feudalism was overthrown and \u201cfree\u201d\r\ncapitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent\r\nthat this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of\r\nthe working people.\n\r\nLenin, The Three Sources\r\nand Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)", "People always have been the foolish victims of deception and\r\nself-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have\r\nlearnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all\r\nmoral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and\r\npromises.\n\r\nLenin, The Three Sources\r\nand Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)", "And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of\r\nthose classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds\r\nus, the forces which can\u2014and, owing to their social position,\r\nmust\u2014constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old\r\nand creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for\r\nthe struggle.\n\r\nLenin, The Three Sources\r\nand Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)", "I am in general trying to read Hegel materialistically:\r\nHegel is materialism which has been stood on its head (according to\r\nEngels) \u2013 that is to say, I cast aside for the most part God,\r\nthe Absolute, the Pure Idea, etc. \n\r\nLenin, Conspectus\r\nof Hegel\u2019s Logic (1914)", "Dialectics is the teaching which shows\r\nhow Opposites can be and how they happen to be (how\r\nthey become) identical,\u2014under what\r\nconditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one\r\nanother,\u2014why the human mind should grasp these opposites not\r\nas dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, becoming\r\ntransformed into one another.\n\r\nLenin, Conspectus\r\nof Hegel\u2019s Logic (1914)", "These parts of the work should be called: \u201ca best\r\nmeans for getting a headache!\u201d \n\r\nLenin, Conspectus\r\nof Hegel\u2019s Logic (1914)", "It is impossible completely to understand Marx\u2019s Capital,\r\nand especially its first Chapter, without having thoroughly studied and\r\nunderstood the whole of Hegel\u2019s Logic.\r\nConsequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood\r\nMarx!! \n\r\nLenin, Conspectus\r\nof Hegel\u2019s Logic (1914)", "Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number\r\nof sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of\r\nevery approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical\r\nsystem growing into a whole out of each shade) \n\r\nLenin, Summary\r\nof Dialectics (1914)", "Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint\r\nof crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of\r\ndialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a\r\none-sided, exaggerated, development (inflation, distension) of one of\r\nthe features, aspects, facets of knowledge, into an absolute, divorced\r\nfrom matter, from nature, apotheosised.\n\r\nLenin, Summary\r\nof Dialectics (1914)", "Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line,\r\nbut a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a\r\nspiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed\r\n(transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line,\r\nwhich then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the\r\nquagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored\r\nby the class interests of the ruling classes).\n\r\nLenin, Summary\r\nof Dialectics (1914)", "To the socialist it is not the horrors of war that are the hardest\r\nto endure ... but the horrors of the treachery shown by the leaders of\r\npresent day socialism, the horrors of the collapse of the present-day\r\nInternational.\n\r\nLenin, The European War and International Socialism\r\n(1914)", "War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and\r\nSocialism is created.\n\r\nLenin, Socialism and War\r\n(1915)", "We fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the\r\noppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against\r\nslave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage-workers against the\r\nbourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary.\n\r\nLenin, Socialism and War\r\n(1915)", "If tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on\r\nEngland, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be\r\n\u201cjust\u201d \u201cdefensive\u201d wars, irrespective\r\nof who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathise with the\r\nvictory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the\r\noppressing, slave-owning, predatory \u201cgreat\u201d powers.\n\r\nLenin, Socialism and War\r\n(1915)", "The working class cannot play its world-revolutionary role\r\nunless it wages a ruthless struggle against this renegacy.\r\nspinelessness, subservience to opportunism and unexampled vulgarization\r\nof the theories of Marxism.\n\r\nLenin, Socialism and War\r\n(1915)", "Convert the imperialist war into civil war.\n\r\nLenin, Socialism and War\r\n(1915)", "A revolutionary class cannot but wish for the defeat of its\r\ngovernment in a reactionary war.\n\r\nLenin, Socialism and War\r\n(1915)", "Socialists must explain to the masses that they have no\r\nother road of salvation except the revolutionary overthrow of\r\n\u201ctheir\u201d governments, and that advantage must be\r\ntaken of these governments\u2019 embarrassments in the present war\r\nprecisely for this purpose. \n\r\nLenin, Socialism and War\r\n(1915)", "Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting\r\nagainst all oppression of nations.\n\r\nLenin, Socialism and War\r\n(1915)", "The Socialists of oppressed nations\r\nmust, in their turn, unfailingly fight for the complete (including\r\norganisational) unity of the workers of the\r\noppressed and oppressing nationalities.\n\r\nLenin, Socialism and War\r\n(1915)", "The war of 1914-18 was imperialist (that is, an\r\nannexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it\r\nwas a war for the division of the world, for the partition and\r\nrepartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital.\n\r\nLenin, Imperialism:\r\nThe Highest Stage of Capitalism (1914)", "We Social-Democrats always stand for democracy, not\r\n\u201cin the name of capitalism, \u201d but in the name of\r\nclearing the path for our movement, which clearing\r\nis impossible without the development of capitalism. \n\r\nLenin, Letter to Inessa\r\nArmand (1916)", "Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not\r\nfor freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak\r\nnations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations\r\n\u2014 all these have given birth to those distinctive\r\ncharacteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as\r\nparasitic or decaying capitalism.\n\r\nLenin, Imperialism:\r\nThe Highest Stage of Capitalism (1914)", "When nine-tenths of Africa had been seized (by 1900), when\r\nthe whole world had been divided up,there was inevitably ushered in the\r\nera of monopoly possession of colonies and, consequently, of\r\nparticularly intense struggle for the division and the redivision of\r\nthe world. \n\r\nLenin, Imperialism:\r\nThe Highest Stage of Capitalism (1914)", "The so-called Great Powers have long been exploiting and\r\nenslaving a whole number of small and weak nations. And the imperialist\r\nwar is a war for the division and redivision of this kind of booty.\n\r\nLenin, State\r\nand Revolution (1917)", "It is not done in modern socialist parties to talk or even\r\nthink about the significance of this idea, \u2014 the\r\n\u201cwithering away\u201d of the state.\n\r\nLenin, State and\r\nRevolution (1917)", "A standing army and police are the chief instruments of\r\nstate power.\n\r\nLenin, State and\r\nRevolution (1917)", "Our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks themselves\r\nshare, and instil into the minds of the people, the false notion that\r\nuniversal suffrage \u201cin the present-day state\u201d is\r\nreally capable of revealing the will of the majority of the working\r\npeople and of securing its realization.\n\r\nLenin, State and\r\nRevolution (1917)", "the working class must break up, smash the\r\n\u201cready-made state machinery,\u201d and not confine\r\nitself merely to laying hold of it.\n\r\nLenin, State and\r\nRevolution (1917)", "Democracy is a form of the state, it represents, on the one\r\nhand, the organized, systematic use of force against persons; but, on\r\nthe other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of\r\ncitizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to\r\nadminister, the state. \n\r\nLenin, State and\r\nRevolution (1917)", "Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the\r\nrich \u2014 that is the democracy of capitalist society.\n\r\nLenin, State and\r\nRevolution (1917)", "The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide\r\nwhich particular representatives of the oppressing class shall\r\nrepresent and repress them in parliament.\n\r\nLenin, State and\r\nRevolution (1917)", "The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization\r\nof the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of\r\nsuppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of\r\ndemocracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which\r\nfor the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the\r\npeople, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the\r\nproletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the\r\noppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. \n\r\nLenin, State and\r\nRevolution (1917)", "And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is\r\ncurtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the\r\nminority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition\r\nto communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people,\r\nfor the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the\r\nexploiters, of the minority.\n\r\nLenin, State and\r\nRevolution (1917)", "In our attitude towards the war, which under the new\r\ngovernment of Lvov and Co. unquestionably remains on Russia\u2019s\r\npart a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that\r\ngovernment, not the slightest concession to \u201crevolutionary\r\ndefencism\u201d is permissible.\n\r\nLenin, April Theses\r\n(1917)", "In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of\r\nthe mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only\r\nas a necessity, and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact\r\nthat they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with\r\nparticular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their\r\nerror to them, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it\r\nis impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace.\n\r\nLenin, April Theses\r\n(1917)", "The masses must be made to see that the Sovietsof\r\nWorkers\u2019 Deputies\r\nare the only possible form of revolutionary\r\ngovernment.\n\r\nLenin, April Theses\r\n(1917)", "Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy. The\r\nsalaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable\r\nat any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.\n\r\nLenin, April Theses\r\n(1917)", "It is not our immediate task to\r\n\u201cintroduce\u201d socialism, but only to bring social\r\nproduction and the distribution of products at once under the control\r\nof the Soviets of Workers\u2019 Deputies.\n\r\nLenin, April Theses\r\n(1917)", "It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than\r\nto attempt to relate, to explain.\n\r\nLenin, April Theses\r\n(1917)", "A party is the vanguard of a class, and its duty is to lead\r\nthe masses and not merely to reflect the average political level of the\r\nmasses.\n\r\nLenin, Speech On The\r\nAgrarian Question November 14 (1917)", "It is the duty of the revolution to put an end to\r\ncompromise, and to put an end to compromise means taking the path of\r\nsocialist revolution.\n\r\nLenin, Speech On The\r\nAgrarian Question November 14 (1917)", "The Russian is a bad worker compared with people in advanced\r\ncountries. It could not be otherwise under the tsarist regime and in\r\nview of the persistence of the hangover from serfdom. The task that the\r\nSoviet government must set the people in all its scope is - learn to\r\nwork. The Taylor system, the last word of capitalism in this respect,\r\nlike all capitalist progress, is a combination of the refined brutality\r\nof bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific\r\nachievements in the field.\n\r\nLenin, The Immediate\r\nTask of the Soviet Government (1918)", "Human child birth is an act which transforms the woman into\r\nan almost lifeless, bloodstained heap of flesh, tortured, tormented and\r\ndriven frantic by pain. \n\r\nLenin, Prophetic Words\r\n(1918)", "Let the \u201csocialist\u201d snivellers croak,\r\nlet the bourgeoisie rage and fume, but only people who shut their eyes\r\nso as not to see, and stuff their ears so as not to hear, can fail to\r\nnotice that all over the world the birth pangs of the old, capitalist\r\nsociety, which is pregnant with socialism, have begun. \n\r\nLenin, Prophetic Words\r\n(1918)", "The passing of state power from one class\r\nto another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution,\r\nboth in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning\r\nof that term. To this extent, the bourgeois, or the\r\nbourgeois-democratic, revolution in Russia is completed.\r\n\n\r\nLenin, Letters on Tactics\r\n(1918)", "The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole\r\nhave been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently;\r\nthey are more original, more peculiar, more variated than anyone could\r\nhave expected.. \n\r\nLenin, Letters on Tactics\r\n(1918)", "\u201cThe revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the\r\nproletariat and the peasantry\u201d has already become a reality\r\nin the Russian revolution, for this \u201cformula\u201d\r\nenvisages only a relation of classes, and not a concrete\r\npolitical institution implementing this relation. \n\r\nLenin, Letters on Tactics\r\n(1918)", "The crisis in Germany has only begun. It will inevitably end\r\nin the transfer of political power to the German proletariat. The\r\nRussian proletariat is following events with the keenest attention and\r\nenthusiasm. Now even the blindest workers in the various countries will\r\nsee that the Bolsheviks were right in basing their whole tactics on the\r\nsupport of the world workers' revolution.\n\r\nLenin, Letter To A Joint\r\nSession Of The All-Russia Central Executive Committee (1918)", "In the course of two years Soviet power in one of the most\r\nbackward countries of Europe did more to emancipate women and to make\r\ntheir status equal to that of the \u201cstrong\u201d sex than\r\nall the advanced, enlightened, \u201cdemocratic\u201d\r\nrepublics of the world did in the course of 130 years.\n\r\nLenin, Soviet Power and\r\nthe Status of Women (1919)", "Down with this contemptible fraud! There cannot be, nor is\r\nthere nor will there ever be \u201cequality\u201d between the\r\noppressed and the oppressors, between the exploited and the exploiters.\r\nThere cannot be, nor is there nor will there ever be real\r\n\u201cfreedom\u201d as long as there is no freedom for women\r\nfrom the privileges which the law grants to men, as long as there is no\r\nfreedom for the workers from the yoke of capital, and no freedom for\r\nthe toiling peasants from the yoke of the capitalists, landlords and\r\nmerchants.\n\r\nLenin, Soviet Power and\r\nthe Status of Women (1919)", "Bourgeois democracy is democracy of pompous phrases, solemn\r\nwords, exuberant promises and the high-sounding slogans of freedom and\r\nequality. But, in fact, it screens the non-freedom and inferiority of\r\nwomen, the non-freedom and inferiority of the toilers and exploited.\n\r\nLenin, Soviet Power and\r\nthe Status of Women (1919)", "Modern monopolist capitalism on a world-wide scale\r\n\u2014 imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such\r\nan economic system, as long as private property in\r\nthe means of production exists.\n\r\nLenin, Imperialism:\r\nThe Highest Stage of Capitalism (1920)", "We must display determination, endurance, firmness and\r\nunanimity. We must stop at nothing. Everybody and everything must be\r\nused to save the rule of the workers and peasants, to save communism. \n\r\nLenin, Speech to Third\r\nAll-Russia Congress of Textile Workers (1920)", "But the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised\r\nthrough an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in\r\nall capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most\r\nbackward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so\r\ncorrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an\r\norganisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise\r\nproletarian dictatorship. \n\r\nLenin, The Trade Unions,\r\nThe Present Situation and Trotsky's Mistakes (1920)", "The Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a\r\nhalf months, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous\r\nand truly iron discipline in our Party.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "How is the discipline of the proletariat\u2019s\r\nrevolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced?\r\nFirst, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by\r\nits devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and\r\nheroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest\r\ncontact, and\u2014if you wish\u2014merge, in certain measure,\r\nwith the broadest masses of the working people\u2014primarily with\r\nthe proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian\r\nmasses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political\r\nleadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its\r\npolitical strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from\r\ntheir own experience, that they are correct.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "Russia achieved Marxism\u2014the only correct\r\nrevolutionary theory\u2014through the agony\r\nshe experienced in the course of half a century of unparalleled torment\r\nand sacrifice, of unparalleled revolutionary heroism, incredible\r\nenergy, devoted searching, study, practical trial, disappointment,\r\nverification, and comparison with European experience.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "Thanks to the political emigration caused by tsarism,\r\nrevolutionary Russia acquired a wealth of international links and\r\nexcellent information on the forms and theories of the world\r\nrevolutionary movement, such as no other country possessed.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "Bolshevism went through fifteen years of practical history\r\n(1903-17) unequalled anywhere in the world in its wealth of experience.\r\nDuring those fifteen years, no other country knew anything even\r\napproximating to that revolutionary experience, that rapid and varied\r\nsuccession of different forms of the movement\u2014legal and\r\nillegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and\r\nmass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "It is at moments of need that one learns who one\u2019s\r\nfriends are. Defeated armies learn their lesson.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "Experience has proved that, on certain very important\r\nquestions of the proletarian revolution, all\r\ncountries will inevitably have to do what Russia has done.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "Without such thorough, circumspect and long preparations\r\n[since 1903], we could not have achieved victory in October 1917, or\r\nhave consolidated that victory.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "To reject compromises \u201con principle,\u201d to\r\nreject the permissibility of compromises in general, no matter of what\r\nkind, is childishness. A political leader who desires to be useful to\r\nthe revolutionary proletariat must be able to distinguish concrete\r\ncases of compromises that are inexcusable and are an expression of\r\nopportunism and treachery.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "In 1912 the agent provocateur\r\nMalinovsky got into the Bolshevik Central Committee. He betrayed scores\r\nand scores\r\nof the best and most loyal comrades; he was obliged, with the other, to\r\nassist in the education of scores and scores of thousands of new\r\nBolsheviks through the medium of the legal press.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "If you want to help the \u201cmasses\u201d and win\r\nthe sympathy and support of the \u201cmasses,\u201d you\r\nshould not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and\r\npersecution from the \u201cleaders,\u201d but must absolutely\r\nwork wherever the masses are to be found.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "All efforts and all attention should now be concentrated on\r\nthe next step \u2014 the search after forms\r\nof the transition or the approach\r\nto the proletarian revolution.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "One must not count in thousands, like the propagandist\r\nbelonging to a small group that has not yet given leadership to the\r\nmasses; in these circumstances one must count in millions and tens of\r\nmillions.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "any army which does not train to use all the weapons, all\r\nthe means and methods of warfare that the enemy possesses, or may\r\npossess, is behaving in an unwise or even criminal manner. This applies\r\nto politics even more than it does to the art of war.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "It is not difficult to be a revolutionary when revolution\r\nhas already broken out and is in spate, when all people are joining the\r\nrevolution just because they are carried away, because it is the vogue,\r\nand sometimes even from careerist motives. It is far more\r\ndifficult\u2014and far more precious\u2014to be a\r\nrevolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and\r\nreally revolutionary struggle do not yet exist.\n\r\nLenin, Left-Wing\r\nCommunism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)", "One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by\r\nCommunists is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries\r\nalone. On the contrary, to be successful, all serious revolutionary\r\nwork requires that the idea that revolutionaries are capable of playing\r\nthe part only of the vanguard of the truly virile and advanced class\r\nmust be understood and translated into action.\n\r\nLenin, The Significance\r\nof Militant Materialism (1922)", "Without an alliance with non-Communists in the most diverse\r\nspheres of activity there can be no question of any successful\r\ncommunist construction.\n\r\nLenin, The Significance\r\nof Militant Materialism (1922)", "The most important thing is to know how to awaken in the\r\nstill undeveloped masses an intelligent attitude towards religious\r\nquestions and an intelligent criticism of religions.\n\r\nLenin, The Significance\r\nof Militant Materialism (1922)", "No natural science can hold its own in the struggle against\r\nthe onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the restoration of the bourgeois\r\nworld outlook unless it stands on solid philosophical ground. In order\r\nto hold his own in this struggle and carry it to a victorious finish,\r\nthe natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious\r\nadherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a\r\ndialectical materialist.\n\r\nLenin, The Significance\r\nof Militant Materialism (1922)", "Modern natural scientists (if they know how to seek, and if\r\nwe learn to help them) will find in the Hegelian dialectics,\r\nmaterialistically interpreted, a series of answers to the philosophical\r\nproblems which are being raised by the revolution in natural science.\n\r\nLenin, The Significance\r\nof Militant Materialism (1922)", "the prime factors in the question of stability are such\r\nmembers of the C.C. as Stalin and Trotsky. I think relations between\r\nthem make up the greater part of the danger of a split.\n\r\nLenin, Letter\r\nto the Congress (1922)", "Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has\r\nunlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure\r\nwhether he will always be capable of using that authority with\r\nsufficient caution.\n\r\nLenin, Letter\r\nto the Congress (1922)", "Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable\r\nin our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in\r\na Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think\r\nabout a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another\r\nman in his stead.\n\r\nLenin, Letter\r\nto the Congress (1922)", "Our schoolteacher should be raised to a standard he has\r\nnever achieved, and cannot achieve, in bourgeois society. This is a\r\ntruism and requires no proof. \n\r\nLenin, Pages from a Diary\r\n(1923)", "If a definite level of culture is required for the building\r\nof socialism (although nobody can say just what that definite\r\n\u2018level of culture\u2019 is, for it differs in every\r\nWestern European country), why cannot we began by first achieving the\r\nprerequisites for that definite level of culture in a revolutionary\r\nway, and then, with the aid of the workers\u2019 and\r\npeasants\u2019 government and Soviet system, proceed to overtake\r\nthe other nations? \n\r\nLenin, Our Revolution\r\n(1923)", "Napoleon, I think, wrote: \u201cOn\r\ns\u2019engage et puis ... on voit.\u201d rendered\r\nfreely this means: \u201cFirst engage in a serious battle and then\r\nsee what happens. \u201d Well, we did first engage in a serious\r\nbattle in October 1917. And now there can be no doubt that in the main\r\nwe have been victorious. \n\r\nLenin, Our Revolution\r\n(1923)", "We must follow the rule: Better fewer, but better. We must\r\nfollow the rule: Better get good human material in two or even three\r\nyears than work in haste without hope of getting any at all.\n\r\nLenin, Better fewer, but\r\nBetter (1923)", "While the bourgeois state methodically concentrates all its\r\nefforts on doping the urban workers, adapting all the literature\r\npublished at state expense and at the expense of the tsarist and\r\nbourgeois parties for this purpose, we can and must utilise our\r\npolitical power to make the urban worker an effective vehicle of\r\ncommunist ideas among the rural proletariat. \n\r\nLenin, Pages from a Diary\r\n(1923)", "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary\r\nmovement.\n\r\nLenin, What Is To Be\r\nDone?, \u201cDogmatism And \u2018Freedom of\r\nCriticism\u2019\u201d (1902)", "So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there\r\nis freedom, there will be no state.\n\r\nLenin, The State\r\nand Revolution (1917)", "Democracy means equality. The great significance of the\r\nproletariat's struggle for equality and of equality as a slogan will be\r\nclear if we correctly interpret it as meaning the abolition of classes.\r\nBut democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is\r\nachieved for all members of society in relation to ownership of the\r\nmeans of production, that is, equality of labor and wages, humanity\r\nwill inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing father,\r\nfrom formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the\r\nrule \u201cfrom each according to his ability, to each according\r\nto his needs\u201d.\n\r\nLenin, The State\r\nand Revolution (1917)", "We say: our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society,\r\nwhich, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by\r\neliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will\r\ninevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.\n\r\nLenin, War and Revolution\r\n(1917)", "The real education of the masses can never be separated from\r\ntheir independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle.\r\nOnly struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to\r\nit the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its\r\nabilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.\n\r\nLenin, Lecture on the\r\n1905 Revolution (1917)", "Capital is an international force. To vanquish it, an\r\ninternational workers' alliance, an international workers' brotherhood,\r\nis needed.\r\nWe are opposed to national enmity and discord, to national\r\nexclusiveness. We are internationalists.\n\r\nLenin, Letter to the\r\nWorkers and Peasants of the Ukraine (1919)", "[...] I must say that the tasks of the youth in general, and\r\nof the Young Communist Leagues and all other organisations in\r\nparticular, might be summed up in a single word: learn.\n\r\nLenin, The Tasks of the\r\nYouth Leagues (1920)", "\r\nThe only genuine source of Marx quotes on the internet, in which every quote is sourced by a link to the original context.", "If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.\r\nMarx, Reflections of a Young Man (1835)", "History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.\r\nMarx, Reflections of a Young Man (1835)", "As Prometheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to settle upon the earth, so philosophy, expanded to be the whole world, turns against the world of appearance. The same now with the philosophy of Hegel.\r\nMarx, Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,  1839)", "Real talers have the same existence that the imagined gods have. Has a real taler any existence except in the imagination, if only in the general or rather common imagination of man? Bring paper money into a country where this use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination.\r\nMarx, Doctoral Thesis, Appendix (1841)", "Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.\r\nMarx, Doctoral Thesis, Chapter 1 (1841)", "What is genuine is proved in the fire, what is false we shall not miss in our ranks. The opponents must grant us that youth has never before flocked to our colours in such numbers, ... in the end, one will be found among us who will prove that the sword of enthusiasm is just as good as the sword of genius.\r\nEngels, Anti-Schelling (1841)", "The representation of private interests ... abolishes all natural and spiritual distinctions by enthroning in their stead the immoral, irrational and soulless abstraction of a particular material object and a particular consciousness which is slavishly subordinated to this object.\r\nMarx, On the Thefts of Wood, in Rheinische Zeitung (1842)", "\u201catheism\u201d ... reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man.\r\nMarx, Letter to 30 November 1842", "In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. ... the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions. ... When the publishers of the Rheinische Zeitung conceived the illusion that by a more compliant policy on the part of the paper it might be possible to secure the abrogation of the death sentence passed upon it, I eagerly grasped the opportunity to withdraw from the public stage to my study.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)", "Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.\r\nEngels, Outlines of Political Economy (1844)", "The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.\r\nMarx, Critique of Hegel\u2019s Philosophy of Right (1843)", "The bureaucrat has the world as a mere object of his action.\nCritique of Hegel\u2019s Philosophy of Right (1843)", "This is a kind of mutual reconciliation society... Actual extremes cannot be mediated with each other precisely because they are actual extremes. But neither are they in need of mediation, because they are opposed in essence.\r\nMarx, Critique of Hegel\u2019s Philosophy of Right (1843)", "All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.\r\nMarx, Critique of Hegel\u2019s Philosophy of Right (1843)", "We develop new principles for the world out of the world\u2019s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.\r\nMarx, Letter from the Deutsch-Franz\u00f6sische Jahrb\u00fccher to Ruge (1843)", "Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.\r\nMarx, Letter from the Deutsch-Franz\u00f6sische Jahrb\u00fccher to Ruge (1843)", "But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.\r\nMarx, Letter from the Deutsch-Franz\u00f6sische Jahrb\u00fccher (1843)", "The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; buttheory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.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.\r\nMarx, Critique of Hegel\u2019s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1843)", "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.It is the opium of the people.\r\nMarx, Critique of Hegel\u2019s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1843)", "The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities\r\nMarx, Critical Notes on the Article \u2018The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian\u2019 (1844)", "When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need \u2014 the need for society \u2014 and what appears as a means becomes an end. ... the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.\r\nMarx, Human Needs & the division of Labour (1844)", "Do I obey economic laws if I extract money by offering my body for sale,... \u2014 Then the political economist replies to me: You do not transgress my laws; but see what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say about it. My political economic ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with, but \u2014 But whom am I now to believe, political economy or ethics? \u2014 The ethics of political economy is acquisition, work, thrift, sobriety \u2014 but political economy promises to satisfy my needs. ... It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies to me a different and opposite yardstick \u2014 ethics one and political economy another; for each is a specific estrangement of man and focuses attention on a particular field of estranged essential activity, and each stands in an estranged relation to the other.\r\nMarx, Human Needs & the division of Labour (1844)", "The only intelligible language in which we converse with one another consists of our objects in their relation to each other. We would not understand a human language and it would remain without effect. By one side it would be recognised and felt as being a request, an entreaty, and therefore a humiliation\r\nMarx, Comment on James Mill (1844)", "Our mutual value is for us the value of our mutual objects.Hence for us man himself is mutually of no value.\r\nMarx, Comment on James Mill (1844)", "Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.\r\nMarx, Wages of Labour (1844)", "Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.\r\nMarx, Private Property and Communism (1844)", "The entire movement of history, as simply communism\u2019s actual act of genesis \u2014 the birth act of its empirical existence \u2014 is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming.\r\nMarx, Private Property and Communism (1844)", "But also when I am active scientifically, etc. \u2013 an activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others \u2013 then my activity is social, because I perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.\nPrivate Property and Communism (1844)", "Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.\r\nMarx, Private Property and Communism (1844)", "Natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man. Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, .... <The nature which develops in human history \u2014 the genesis of human society \u2014 is man\u2019s real nature; hence nature as it develops through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature.>\r\nMarx, Private Property and Communism (1844)", "Subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity [T\u00e4tigkeit] and suffering, lose their antithetical character, and \u2013 thus their existence as such antitheses only within the framework of society; <we see how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.\r\nMarx, Private Property and Communism (1844)", "In general it is always empirical businessmen we are talking about when we refer to political economists, (who represent) their scientific creed and form of existence.\r\nMarx, Human Requirements and Division of Labour (1844)", "Under private property ... Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual plundering.\r\nMarx, Human Requirements and Division of Labour (1844)", "Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers \u2014 he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities \u2014 as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. ... A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. \r\nMarx, Critique of Hegel\u2019s Philosophy in General (1844)", "A few days in my old man\u2019s factory have sufficed to bring me face to face with this beastliness, which I had rather overlooked. ..., it is impossible to carry on communist propaganda on a large scale and at the same time engage in huckstering and industry.\r\nEngels, Letter to Marx. January 20 1845)", "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.\r\nMarx, German Ideology (1845)", "The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.\r\nMarx, German Ideology (1845)", "Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.\r\nMarx, German Ideology (1845)", "We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist. The history of nature, called natural science, does not concern us here; but we will have to examine the history of men, since almost the whole ideology amounts either to a distorted conception of this history or to a complete abstraction from it. Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of this history.\r\nMarx, German Ideology (1845)", "In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.\r\nMarx, German Ideology (1845)", "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.\r\nMarx, German Ideology (1845)", "For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.\r\nMarx, German Ideology (1845)", "As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist.\r\nMarx, German Ideology (1845)", "Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and ... the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, ... a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.\r\nMarx, German Ideology (1845)", "The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature....Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life\r\nMarx, German Ideology (1845)", "The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.\r\nMarx, Theses On Feuerbach: Thesis 2 (1845)", "The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.\r\nMarx, Theses On Feuerbach: Thesis 3 (1845)", "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.\r\nMarx, Theses On Feuerbach: Thesis 11 (1845)", "One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm.\r\nMarx, German Ideology, Chapter 3 (1846)", "History does nothing, it \u2018possesses no immense wealth\u2019, it \u2018wages no battles\u2019. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; \u2018history\u2019 is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims..\r\nMarx, The Holy Family, Chapter 6 (1846)", "The productive forces are the result of man\u2019s practical energy, but that energy is in turn circumscribed by the conditions in which man is placed by the productive forces already acquired, by the form of society which exists before him, which he does not create, which is the product of the preceding generation.\r\nMarx, 1846 Letter to Annenkov (1846)", "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.\r\nMarx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)", "Economists explain how production takes place in the above-mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical movement which gave them birth. M. Proudhon, taking these relations for principles, categories, has merely to put into order these thoughts.\r\nMarx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)", "Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labor.\r\nMarx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)", "The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.\r\nMarx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)", "But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece. So long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society. From this moment, science, which is a product of the historical movement, has associated itself consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary.\r\nMarx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)", "The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.\r\nEngels, Principles of Communism (1847)", "What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.\r\nWhat is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor....\r\nEngels, Principles of Communism (1847)", "A nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations. The liberation of Germany cannot therefore take place without the liberation of Poland from German oppression.\r\nEngels, Speech on Poland (1847)", "Under the freedom of trade the whole severity of the laws of political economy will be applied to the working classes. Is that to say that we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon a greater extent of territory, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions into a single group, where they stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletarians.\r\nEngels, To Free Trade Congress at Brussels (1847)", "And this life activity [the worker] sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. ... He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labor itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another.\r\nMarx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847)", "What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. ... A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar\r\nMarx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847)", "A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain.\r\nMarx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847)", "What is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action.  ... \u00a0\nBut, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.\r\nMarx & Engels, On Free Trade (1848)\n\u00a0\nA spectre is haunting Europe \u2013 the spectre of communism.\r\nMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)\n\u00a0\nAll fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned ...\r\nMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)\n\u00a0\nIn bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.\r\nMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)\n\u00a0\nIn place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.\r\nMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)\n\u00a0\nThe Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution.The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.Working Men of All Countries, Unite!\r\nMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)\n\u00a0\nWe have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable..\r\nMarx, Editorial in Final edition of Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1849)\n\u00a0\nIt will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. The petty bourgeoisie will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. ... the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier..\r\nMarx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850)\n\u00a0\nThe revolution made progress, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party.\r\nMarx, Class Struggle in France (1850)\n\u00a0\nRevolutions are the locomotives of history.\nClass Struggle in France (1850)\n\u00a0\nThe worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply ...\r\nEngels, The Peasant War in Germany (1850)\n\u00a0\nThe democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to make the existing society as tolerable for themselves as possible. ... The rule of capital is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers; in short, they hope to bribe the workers ...\r\nMarx & Engels, Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League (1850)\n\u00a0\nHegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.\r\nMarx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)\n\u00a0\nMen make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living.\r\nMarx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)\n\u00a0\nthe great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous\r\nmagnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.\r\nMarx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)\n\u00a0\nBut the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically. ... And when it has accomplished this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well burrowed, old mole!\r\nMarx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)\n\u00a0\nAnd now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove:(1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production,(2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat,(3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.\r\nMarx, Letter to Weydemeyer (1852)\n\u00a0\nHistory is the judge \u2014 its executioner, the proletarian.\r\nMarx, Speech at Anniversary of The People\u2019s Paper (1856)\n\u00a0\nThe Afghans are a brave, hardy, and independent race; they follow pastoral or agricultural occupations only ... With them, war is an excitement and relief from the monotonous occupation of industrial pursuits.\r\nEngels, On Afghanistan (1857)\n\u00a0\nThe 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. Production by an isolated individual outside society ... is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)\n\u00a0\nIt seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. ... if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)\n\u00a0\nHuman anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. \r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)\n\u00a0\nIn all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, ... a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)\n\u00a0\nRelations of personal dependence are the first social forms in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)\n\u00a0\nSociety does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)\n\u00a0\nCapital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital\u2019s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because natural need has been replaced by historically produced need. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself.\r\nMarx, 1The Grundrisse (1857)\n\u00a0\nThe pay of the common soldier is also reduced to a minimum \u2014 determined purely by the production costs necessary to procure him. But he exchanges the performance of his services not for capital, but for the revenue of the state.\r\nIn bourgeois society itself, all exchange of personal services for revenue \u2014 including labour for personal consumption, cooking, sewing etc., garden work etc., up to and including all of the unproductive classes, civil servants, physicians, lawyers, scholars etc. \u2014 belongs under this rubric, within this category. All menial servants etc. By means of their services \u2014 often coerced \u2014 all these workers, from the least to the highest, obtain for themselves a share of the surplus product, of the capitalist\u2019s revenue.\r\nBut it does not occur to anyone to think that by means of the exchange of his revenue for such services, i.e. through private consumption, the capitalist posits himself as capitalist. Rather, he thereby spends the fruits of his capital. It does not change the nature of the relation that the proportions in which revenue is exchanged for this kind of living labour are themselves determined by the general laws of production.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)\n\u00a0\nFor example, when the peasant takes a wandering tailor, of the kind that existed in times past, into his house, and gives him the material to make clothes with. ... The man who takes the cloth I supplied to him and makes me an article of clothing out of it gives me a use value. But instead of giving it directly in objective form, he gives it in the form of activity. I give him a completed use value; he completes another for me. The difference between previous, objectified labour and living, present labour here appears as a merely formal difference between the different tenses of labour, at one time in the perfect and at another in the present.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)\n\u00a0\nThe separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)\n\u00a0\nIn the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)\n\u00a0\nThe mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)\n\u00a0\nAt a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or \u2013 this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms \u2013 with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.  From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)\n\u00a0\nIn studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic \u2013 in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)\n\u00a0\nNo social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.  Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)\n\u00a0\nThere is in every social formation a particular branch of production which determines the position and importance of all the others, and the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine the relations of all other branches as well. It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything, tingeing all other colours and modifying their specific features.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)\n\u00a0\nI have tried to dispel the misunderstanding arising out of the impression that by \u2018party\u2019 I meant a \u2018League\u2019 that expired eight years ago, or an editorial board that was disbanded twelve years ago. By party, I meant the party in the broad historical sense.\r\nMarx, Letter to Freiligrath, 29 February 1860 (1860)\n\u00a0\nA philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as \u201ccommodities\u201d.\r\nMarx, Theories of Surplus Value (1861)\n\u00a0\nAll economists share the error of examining surplus-value not as such, in its pure form, but in the particular forms of profit and rent.\r\nMarx, Theories of Surplus Value (1863)\n\u00a0\nOnly your small-minded German philistine who measures world history by the ell and by what he happens to think are \u2018interesting news items\u2019, could regard 20 years as more than a day where major developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be again succeeded by days into which 20 years are compressed.\r\nMarx, Marx To Engels (9 April 1863)\n\u00a0\nI do not think I shall be able to deliver the manuscript of the first volume to Hamburg before October. ... I cannot go to Geneva. I consider that what I am doing through this work is far more important for the working class than anything I might be able to do personally at any Congress.\r\nMarx, Letter to Kugelmann (1866)\n\u00a0\nThe wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as \"an immense accumulation of commodities,\" its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)\n\u00a0\nThe different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)\n\u00a0\nLabour is ... not the only source of material wealth, ie of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)\n\u00a0\nThe secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)\n\u00a0\nA commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)\n\u00a0\nthe existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. ... This I call the Fetishism ... of commodities.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)\n\u00a0\nMan\u2019s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)\n\u00a0\nThe categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)\n\u00a0\nPolitical Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude of that value. These formulae, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulae appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)\n\u00a0\nIt is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtean philosopher, to whom \u2018I am I\u2019 is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)\r\n\n\u00a0\nThe price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, a form quite distinct from their palpable bodily form; it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental form\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 3 (1867)\n\u00a0\nModern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 3 (1867)\n\u00a0\nWhile the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 4 (1867)\n\u00a0\nCapital is money: Capital is commodities. ... Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 4 (1867)\n\u00a0\nLabour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, ....\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 7 (1867)\n\u00a0\nAs capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)\n\u00a0\nCapital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)\n\u00a0\nIn the United States of North America, every independent movement\r\nof the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the\r\nRepublic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the\r\nblack it is branded.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)\n\u00a0\nIn every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Apr\u00e8s moi le d\u00e9luge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. [Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)\n\u00a0\nmachinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15 (1867)\n\u00a0\nCapitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15 (1867)\n\u00a0\na schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 16 (1867)\n\u00a0\nOn the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects..\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 16 (1867)\n\u00a0\nThat which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market, is in fact not labour, but the labourer. What the latter sells is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him. Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value. ... That in their appearance things often represent themselves in inverted form is pretty well known in every science except Political Economy\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 19 (1867)\n\u00a0\nA rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 25 (1867)\n\u00a0\nCentralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds.The expropriators are expropriated.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32 (1867)\n\u00a0\nhere individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.\r\nMarx, Preface to First German Edition of Capital (1867)\n\u00a0\nThe country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.\r\nMarx, Preface to First German Edition of Capital (1867)\n\u00a0\nIs your wife also active in the German ladies' great emancipation campaign? I think that German women should begin by driving their husbands to self-emancipation.\r\nMarx, Letter to Kugelmann (1868)\n\u00a0\nEveryone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).\r\nMarx, Letter to Kugelmann (1868)\n\u00a0\nThe English have at their disposal all necessary material preconditions for a social revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary passion. Only the General Council [of the International] can provide them with this, and thus accelerate a truly revolutionary movement here and, in consequence, everywhere.\r\nMarx, Confidential Communication on Bakunin (1870)\n\u00a0\nBut the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes. \r\nMarx, The Paris Commune (1871)\n\u00a0\nInstead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people\r\nin Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, ....\r\nMarx, The Paris Commune (1871)\r\n\r\nIn German: \u2018Statt einmal in drei oder sechs Jahren zu entscheiden, welches Mitglied der herrschenden Klasse das Volk im Parlament ver- und zertreten soll ...\r\nEngels\u2019 German translation (1891)\n\u00a0\nIt is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. \r\nMarx, The Paris Commune (1871)\n\u00a0\nA revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon \u2014 authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?\r\nEngels, On Authority, (1872)\n\u00a0\nOf course the method of presentation must differ in form from\r\nthat of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail,\r\nto analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner\r\nconnexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately\r\ndescribed. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter\r\nis ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before\r\nus a mere a priori construction.\r\nMarx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital (1873)\n\u00a0\nMy dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. .... With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.\r\nMarx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital (1873)\n\u00a0\nPolitical Economy can remain a science only so long as the class-struggle is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena. ... In France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. Thenceforth, the class-struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms. It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic.\r\nMarx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital (1873)\n\u00a0\nOf course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.\r\nMarx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital (1873)\n\u00a0\nThe bourgeoisie is just as necessary a precondition for the socialist revolution as is the proletariat itself.\r\nMarx, On Social Relations in Russia (1874)\n\u00a0\n... defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.\r\nMarx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)\n\u00a0\nIn a higher phase of communist society, ... \u2014 only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!\r\nMarx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)\n\u00a0\nIt is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organize itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle \u2014 insofar as its class struggle is national, not in substance, but, as the Communist Manifesto says, \u2018in form\u2019.\r\nMarx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)\n\u00a0\nBetween capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.\r\nMarx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)\n\u00a0\nEvery step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.\r\nMarx, Letter to Bracke (1875)\n\u00a0\nThe whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to animate nature of Hobbes\u2019 theory of the war of every man against every man and the bourgeois economic theory of competition, along with the Malthusian theory of population. This feat having been accomplished \u2013 (as indicated under (1) I dispute its unqualified justification, especially where the Malthusian theory is concerned) \u2013 the same theories are next transferred back again from organic nature to history and their validity as eternal laws of human society declared to have been proved..\r\nMarx, Enegls to Lavrov (1875)\n\u00a0\nLet us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature \u2013 but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact\r\nthat we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.\r\nEngels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876)\n\u00a0\nLabour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source \u2014  next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.\r\nEngels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876)\n\u00a0\nWhen we consider and reflect upon nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.\u00a0\nBut this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, its nature, special causes, effects, etc.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nOnly sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nNature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing daily.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nall past history was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nthe principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the matter.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nFreedom 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.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nThe idea that political acts, grand performances of state, are decisive in history is as old as written history itself, and is the main reason why so little material has been preserved for us in regard to the really progressive evolution of the peoples which has taken place quietly, in the background, behind these noisy scenes on the stage.\r\nEngels, The Theory of Force (1877)\n\u00a0\nNeither of us cares a straw for popularity. Let me cite one proof of this: such was my aversion to the personality cult that at the time of the International, when plagued by numerous moves \u2013 originating from various countries \u2013 to accord me public honour, I never allowed one of these to enter the domain of publicity, nor did I ever reply to them, save with an occasional snub. When Engels and I first joined the secret communist society, we did so only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules.\r\nMarx, Letter to Blos (1877)\n\u00a0\nIt is becoming equally imperative to bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one another. In doing so, however, natural science enters the field of theory and here the methods of empiricism will not work, here only theoretical thinking can be of assistance. But theoretical thinking is an innate quality only as regards natural capacity. This natural capacity must be developed, improved, and for its improvement there is as yet no other means than the study of previous philosophy.\r\nEngels, On Dialectics (1878)\n\u00a0\nDialectics constitutes the most important form of thinking for present-day natural science, for it alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connections in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to another.\r\nEngels, On Dialectics (1878)\n\u00a0\nThe Greeks were not yet advanced enough to dissect, analyse nature \u2014 nature is still viewed as a whole, in general. The universal connection of natural phenomena is not proved in regard to particular; to the Greeks it is the result of direct contemplation. Herein lies the inadequacy of Greek philosophy, ... But herein also lies its superiority over all its subsequent metaphysical opponents. If in regard to the Greeks metaphysics was right in particulars, in regard to metaphysics the Greeks were right in general.\r\nEngels, On Dialectics (1878)\n\u00a0\nFor nearly 40 years we have raised to prominence the idea of the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and particularly the class struggle between bourgeois and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; ... At the founding of the International, we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.\r\nMarx and Engels, Strategy and Tactics of the Class Struggle (1879) \n\u00a0\nNature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern\r\nscience that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly\r\ndaily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically\r\nand not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of\r\na perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution.\r\nEngels, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific (1880)\n\u00a0\nThe materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men\u2019s brains, not in men\u2019s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.\r\nEngels, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific (1880)\n\u00a0\nTo save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is needed.\r\nMarx, Letter To Vera Zasulich (1881)\n\u00a0\nThe history of the decline of primitive communities (it would be a mistake to place them all on the same level; as in geological formations, these historical forms contain a whole series of primary, secondary, tertiary types, etc.) has still to be written. All we have seen so far are some rather meagre outlines. But in any event the research has advanced far enough to establish that: (1) the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies; (2) the causes of their decline stem from economic facts which prevented them from passing a certain stage of development\r\nEngels, Letter To Vera Zasulich (1881)\n\u00a0\nNot only can we manage very well without the interference of the capitalist class in the great industries of the country, but that their interference is becoming more and more a nuisance.\r\nEngels, Social Classes - Necessary and Superfluous (1881)\n\u00a0\nI do not proceed from \u201cconcepts,\u201d hence neither from the \u201cconcept of value,\u201d and am therefore in no way concerned to \u201cdivide\u201d it. What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the \u201ccommodity.\u201d This I analyse, initially in the form in which it appears.\r\nMarx, Notes on Adolph Wagner\u2019s \u201cLehrbuch der politischen \u00d6konomie\u201d (1881)\n\u00a0\nWhat is known as \u2018Marxism\u2019 in France is, indeed, an altogether peculiar product \u2014 so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: \u2018Ce qu\u2019il y a de certain c\u2019est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.\u2019 [If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist]\r\nEngels, Letter to Eduard Bernstein (1882)\n\u00a0\nJust as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.\r\nEngels, Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx (1883)\n\u00a0\nIt is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought.\r\nEngels, Dialectics of Nature (1883)\n\u00a0\nIt is, therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself.\r\nAnd indeed they can be reduced in the main to three: \r\n \u00a0 The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;\r\n \u00a0 The law of the interpenetration of opposites;\r\n \u00a0 The law of the negation of the negation.\r\nEngels, Dialectics of Nature (1883)\n\u00a0\nEvery individual capital forms, however, but an individualised fraction, a fraction endowed with individual life, as it were, of the aggregate social capital, just as every individual capitalist is but an individual element of the capitalist class.\r\nMarx, Capital Volume II (1885)\n\u00a0\nIt was Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science.\r\nEngels, Preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1885)\n\u00a0\nThe economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis of the origination of the present-day class antagonisms; that these class antagonisms, in the countries where they have become fully developed, thanks to large-scale industry, hence especially in England, are in their turn the basis of the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all political history. Marx had not only arrived at the same view, but had already, in the Deutsche-Franz\u00f6sische Jahrb\u00fccher (1844), generalized it to the effect that, speaking generally, it is not the state which conditions and regulates the civil society at all, but civil society which conditions and regulates the state, and, consequently, that policy and its history are to be explained from the economic relations and their development, and not vice versa.\r\nEngels, On the History of the Communist League (1885)\n\u00a0\nCommunism now no longer meant the concoction, by means of the imagination, of an ideal society as perfect as possible, but insight into the nature, the conditions and the consequent general aims of the struggle waged by the proletariat.\r\nEngels, On the History of the Communist League (1885)\n\u00a0\nThe doctrine of Hegel, taken as a whole, left plenty of room for giving shelter to the most diverse practical party views. And in the theoretical Germany of that time, two things above all were practical: religion and politics. Whoever placed the chief emphasis on the Hegelian system could be fairly conservative in both spheres; whoever regarded the dialectical method as the main thing could belong to the most extreme opposition, both in politics and religion.\r\nEngels, Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)\n\u00a0\nThe great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. ... \r\nThe answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other \u2014 and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often becomes still more intricate and impossible than in Christianity \u2014 comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.\r\nEngels, Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)\n\u00a0\nThat which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realisation, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature.\r\nEngels, Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)\n\u00a0\nThe only war left for Prussia-Germany to wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover of an extent the violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other\u2019s throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Years\u2019 War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism.\r\nEngels, Introduction to Borkheim (1887)\n\u00a0\nAccording to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.\r\n[Engels, Letter to J Bloch (1890)\n\u00a0\nTo my mind, the so-called \u2018socialist society\u2019 is not anything immutable. Like all other social formations, it should be conceived in a state of constant flux and change. It\u2019s crucial difference from the present order consists naturally in production organized on the basis of common ownership by the nation of all means of production. To begin this reorganization tomorrow, but performing it gradually, seems to me quite feasible. That our workers are capable of it is borne out by their many producer and consumer cooperatives which, whenever they\u2019re not deliberately ruined by the police, are equally well and far more honestly run than the bourgeois stock companies.\r\nEngels, Letter to Otto Von Boenigk (1890)\n\u00a0\nThe day when we are in the majority, what the French army did instinctively in not firing on the people will be repeated in our country quite consciously. Yes, whatever the frightened bourgeois say, we are able to calculate the moment when we shall have the majority of the people behind us; our ideas are making headway everywhere, as much among teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. as among the workers. If we had to start wielding power tomorrow, we should need engineers, chemists, agronomists. Well, it is my conviction that we would have a good many of them behind us already. In five or ten years we shall have more of them than we need.\r\nEngels, Interview with Le Figaro (1893)\n\u00a0\nAll science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.\r\nMarx, published by Engels Capital, Volume III (1894)\n\u00a0\nJust as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.\r\nMarx, published by Engels Capital, Volume III (1894)\n\u00a0\nWhat we understand by the economic conditions which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society are the methods by which human beings in a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves (in so far as division of labour exists). Thus the entire technique of production and transport is here included. According to our conception, this technique also determines the method of exchange and, further, the division of products, ...\r\nEngels, Letter to Starkenburg (1894)\n\n\r\nOn most of the many \u201cFamous Quotes\u201d pages on the Internet, quotes from Marx, Engels, Lenin and other Marxists are invariably unsourced and in very many cases they are deliberately-propagated misinformation, unthinkingly copied form one site to the next. The Marxists Internet Archive contains almost all the writings of the founders of Communism, so if you can\u2019t find a quote on this site, then it is probably bogus. Write us if you are in doubt.\n\n\u00a0\n\nMarxists Internet Archive |\r\nSubject Index\n\n", "But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.\r\nMarx & Engels, On Free Trade (1848)", "A spectre is haunting Europe \u2013 the spectre of communism.\r\nMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)", "All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned ...\r\nMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)", "In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.\r\nMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)", "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.\r\nMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)", "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution.The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.Working Men of All Countries, Unite!\r\nMarx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)", "We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable..\r\nMarx, Editorial in Final edition of Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1849)", "It will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. The petty bourgeoisie will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. ... the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier..\r\nMarx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850)", "The revolution made progress, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party.\r\nMarx, Class Struggle in France (1850)", "Revolutions are the locomotives of history.\nClass Struggle in France (1850)", "The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply ...\r\nEngels, The Peasant War in Germany (1850)", "The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to make the existing society as tolerable for themselves as possible. ... The rule of capital is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers; in short, they hope to bribe the workers ...\r\nMarx & Engels, Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League (1850)", "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.\r\nMarx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)", "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living.\r\nMarx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)", "the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous\r\nmagnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.\r\nMarx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)", "But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically. ... And when it has accomplished this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well burrowed, old mole!\r\nMarx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)", "And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove:(1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production,(2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat,(3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.\r\nMarx, Letter to Weydemeyer (1852)", "History is the judge \u2014 its executioner, the proletarian.\r\nMarx, Speech at Anniversary of The People\u2019s Paper (1856)", "The Afghans are a brave, hardy, and independent race; they follow pastoral or agricultural occupations only ... With them, war is an excitement and relief from the monotonous occupation of industrial pursuits.\r\nEngels, On Afghanistan (1857)", "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. Production by an isolated individual outside society ... is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)", "It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. ... if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)", "Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. \r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)", "In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, ... a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)", "Relations of personal dependence are the first social forms in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)", "Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)", "Capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital\u2019s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because natural need has been replaced by historically produced need. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself.\r\nMarx, 1The Grundrisse (1857)", "The pay of the common soldier is also reduced to a minimum \u2014 determined purely by the production costs necessary to procure him. But he exchanges the performance of his services not for capital, but for the revenue of the state.\r\nIn bourgeois society itself, all exchange of personal services for revenue \u2014 including labour for personal consumption, cooking, sewing etc., garden work etc., up to and including all of the unproductive classes, civil servants, physicians, lawyers, scholars etc. \u2014 belongs under this rubric, within this category. All menial servants etc. By means of their services \u2014 often coerced \u2014 all these workers, from the least to the highest, obtain for themselves a share of the surplus product, of the capitalist\u2019s revenue.\r\nBut it does not occur to anyone to think that by means of the exchange of his revenue for such services, i.e. through private consumption, the capitalist posits himself as capitalist. Rather, he thereby spends the fruits of his capital. It does not change the nature of the relation that the proportions in which revenue is exchanged for this kind of living labour are themselves determined by the general laws of production.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)", "For example, when the peasant takes a wandering tailor, of the kind that existed in times past, into his house, and gives him the material to make clothes with. ... The man who takes the cloth I supplied to him and makes me an article of clothing out of it gives me a use value. But instead of giving it directly in objective form, he gives it in the form of activity. I give him a completed use value; he completes another for me. The difference between previous, objectified labour and living, present labour here appears as a merely formal difference between the different tenses of labour, at one time in the perfect and at another in the present.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)", "The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital.\r\nMarx, The Grundrisse (1857)", "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)", "The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)", "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or \u2013 this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms \u2013 with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.  From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)", "In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic \u2013 in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)", "No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.  Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)", "There is in every social formation a particular branch of production which determines the position and importance of all the others, and the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine the relations of all other branches as well. It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything, tingeing all other colours and modifying their specific features.\r\nMarx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)", "I have tried to dispel the misunderstanding arising out of the impression that by \u2018party\u2019 I meant a \u2018League\u2019 that expired eight years ago, or an editorial board that was disbanded twelve years ago. By party, I meant the party in the broad historical sense.\r\nMarx, Letter to Freiligrath, 29 February 1860 (1860)", "A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as \u201ccommodities\u201d.\r\nMarx, Theories of Surplus Value (1861)", "All economists share the error of examining surplus-value not as such, in its pure form, but in the particular forms of profit and rent.\r\nMarx, Theories of Surplus Value (1863)", "Only your small-minded German philistine who measures world history by the ell and by what he happens to think are \u2018interesting news items\u2019, could regard 20 years as more than a day where major developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be again succeeded by days into which 20 years are compressed.\r\nMarx, Marx To Engels (9 April 1863)", "I do not think I shall be able to deliver the manuscript of the first volume to Hamburg before October. ... I cannot go to Geneva. I consider that what I am doing through this work is far more important for the working class than anything I might be able to do personally at any Congress.\r\nMarx, Letter to Kugelmann (1866)", "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as \"an immense accumulation of commodities,\" its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)", "The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)", "Labour is ... not the only source of material wealth, ie of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)", "The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)", "A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)", "the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. ... This I call the Fetishism ... of commodities.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)", "Man\u2019s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)", "The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)", "Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude of that value. These formulae, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulae appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)", "It is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtean philosopher, to whom \u2018I am I\u2019 is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)\r\n", "The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, a form quite distinct from their palpable bodily form; it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental form\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 3 (1867)", "Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 3 (1867)", "While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 4 (1867)", "Capital is money: Capital is commodities. ... Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 4 (1867)", "Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, ....\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 7 (1867)", "As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)", "Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)", "In the United States of North America, every independent movement\r\nof the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the\r\nRepublic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the\r\nblack it is branded.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)", "In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Apr\u00e8s moi le d\u00e9luge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. [Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)", "machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15 (1867)", "Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15 (1867)", "a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 16 (1867)", "On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects..\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 16 (1867)", "That which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market, is in fact not labour, but the labourer. What the latter sells is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him. Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value. ... That in their appearance things often represent themselves in inverted form is pretty well known in every science except Political Economy\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 19 (1867)", "A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 25 (1867)", "Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds.The expropriators are expropriated.\r\nMarx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32 (1867)", "here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.\r\nMarx, Preface to First German Edition of Capital (1867)", "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.\r\nMarx, Preface to First German Edition of Capital (1867)", "Is your wife also active in the German ladies' great emancipation campaign? I think that German women should begin by driving their husbands to self-emancipation.\r\nMarx, Letter to Kugelmann (1868)", "Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).\r\nMarx, Letter to Kugelmann (1868)", "The English have at their disposal all necessary material preconditions for a social revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary passion. Only the General Council [of the International] can provide them with this, and thus accelerate a truly revolutionary movement here and, in consequence, everywhere.\r\nMarx, Confidential Communication on Bakunin (1870)", "But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes. \r\nMarx, The Paris Commune (1871)", "Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people\r\nin Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, ....\r\nMarx, The Paris Commune (1871)\r\n\r\nIn German: \u2018Statt einmal in drei oder sechs Jahren zu entscheiden, welches Mitglied der herrschenden Klasse das Volk im Parlament ver- und zertreten soll ...\r\nEngels\u2019 German translation (1891)", "It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. \r\nMarx, The Paris Commune (1871)", "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon \u2014 authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?\r\nEngels, On Authority, (1872)", "Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from\r\nthat of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail,\r\nto analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner\r\nconnexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately\r\ndescribed. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter\r\nis ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before\r\nus a mere a priori construction.\r\nMarx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital (1873)", "My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. .... With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.\r\nMarx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital (1873)", "Political Economy can remain a science only so long as the class-struggle is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena. ... In France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. Thenceforth, the class-struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms. It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic.\r\nMarx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital (1873)", "Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.\r\nMarx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital (1873)", "The bourgeoisie is just as necessary a precondition for the socialist revolution as is the proletariat itself.\r\nMarx, On Social Relations in Russia (1874)", "... defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.\r\nMarx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)", "In a higher phase of communist society, ... \u2014 only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!\r\nMarx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)", "It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organize itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle \u2014 insofar as its class struggle is national, not in substance, but, as the Communist Manifesto says, \u2018in form\u2019.\r\nMarx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)", "Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.\r\nMarx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)", "Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.\r\nMarx, Letter to Bracke (1875)", "The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to animate nature of Hobbes\u2019 theory of the war of every man against every man and the bourgeois economic theory of competition, along with the Malthusian theory of population. This feat having been accomplished \u2013 (as indicated under (1) I dispute its unqualified justification, especially where the Malthusian theory is concerned) \u2013 the same theories are next transferred back again from organic nature to history and their validity as eternal laws of human society declared to have been proved..\r\nMarx, Enegls to Lavrov (1875)", "Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature \u2013 but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact\r\nthat we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.\r\nEngels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876)", "Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source \u2014  next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.\r\nEngels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876)", "When we consider and reflect upon nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.\u00a0\nBut this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, its nature, special causes, effects, etc.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nOnly sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nNature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing daily.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nall past history was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nthe principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the matter.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nFreedom 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.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)\n\u00a0\nThe idea that political acts, grand performances of state, are decisive in history is as old as written history itself, and is the main reason why so little material has been preserved for us in regard to the really progressive evolution of the peoples which has taken place quietly, in the background, behind these noisy scenes on the stage.\r\nEngels, The Theory of Force (1877)\n\u00a0\nNeither of us cares a straw for popularity. Let me cite one proof of this: such was my aversion to the personality cult that at the time of the International, when plagued by numerous moves \u2013 originating from various countries \u2013 to accord me public honour, I never allowed one of these to enter the domain of publicity, nor did I ever reply to them, save with an occasional snub. When Engels and I first joined the secret communist society, we did so only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules.\r\nMarx, Letter to Blos (1877)\n\u00a0\nIt is becoming equally imperative to bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one another. In doing so, however, natural science enters the field of theory and here the methods of empiricism will not work, here only theoretical thinking can be of assistance. But theoretical thinking is an innate quality only as regards natural capacity. This natural capacity must be developed, improved, and for its improvement there is as yet no other means than the study of previous philosophy.\r\nEngels, On Dialectics (1878)\n\u00a0\nDialectics constitutes the most important form of thinking for present-day natural science, for it alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connections in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to another.\r\nEngels, On Dialectics (1878)\n\u00a0\nThe Greeks were not yet advanced enough to dissect, analyse nature \u2014 nature is still viewed as a whole, in general. The universal connection of natural phenomena is not proved in regard to particular; to the Greeks it is the result of direct contemplation. Herein lies the inadequacy of Greek philosophy, ... But herein also lies its superiority over all its subsequent metaphysical opponents. If in regard to the Greeks metaphysics was right in particulars, in regard to metaphysics the Greeks were right in general.\r\nEngels, On Dialectics (1878)\n\u00a0\nFor nearly 40 years we have raised to prominence the idea of the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and particularly the class struggle between bourgeois and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; ... At the founding of the International, we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.\r\nMarx and Engels, Strategy and Tactics of the Class Struggle (1879) \n\u00a0\nNature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern\r\nscience that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly\r\ndaily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically\r\nand not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of\r\na perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution.\r\nEngels, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific (1880)\n\u00a0\nThe materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men\u2019s brains, not in men\u2019s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.\r\nEngels, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific (1880)\n\u00a0\nTo save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is needed.\r\nMarx, Letter To Vera Zasulich (1881)\n\u00a0\nThe history of the decline of primitive communities (it would be a mistake to place them all on the same level; as in geological formations, these historical forms contain a whole series of primary, secondary, tertiary types, etc.) has still to be written. All we have seen so far are some rather meagre outlines. But in any event the research has advanced far enough to establish that: (1) the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies; (2) the causes of their decline stem from economic facts which prevented them from passing a certain stage of development\r\nEngels, Letter To Vera Zasulich (1881)\n\u00a0\nNot only can we manage very well without the interference of the capitalist class in the great industries of the country, but that their interference is becoming more and more a nuisance.\r\nEngels, Social Classes - Necessary and Superfluous (1881)\n\u00a0\nI do not proceed from \u201cconcepts,\u201d hence neither from the \u201cconcept of value,\u201d and am therefore in no way concerned to \u201cdivide\u201d it. What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the \u201ccommodity.\u201d This I analyse, initially in the form in which it appears.\r\nMarx, Notes on Adolph Wagner\u2019s \u201cLehrbuch der politischen \u00d6konomie\u201d (1881)\n\u00a0\nWhat is known as \u2018Marxism\u2019 in France is, indeed, an altogether peculiar product \u2014 so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: \u2018Ce qu\u2019il y a de certain c\u2019est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.\u2019 [If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist]\r\nEngels, Letter to Eduard Bernstein (1882)\n\u00a0\nJust as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.\r\nEngels, Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx (1883)\n\u00a0\nIt is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought.\r\nEngels, Dialectics of Nature (1883)\n\u00a0\nIt is, therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself.\r\nAnd indeed they can be reduced in the main to three: \r\n \u00a0 The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;\r\n \u00a0 The law of the interpenetration of opposites;\r\n \u00a0 The law of the negation of the negation.\r\nEngels, Dialectics of Nature (1883)\n\u00a0\nEvery individual capital forms, however, but an individualised fraction, a fraction endowed with individual life, as it were, of the aggregate social capital, just as every individual capitalist is but an individual element of the capitalist class.\r\nMarx, Capital Volume II (1885)\n\u00a0\nIt was Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science.\r\nEngels, Preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1885)\n\u00a0\nThe economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis of the origination of the present-day class antagonisms; that these class antagonisms, in the countries where they have become fully developed, thanks to large-scale industry, hence especially in England, are in their turn the basis of the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all political history. Marx had not only arrived at the same view, but had already, in the Deutsche-Franz\u00f6sische Jahrb\u00fccher (1844), generalized it to the effect that, speaking generally, it is not the state which conditions and regulates the civil society at all, but civil society which conditions and regulates the state, and, consequently, that policy and its history are to be explained from the economic relations and their development, and not vice versa.\r\nEngels, On the History of the Communist League (1885)\n\u00a0\nCommunism now no longer meant the concoction, by means of the imagination, of an ideal society as perfect as possible, but insight into the nature, the conditions and the consequent general aims of the struggle waged by the proletariat.\r\nEngels, On the History of the Communist League (1885)\n\u00a0\nThe doctrine of Hegel, taken as a whole, left plenty of room for giving shelter to the most diverse practical party views. And in the theoretical Germany of that time, two things above all were practical: religion and politics. Whoever placed the chief emphasis on the Hegelian system could be fairly conservative in both spheres; whoever regarded the dialectical method as the main thing could belong to the most extreme opposition, both in politics and religion.\r\nEngels, Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)\n\u00a0\nThe great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. ... \r\nThe answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other \u2014 and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often becomes still more intricate and impossible than in Christianity \u2014 comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.\r\nEngels, Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)\n\u00a0\nThat which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realisation, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature.\r\nEngels, Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)\n\u00a0\nThe only war left for Prussia-Germany to wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover of an extent the violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other\u2019s throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Years\u2019 War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism.\r\nEngels, Introduction to Borkheim (1887)\n\u00a0\nAccording to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.\r\n[Engels, Letter to J Bloch (1890)\n\u00a0\nTo my mind, the so-called \u2018socialist society\u2019 is not anything immutable. Like all other social formations, it should be conceived in a state of constant flux and change. It\u2019s crucial difference from the present order consists naturally in production organized on the basis of common ownership by the nation of all means of production. To begin this reorganization tomorrow, but performing it gradually, seems to me quite feasible. That our workers are capable of it is borne out by their many producer and consumer cooperatives which, whenever they\u2019re not deliberately ruined by the police, are equally well and far more honestly run than the bourgeois stock companies.\r\nEngels, Letter to Otto Von Boenigk (1890)\n\u00a0\nThe day when we are in the majority, what the French army did instinctively in not firing on the people will be repeated in our country quite consciously. Yes, whatever the frightened bourgeois say, we are able to calculate the moment when we shall have the majority of the people behind us; our ideas are making headway everywhere, as much among teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. as among the workers. If we had to start wielding power tomorrow, we should need engineers, chemists, agronomists. Well, it is my conviction that we would have a good many of them behind us already. In five or ten years we shall have more of them than we need.\r\nEngels, Interview with Le Figaro (1893)\n\u00a0\nAll science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.\r\nMarx, published by Engels Capital, Volume III (1894)\n\u00a0\nJust as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.\r\nMarx, published by Engels Capital, Volume III (1894)\n\u00a0\nWhat we understand by the economic conditions which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society are the methods by which human beings in a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves (in so far as division of labour exists). Thus the entire technique of production and transport is here included. According to our conception, this technique also determines the method of exchange and, further, the division of products, ...\r\nEngels, Letter to Starkenburg (1894)\n\n\r\nOn most of the many \u201cFamous Quotes\u201d pages on the Internet, quotes from Marx, Engels, Lenin and other Marxists are invariably unsourced and in very many cases they are deliberately-propagated misinformation, unthinkingly copied form one site to the next. The Marxists Internet Archive contains almost all the writings of the founders of Communism, so if you can\u2019t find a quote on this site, then it is probably bogus. Write us if you are in doubt.\n\n\u00a0\n\nMarxists Internet Archive |\r\nSubject Index\n\n", "But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, its nature, special causes, effects, etc.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)", "Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)", "Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing daily.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)", "all past history was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)", "the principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the matter.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)", "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.\r\nEngels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)", "The idea that political acts, grand performances of state, are decisive in history is as old as written history itself, and is the main reason why so little material has been preserved for us in regard to the really progressive evolution of the peoples which has taken place quietly, in the background, behind these noisy scenes on the stage.\r\nEngels, The Theory of Force (1877)", "Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. Let me cite one proof of this: such was my aversion to the personality cult that at the time of the International, when plagued by numerous moves \u2013 originating from various countries \u2013 to accord me public honour, I never allowed one of these to enter the domain of publicity, nor did I ever reply to them, save with an occasional snub. When Engels and I first joined the secret communist society, we did so only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules.\r\nMarx, Letter to Blos (1877)", "It is becoming equally imperative to bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one another. In doing so, however, natural science enters the field of theory and here the methods of empiricism will not work, here only theoretical thinking can be of assistance. But theoretical thinking is an innate quality only as regards natural capacity. This natural capacity must be developed, improved, and for its improvement there is as yet no other means than the study of previous philosophy.\r\nEngels, On Dialectics (1878)", "Dialectics constitutes the most important form of thinking for present-day natural science, for it alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connections in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to another.\r\nEngels, On Dialectics (1878)", "The Greeks were not yet advanced enough to dissect, analyse nature \u2014 nature is still viewed as a whole, in general. The universal connection of natural phenomena is not proved in regard to particular; to the Greeks it is the result of direct contemplation. Herein lies the inadequacy of Greek philosophy, ... But herein also lies its superiority over all its subsequent metaphysical opponents. If in regard to the Greeks metaphysics was right in particulars, in regard to metaphysics the Greeks were right in general.\r\nEngels, On Dialectics (1878)", "For nearly 40 years we have raised to prominence the idea of the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and particularly the class struggle between bourgeois and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; ... At the founding of the International, we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.\r\nMarx and Engels, Strategy and Tactics of the Class Struggle (1879) ", "Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern\r\nscience that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly\r\ndaily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically\r\nand not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of\r\na perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution.\r\nEngels, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific (1880)", "The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men\u2019s brains, not in men\u2019s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.\r\nEngels, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific (1880)", "To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is needed.\r\nMarx, Letter To Vera Zasulich (1881)", "The history of the decline of primitive communities (it would be a mistake to place them all on the same level; as in geological formations, these historical forms contain a whole series of primary, secondary, tertiary types, etc.) has still to be written. All we have seen so far are some rather meagre outlines. But in any event the research has advanced far enough to establish that: (1) the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies; (2) the causes of their decline stem from economic facts which prevented them from passing a certain stage of development\r\nEngels, Letter To Vera Zasulich (1881)", "Not only can we manage very well without the interference of the capitalist class in the great industries of the country, but that their interference is becoming more and more a nuisance.\r\nEngels, Social Classes - Necessary and Superfluous (1881)", "I do not proceed from \u201cconcepts,\u201d hence neither from the \u201cconcept of value,\u201d and am therefore in no way concerned to \u201cdivide\u201d it. What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the \u201ccommodity.\u201d This I analyse, initially in the form in which it appears.\r\nMarx, Notes on Adolph Wagner\u2019s \u201cLehrbuch der politischen \u00d6konomie\u201d (1881)", "What is known as \u2018Marxism\u2019 in France is, indeed, an altogether peculiar product \u2014 so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: \u2018Ce qu\u2019il y a de certain c\u2019est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.\u2019 [If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist]\r\nEngels, Letter to Eduard Bernstein (1882)", "Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.\r\nEngels, Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx (1883)", "It is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought.\r\nEngels, Dialectics of Nature (1883)", "It is, therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself.\r\nAnd indeed they can be reduced in the main to three: \r\n \u00a0 The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;\r\n \u00a0 The law of the interpenetration of opposites;\r\n \u00a0 The law of the negation of the negation.\r\nEngels, Dialectics of Nature (1883)", "Every individual capital forms, however, but an individualised fraction, a fraction endowed with individual life, as it were, of the aggregate social capital, just as every individual capitalist is but an individual element of the capitalist class.\r\nMarx, Capital Volume II (1885)", "It was Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science.\r\nEngels, Preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1885)", "The economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis of the origination of the present-day class antagonisms; that these class antagonisms, in the countries where they have become fully developed, thanks to large-scale industry, hence especially in England, are in their turn the basis of the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all political history. Marx had not only arrived at the same view, but had already, in the Deutsche-Franz\u00f6sische Jahrb\u00fccher (1844), generalized it to the effect that, speaking generally, it is not the state which conditions and regulates the civil society at all, but civil society which conditions and regulates the state, and, consequently, that policy and its history are to be explained from the economic relations and their development, and not vice versa.\r\nEngels, On the History of the Communist League (1885)", "Communism now no longer meant the concoction, by means of the imagination, of an ideal society as perfect as possible, but insight into the nature, the conditions and the consequent general aims of the struggle waged by the proletariat.\r\nEngels, On the History of the Communist League (1885)", "The doctrine of Hegel, taken as a whole, left plenty of room for giving shelter to the most diverse practical party views. And in the theoretical Germany of that time, two things above all were practical: religion and politics. Whoever placed the chief emphasis on the Hegelian system could be fairly conservative in both spheres; whoever regarded the dialectical method as the main thing could belong to the most extreme opposition, both in politics and religion.\r\nEngels, Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)", "The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. ... \r\nThe answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other \u2014 and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often becomes still more intricate and impossible than in Christianity \u2014 comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.\r\nEngels, Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)", "That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realisation, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature.\r\nEngels, Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)", "The only war left for Prussia-Germany to wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover of an extent the violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other\u2019s throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Years\u2019 War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism.\r\nEngels, Introduction to Borkheim (1887)", "According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.\r\n[Engels, Letter to J Bloch (1890)", "To my mind, the so-called \u2018socialist society\u2019 is not anything immutable. Like all other social formations, it should be conceived in a state of constant flux and change. It\u2019s crucial difference from the present order consists naturally in production organized on the basis of common ownership by the nation of all means of production. To begin this reorganization tomorrow, but performing it gradually, seems to me quite feasible. That our workers are capable of it is borne out by their many producer and consumer cooperatives which, whenever they\u2019re not deliberately ruined by the police, are equally well and far more honestly run than the bourgeois stock companies.\r\nEngels, Letter to Otto Von Boenigk (1890)", "The day when we are in the majority, what the French army did instinctively in not firing on the people will be repeated in our country quite consciously. Yes, whatever the frightened bourgeois say, we are able to calculate the moment when we shall have the majority of the people behind us; our ideas are making headway everywhere, as much among teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. as among the workers. If we had to start wielding power tomorrow, we should need engineers, chemists, agronomists. Well, it is my conviction that we would have a good many of them behind us already. In five or ten years we shall have more of them than we need.\r\nEngels, Interview with Le Figaro (1893)", "All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.\r\nMarx, published by Engels Capital, Volume III (1894)", "Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.\r\nMarx, published by Engels Capital, Volume III (1894)", "What we understand by the economic conditions which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society are the methods by which human beings in a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves (in so far as division of labour exists). Thus the entire technique of production and transport is here included. According to our conception, this technique also determines the method of exchange and, further, the division of products, ...\r\nEngels, Letter to Starkenburg (1894)", "Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it \u2013 when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., \u2013 in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property \u2013 labour and conversion into capital.Karl Marx, Private Property and Communism (1844)", "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. Karl Marx, Theses On Feuerbach (1845)", "As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)", "Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)", "The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.Frederick Engels, The Principles of Communism (1847)", "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)", "We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)", "The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.Karl Marx, Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)", "The capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonisation (1867)", "The political freedoms, the right of assembly and association, and the freedom of the press \u2013 those are our weapons. Are we to sit back and abstain while somebody tries to rob us of them? It is said that a political act on our part implies that we accept the exiting state of affairs. On the contrary, so long as this state of affairs offers us the means of protesting against it, our use of these means does not signify that we recognise the prevailing order.Frederick Engels, Apropos Of Working-Class Political Action (1871)", "Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.Karl Marx, Letter to Bracke (In Brunswick) (1875)", "Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source \u00d0 next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.Frederick Engels, The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876)", "We...reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and forever immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above history and the differences between nations. We maintain on the contrary that all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed. That in this process there has on the whole been progress in morality, as in all other branches of human knowledge, no one will doubt. But we have not yet passed beyond class morality.Frederick Engels, Anti-D\u00fchring (1877)", "The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master \u2013 free.To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and this the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)", "The revolutionary power which will socialise the instruments of labour taken from the capitalist class, will have to mount guard over the general interests of society served by the socialised industries, and in particular over the interests of those directly engaged in them.Paul Lafargue, Socialism and Nationalisation (1882)", "All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.Karl Marx,  Capital Vol. III Chapter 48  (1883) ", "We must not be like some Christians who sin for six days and go to church on the seventh, but we must speak for the cause daily, and make the men, and especially the women that we meet, come into the ranks to help us.Eleanor Marx, Speech on the First May Day (1890)", "The division of society into a small, excessively rich class and a large, propertyless class of wage-workers results in a society suffocating from its own superfluity, while the great majority of its members is scarcely, or even not at all, protected from extreme want. This state of affairs becomes daily more absurd and \u2013 more unnecessary. It must be abolished, it can be abolished.Frederick Engels, Introduction to Marx\u2019s Wage Labor and Capital (1891)", "Only when the great mass of workers take the keen and dependable weapons of scientific socialism in their own hands, will all the petty-bourgeois inclinations, all the opportunistic currents, come to naught. The movement will then find itself on sure and firm ground. \u201cQuantity will do it.\u201d Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (1900) ", "We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don\u2019t clutch at us and don\u2019t besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are \u2018free\u00d3 to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!VI Lenin,  What Is To Be Done? (1901)", "If, contrary to all the efforts of our enemies, the modern labor movement marches triumphantly forward, its head raised high, then it owes this first and foremost to its calm understanding of the lawfulness of objective historical development, its understanding that \u201ccapitalist society with the inevitability of a natural process creates its own negation, namely, the expropriation of the expropriators, the socialist overturn.\u201d In this, its understanding, the labor movement sees a reliable guarantee of its final victory. And from this same source it draws not only its ability to surge forward but also its patience ; not only strength for action, but also the courage to stand firm and to endure.Rosa Luxemburg, Marxist Theory and the Proletariat (1903)", "War unleashes \u2013 at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world \u2013 the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths.Rosa Luxemburg, In the Storm (1904)", "From the moment when the priests use the pulpit as a means of political struggle against the working classes, the workers must fight against the enemies of their rights and their liberation. For he who defends the exploiters and who helps to prolong this present regime of misery, he is the mortal enemy of the proletariat...Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism and the Churches (1905)", "Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.VI Lenin, Socialsm and Religion (1905)", "And it is not our object to destroy civilization. We do not desire to \u201cdivide up,\u201d as people are in the habit of saying; we do not wish to throw humanity back into barbarism; on the contrary, we desire to lift the whole of humanity to the highest thinkable plane of civilization. We wish every individual without exception to have a share in the means of culture and education according to his capacities and his needs. This is the loftiest ideal that the human race can set before itself; and this ideal is possible today because it is only now that, in consequence of the thousands of years of progress towards civilization and of the tremendous acquisitions which man has gained in this age of culture; because only now are all the means and possibilities given through which we may realize this ideal condition in the way that the majority of men desire to realize it.August Bebel, Socialism and the Student (1905)", "Whatever is done we must do ourselves, and if we stand up like men from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to the Gulf, we will strike terror to their cowardly hearts and they will be but too eager to relax their grip upon our throats and beat a swift retreat.Eugene V. Debs, Arouse, ye slaves! (1906)", "They have done their best and their worst to crush and enslave us. Their politicians have betrayed us, their courts have thrown us into jail without trial and their soldiers have shot our comrades dead in their tracks.The worm turns at last, and so does the worker.Eugene V. Debs, Arouse, ye slaves! (1906)", "When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.Emma Goldman, A New Declaration of Independence (1909)", "Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.V.I. Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)", "Unity must be won, and only the workers, the class-conscious workers themselves can win it \u2013 by stubborn and persistent effort.V.I. Lenin, Unity (1914)", "Marx\u2019s economic doctrine is the most profound, comprehensive and detailed confirmation and application of his theory.V.I. Lenin, The Marxist Doctrine in Karl Marx: A Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism (1914)", "There are individuals \u00d0 a mere handful in the history of mankind \u00d0 who, while themselves being the product of an imminent catastrophic change, leave their mark upon an entire epoch. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is one such giant mind, one such giant will...Alexandra Kollantai, A Giant Mind, A Giant Will (1914-1916)", "The revolution will move forward until its consolidation is total. The time is still far off when there can be a period of relative calm. And life is always revolution.Antonio Gramsci, The Russian Maximalists (1916)", "And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord.V.I Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917) ", "The Communist Manifesto gives a general summary of history, which compels us to regard the state as the organ of class rule and leads us to the inevitable conclusion that the proletariat cannot overthrow the bourgeoisie without first winning political power, without attaining political supremacy, without transforming the state into the \u201cproletariat organized as the ruling class\u201d; and that this proletarian state will begin to wither away immediately after its victory because the state is unnecessary and cannot exist in a society in which there are no class antagonisms. VI Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)", "To work, everybody to work, the cause of the world socialist revolution must and will triumph.VI Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? (1917)", "Everybody talks about imperialism. But imperialism is merely monopoly capitalism.V I Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It (1917)", "The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie \u2018must\u00d3 teach the people to trust the bourgeoisie. The proletarians must teach the people to distrust the bourgeoisie.V I Lenin, The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution (1917)", "It is only in revolutionary struggle against the capitalists of every country, and only in union with the working women and men of the whole world, that we will achieve a new and brighter future-the socialist brotherhood of the workers.Alexandra Kollontai, Our Tasks (1917)", "The question now arises, for what reason does the capitalist class hire workers? Everyone knows that the reason is by no means because the factory owners wish to feed the hungry workers, but because they wish to extract profit from them. For the sake of profit, the factory owner builds his factory; for the sake of profit, he engages workers; for the sake of profit, he is always nosing out where higher prices are paid. Profit is the motive of all his calculations. Herein, moreover, we discern a very interesting characteristic of capitalist society. For society does not itself produce the things which are necessary and useful to it; instead of this, the capitalist class compels the workers to produce those things for which more will be paid, those things from which the capitalists derive the largest profit. Whisky, for example, is a very harmful substance, and alcoholic liquors in general ought to be produced; only for technical purposes and for their use in medicine. But throughout the world the capitalists produce alcohol with all their might. Why? Because to ply the people with drink is extremely profitable.N.I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (1920)", "Criticism \u2013 the most keen, ruthless and uncompromising criticism \u2013 should be directed, not against parliamentarianism or parliamentary activities, but against those leaders who are unable \u2013 and still more against those who are unwilling \u2013 to utilise parliamentary elections and the parliamentary rostrum in a revolutionary and communist manner. Only such criticism \u2013 combined, of course, with the dismissal of incapable leaders and their replacement by capable ones \u2013 will constitute useful and fruitful revolutionary work that will simultaneously train the \u201cleaders\u201d to be worthy of the working class and of all working people, and train the masses to be able properly to understand the political situation and the often very complicated and intricate tasks that spring from that situation.V I Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder (1920)", "Comrades, just as the earth, after a long drought, pants for rain, so the workers of the world pant for the end of the accursed war, for unification. This striving of the workers for unification is the greatest factor in world history.Gregory Zinoviev, Closing Address at 2nd Congress of Comintern (1920)", "Anyone who doubts the inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a necessary stage of its victory over the bourgeoisie, facilitates the conditions for the victory of the latter; anyone who doubts or renounces the political party of the proletariat, is helping to weaken and disorganize the working class.Lev Kamenev, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1920)", "It is folly, not revolutionism, to deprive ourselves in advance of any freedom of action, openly to inform an enemy who is at present better armed than we are whether we shall fight him, and when. To accept battle at a time when it is obviously advantageous to the enemy, but not to us, is criminal; political leaders of the revolutionary class are absolutely useless if they are incapable of \u201cchanging tack, or offering conciliation and compromise\u201d in order to take evasive action in a patently disadvantageous battle.V.I. Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder (1920)", "The popular masses who want peace, freedom and bread must, in this period of dark onrush of events, always hold themselves ready to spring up as one man against every danger of new carnage and suffering threatened by the so heroic exploits of fascism.Antonio Gramsci, The development of fascism (1921)", "When wages have disappeared, when all are upon a basis of economic equality, when the position of manager, director, organiser, etc., brings no material advantage, the desire for it will be less widespread and less keen, and the danger of oppressive action by the management will be largely nullified. Nevertheless, management imposed on unwilling subordinates will not be tolerated; where the organiser has chosen the assistants, the assistants will be free to leave, or change him; where the assistants choose the organiser, they will be free to change him. Co-operation for the common good is necessary, but freedom, not domination, is the goal.E. Sylvia Pankhurst, Communism and its Tactics (1921)", "The practical task of a reconstruction of society may be correctly solved by the application of a scientific policy of the working class, i.e., a policy based on scientific theory; this scientific theory, in the case of the proletarian, is the theory founded by Karl Marx.Nikolai Bukharin, Introduction to Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (1921)", "The words Socialism and Communism have the same meaning. They indicate a condition of society in which the wealth of the community: the land and the means of production, distribution and transport are held in common, production being for use and not for profit.Sylvia Pankhurst, Future Society (1923)", "Our object is the economic freedom of the producing classes; this ultimate goal will be attained after a long and bitter struggle; therefore, our primary task is to organize the masses and lead them in the struggle for economic freedom.M N Roy, On Non-Violence and the Masses (1923)", "All the martyrs of the working class...are victims of the same murderer: international capitalism. And it is always in belief in the liberation of their oppressed brothers, without discrimination as to race or country, that the souls of these martyrs will find supreme consolation.After experiencing these painful lessons, the oppressed people of all countries ought to know on which side their true brothers are, and on which side their enemy.Ho Chi Minh, Oppression Hits All Races (1923)", "Revolution! The air is filled with flames and fumes. The shapes of men, seen through the smoke, become distorted and unreal. Promethean supermen, they seem, giants in sin or virtue, Satans or saviours. But, in truth, behind the screen of smoke and flame they are like other men: no larger and no smaller, no better and no worse: all creatures of the same incessant passions, hungers, vanities and fears.Louise Bryant the, Mirrors Of Moscow (1923)", "Yes, we must fight, struggle, be ready for defeats and disappointments, but once we have consciously set our feet on the right road, with a clear vision of the task ahead, nothing can daunt us and all causes for pessimism disappear.M.N. Roy, On Non-Violence and the Masses (1923)", "We all know, and if we don\u2019t, then experience will teach us, that the great purpose for which we fight will be achieved if our Unions take in their organised lines the great mass of the disbanded and the victims. The more united and more concrete we are, the more our power will be greater and more terrible to the exploiters and militarists, the more our imposition upon the State will be more powerful. Our today\u2019s Unions must organise to awaken and move the indifferent and sleeping masses, to analyse our program to them, to give them consciousness of their interests and the dangers that threaten their lives.Pantelis Pouliopoulos, What the Veterans and Army Victims Demand (1924)", "...We should try to link our personal lives with the cause for which we struggle, with the cause of building communism.Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, On Communist Ethics (1924)", "A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.Mao Zedong, Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927)", "For us, anti-imperialism does not and cannot constitute, by itself a political program for a mass movement capable of conquering state power. Anti-imperialism, even if it could mobilize the nationalist bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie on the side of the worker and peasant masses (and we have already definitively denied this possibility), does not annul class antagonisms nor suppress different class interests.Jose Carlos Mariategui, Anti-Imperialist Viewpoint (1929)", "It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear...Bhagat Singh, The Red Pamphlet (1929)", "...To build socialism means not only building gigantic factories and flour mills. This is essential but not enough for building socialism. People must grow in mind and heart. And on the basis of this individual growth of each in our conditions a new type of mighty socialist collective will in the long run be formed, where \u201cI\u201d and \u201cwe\u201d will merge into one inseparable whole. Such a collective can only develop on the basis of profound ideological solidarity and an equally profound emotional rapprochement, mutual understanding.Nadezhda K. Krupskaya a, Letter to A. M. Gorky (1932)", "Workers in the bourgeois countries must fight for equal rights for men and women.Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Preface to The Emancipation of Women in Writings of V.I. Lenin (1933)", "We Communists...stand for the organizational unity of the labor movement; we stand for a great single mass Party of the proletariat. Bela Kun, The Most Burning Question: Unity of Action (1934)", "Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth. Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level. Such is the whole of the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge, and such is the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowing and doing.Mao Zedong, On Practice (1937)", "The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution.Mao Zedong, Problems of War and Strategy (1938)", "We should therefore see ourselves as in need of change and capable of being changed. We should not look upon ourselves as immutable, perfect and sacrosanct, as persons who need not and cannot be changed. When we pose the task of remoulding ourselves in social struggle, we are not demeaning ourselves; the objective laws of social development demand it. Unless we do so, we cannot make progress, or fulfill the task of changing society.Liu Shaoqi, How to be a Good Communist (1939)", "Never become alienated from the masses; learn from them and help them. Lead a collective life, inquire into the concerns of the people around you, study their problems their problems and abide by the rules of disciplineZhou Enlai, Guidelines for Myself (1943)", "The masses must have their own staunch vanguard which, for its part, must maintain close ties with the widest possible section of the masses. Only thus will the emancipation of the people be possible.Liu Shaoqi, On the Party  (1945)", "All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality, they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are powerful.Mao Zedong, Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong (1946)", "Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years. To interpret history from this viewpoint is historical materialism; standingin opposition to this viewpoint is historical idealism.Mao Zedong, Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle (1949)", "It is common knowledge that the class interests of the bourgeoisie are built on the foundation of capitalist exploitation. It seeks profits and still more profits.The bourgeois class itself is divided into several strata, and each of those into several groups. In their pursuit of profits, the capitalists not only unscrupulously exploit the proletariat; even within their own class the capitalists do not scruple to swallow up their rivals in competition \u2013 the big fish swallows the little fish, the big bourgeoisie swallows the petty and middle bourgeoisie, one group squeezes out and swallows another group.The bourgeoisie strives to possess the means of production and the market of its own country. And since its greed for profits knows no limits, the bourgeoisie strives to expand beyond its own country, to seize foreign markets, sources of raw materials and areas for capital investment, thus subjugating other nations and exploiting them. At the same time it squeezes out the bourgeoisie or rival capitalists of other countries.The exploitation of wage labour, competition, the squeezing out, suppressing and swallowing of rivals among the capitalists themselves, the resorting to war and even world war, the utilization of all means to secure a monopoly position in its own country and throughout the world \u2013 such is the inherent character of the profit-seeking bourgeoisie. This is the class basis of bourgeois nationalism and of all bourgeois ideologies.Liu Shaoqi, Internationalism and Nationalism (1952) ", "We stand firmly for peace and against war. However, if the imperialists insist on unleashing another war, we should not be afraid of it. Our attitude on this question is the same as our attitude towards any disturbance: first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it.Mao Zedong, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (1957)", "No matter how hard the reactionaries try to prevent the advance of the wheel of history, revolution will take place sooner or later and will surely triumph.Mao Zedong, Celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution (1957)", "The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it (which would satisfy his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny.Che Guevara, Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution (1960 )", "It\u2019s not communism that expropriates the peasant\u2019s field, or the merchant\u2019s store, that ruins the small and medium industrialists, helpless to put up with the competition of the trusts. It\u2019s not communism that set alight class struggle. But it\u2019s capitalism that destroys the property of the little people in order to take it over; that buys at a low price the labor of the worker and makes weigh upon him the full weight of oppression and coercion. War, economic crisis, unemployment, the expropriation and ruin of the middle classes are not our doing. They are the result of the private property of the great means of production, which has become \u2013 after having been a stimulant \u2013 a hindrance to economic life and progress. The property of the great means of production is the only one that should be socialized, if we want to lay down the base for a rational economy.Maurice Thorez, The Popular Front (1960)", "If it is now, more than ever before, the duty of every State and its leaders not to permit actions which are capable of jeopardizing universal peace. That applies with all the more force to the leaders of the Great Powers.Nikita Khrushchev, Of What Freedom Are You Speaking? (1961)", "And the imperialists? Will they sit with their arms crossed? No!The system they practice is the cause of the evils from which we are suffering, but they will try to obscure the facts with spurious allegations, of which they are masters. They will try to compromise the conference and sow disunity in the camp of the exploited countries by offering them pittances.Che Guevara, On Development (1964)", "There is no small enemy nor insignificant force, because no longer are there isolated peoples.Che Guevara, Speech to the United Nations (1964)", "People of the world, be courageous, and dare to fight, defy difficulties and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the people. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.Mao Zedong, American Imperialism Is Closely Surrounded By The Peoples Of The World (1964)", "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice. Che Guevara, Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965)", "Socialism is not spontaneous. It does not arise of itself. It has abiding principles according to which the major means of production and distribution ought to be socialised if exploitation of the many by the few is to be prevented; if, that is to say, egalitarianism in the economy is to be protected.Kwame Nkrumah, African Socialism Revisited (1967)", "The urban guerrilla is engaged in revolutionary action for the people, and with them seeks the participation of the people in the struggle against the dictatorship and the liberation of the country.Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla (1969)", "Historical experience merits attention. A line or a viewpoint must be explained constantly and repeatedly. It won\u2019t do to explain them only to a few people; they must be made known to the broad revolutionary masses.Mao Zedongattributed in, Lin Biao\u2019s Report to the Ninth National Congress (1969)", "Ours is the age that can meet the challenge of the times when we work out so new a relationship of theory to practice that the proof of the unity is in the Subject\u2019s own self-development. Philosophy and revolution will first then liberate the innate talents of men and women who will become whole. Whether or not we recognise that this is the task history has \u201cassigned,\u201d to our epoch, it is a task that remains to be done.Raya Dunayevskaya, New Passions and New Forces in Philosophy & Revolution (1973)", "We must persist in the mass line: From the masses, to the masses; we must have unshakable faith in the vast majority of the masses and firmly rely on them. Both in revolution and in construction, we should boldly arouse the people and unfold vigorous mass movements.Zhou Enlai, Report on the Work of the Government (1975)", "We are for the defence of bourgeois democracy \u00d0 more precisely the defence of democratic rights \u00d0 against attacks from the right.We are, in principle, in favour of electoral activity but only as a subordinate form of activity, only as an auxiliary to direct working class action, never as an end in itselfWe are for workers\u2019 power on the basis of the direct rule of working class organisations, whatever specific form this may take. This involves far, far more elections but on a new basis.\u2019the abolition of state power is the goal of all socialists, including and above all Marx\u2019... \u2018Unless this goal is reached, true democracy, that is equality and freedom is not attainable.\u2019 And the road to the abolition of state power is the road of revolution and the commune-state, not the road of reformist electoralism.Duncan Hallas, Marx, Engels and the vote (1983)", "To remain at home and not vote is behind the political situation. It is insufficient.Mansoor Hekmat, \u2018Election Day\u2019: A Day of Protest (2001)", "Ending terrorism is our task. It is the task of us who fight for people\u2019s equality, for their rights and dignity. State terrorism will end by overthrowing terrorist states. Non-state terrorism must be eradicated by putting an end to the hardships, discrimination, exploitation and suppression that lead people to desperation and make them fall prey to reactionary and inhuman organisations. It can be eradicated by exposing religion, ethnicism, racism and any reactionary ideology, which has no respect for people. Our response is to fight for the creation of an open, free and equal society in which people, their lives, dignity and well being are valued.Mansoor Hekmat, Ending Terrorism is Our Task (2001)", "Only for its own purposes did the strike allow itself to break the vow of immobility. When it needed news bulletins of the revolution it opened a printing works; it used the telegraph to send out strike instructions; it let trains carrying strikers\u2019 delegates pass.\nNothing else was exempt: the strike closed down industrial plants, chemists\u2019 and grocers\u2019 shops, courts of law, everything.\nFrom time to time its attention wearied and its vigilance slackened, now here, now there. Sometimes a reckless train would break through the strike barrier: then the strike would set off in pursuit of it. The guilty train, like a criminal on the run, raced through dark and empty stations, unannounced by the telegraph, leaving a wake of fear and uncertainty behind it. But in the end the strike would catch up with the train, stop the engine, immobilize the driver, let off the steam.\nIt used every possible means. It appealed, convinced, implored; it begged on its knees\u2014that is what a woman orator did at the Kursky Station in Moscow\u2014it threatened, terrorized, threw stones, finally fired off its Brownings. It wanted to achieve its aim at whatever cost. It staked too much: the blood of fathers, the bread of children, the reputation of its own strength. An entire class obeyed it; and when a negligible fraction of that class, corrupted by the very forces it was fighting, stood in its path, it is scarcely surprising that the strike roughly kicked the obstacle aside.\nChapter 7 of 1905 (1907)", "As a general rule, the party does not make a decision on every isolated strike. It helps le trade union to decide the question of knowing if the strike is opportune, by means of its political and economic information and by its advice. It serves the strike with its agitation, etc. First place in the strike belongs, of course to the trade union.\nCommunism and Syndicalism (1931)", "In the trade unions, the Communists, of course, submit to the discipline of the party, no matter what posts they occupy. This does not exclude but presupposes their submission to trade union discipline. In other words, the party does not impose upon them any line of conduct that contradicts the state of mind or the opinions of the majority of the members of trade unions.\nCommunism and Syndicalism (1931)", "In capitalist countries, where the Communist Party does not possess any means of coercion, it is obvious that it can give leadership only by Communists being in the trade unions as rank-and-file members or functionaries.\nCommunism and Syndicalism (1931)", "The general strike is only a mobilization of the proletariat and its setting up against its enemy, the State; but that the strike in itself cannot produce the solution of the problem, because it exhausts the forces of the proletariat sooner than those of its enemies, and this, sooner or later, forces the workers to return to the factories. The general strike acquires a decisive importance only as a preliminary to a conflict between the proletariat and the armed forces of the opposition \u2013 i.e., to the open revolutionary rising of the workers. Only by breaking the will of the armies thrown against it can the revolutionary class solve the problem of power \u2013 the root problem of every revolution. The general strike produces the mobilization of both sides, and gives the first serious estimate of the powers of resistance of the counterrevolution.\nTerrorism and Communism (1920)", "Bureaucratism is not a fortuitous feature of certain provincial organizations, but a general phenomenon. It does not travel from the district to the central organization through the medium of the regional organization, but much rather from the central organization to the district through the medium of the regional organization. It is not at all a survival of the war period; it is the result of the transference to the party of the methods and the administrative manners accumulated during these last years.\nThe New Course (1923)", "In playing the role of party leader and being absorbed by the questions of administration, the old generation accustomed itself to think and to decide, as it still does, for the party. For the communist masses, it brings to the forefront purely bookish, pedagogical methods of participating in political life: elementary political training courses, examinations of the knowledge of its members, party schools, etc. Thence the bureaucratism of the apparatus, its cliquism, its exclusive internal life, in a word, all the traits that constitute the profoundly negative  side of the old course.\nThe New Course (1923)", "Those comrades who assert most flatly, with the greatest insistence and sometimes most brutally, that every difference of opinion, every grouping of opinion, however temporary, is an expression of the interests of classes opposed to the proletariat, do not want to apply this criterion to bureaucratism.\nThe New Course (1923)", "Mechanical centralism is necessarily complemented by factionalism, which is at once a malicious caricature of democracy and a potential political danger.\n Letter to Party Meetings (1923)", "The Soviet bureaucracy is like all ruling classes in that it is ready to shut its eyes to the crudest mistakes of its leaders in the sphere of general politics, provided in return they show an unconditional fidelity in the defense of its privileges.\nRevolution Betrayed (1936)", "If the leaders seek only to preserve themselves, that is what they become; preserves, dried preserves.\nSome Questions on American Problems (1940)", "The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers\u2019 state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: it was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country\u2019s economy. The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers\u2019 state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all-powerful privileged caste constitute the most convincing refutation \u2013 not only theoretically, but this time, practically \u2013 of the theory of socialism in one country.\nThe USSR and Problems of the Transitional Epoch (1938)", "The goal to be attained by the overthrow of the bureaucracy is the reestablishment of the rule of the Soviets, expelling from them the present bureaucracy. It is the task of the regenerated Soviets to collaborate with the world revolution and the building of a socialist society. The overthrow of the bureaucracy therefore presupposes the preservation of state property and of planned economy.\nThe USSR and War (1939)", "One has to put a wadded nightcap not only over one\u2019s eyes, but over one\u2019s nose and ears, to be able to-day, after the inglorious collapse of the Second International, after the disgraceful bankruptcy of its leading party, after the bloody lunacy of the world slaughter and the gigantic sweep of the civil war, to set up in contrast to us, the profundity, the loyalty, the peacefulness and the sobriety of the Second International, the heritage of which we are still liquidating.\nTerrorism and Communism (1920)", "It is untrue that revolutionary art can be created only by workers. Just because the revolution is a working-class revolution, it releases \u2013 to repeat what was said before \u2013 very little working-class energy for art.\nCommunist Policy Toward Art (1923)", "Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. The party leads the proletariat but not the \nhistoric processes of history.\nCommunist Policy Toward Art (1923)", "Such terms as \u201cproletarian literature\u201d and \u201cproletarian culture\u201d are dangerous, because they erroneously compress the Culture of the future into the narrow limits of the present day. They falsify perspectives, they violate proportions, they distort standards and they cultivate the arrogance of small circles which is most dangerous.\nLiterature and Revolution (1924)", "The ancient philosopher said that strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means by its very essence strict limitations of freedom. But for that very reason epochs of revolution have never been directly favorable to cultural creation: they have only cleared the arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state. \nRevolution Betrayed (1936)", "Generally speaking, art is an expression of man\u2019s need for an harmonious and complete life, that is to say, his need for those major benefits of which a society of classes has deprived him. That is why a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work. Every new tendency in art has begun with rebellion.\nArt and Politics in Our Epoch (1938)", "The essence of Marxism consists in this, that it approaches society concretely, as a subject for objective research, and analyzes human history as one would a colossal laboratory record. Marxism appraises ideology as a subordinate integral element of the material social structure. Marxism examines the class structure of society as a historically conditioned form of the development of the productive forces; Marxism deduces from the productive forces of society the inter-relations between human society and surrounding nature, and these, in turn are determined at each historical stage by man\u2019s technology, his instruments and weapons, his capacities and methods for struggle with nature. Precisely this objective approach arms Marxism with the insuperable power of historical foresight.\nDialectical Materialism and Science (1925)", "If it is possible to place a given person\u2019s general type of thought on the basis of his relation to concrete practical problems, it is also possible to predict approximately, knowing his general type of thought, how a given individual will approach one or another practical question. That is the incomparable educational value of the dialectical method of thought.\nA Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party (1939)", "Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality. \nThe ABC of Materialist Dialectics (1939)", "The dialectic is not a magic master key for all questions. It does not replace concrete scientific analysis. But it directs this analysis along the correct road, securing it against sterile wanderings in the desert of subjectivism and scholasticism. \nThe ABC of Materialist Dialectics (1939)", "The democratic regime is the most aristocratic way of ruling. It is possible only to a rich nation.\nDiscussions on the Transitional Program (1938)", "We must give a scientific explanation of society, and clearly explain it to the masses. That is the difference between Marxism and reformism.\nDiscussions on the Transitional Program (1938)", "Such categories as \u2018commodity\u2019, \u2018money\u2019, \u2018wages\u2019, \u2018capital\u2019, \u2018profit\u2019, \u2018tax\u2019, and the like are only semi-mystical reflections in men\u2019s heads of the various aspects of a process of economy which they do not understand and which is not under their control. To decipher them, a thoroughgoing scientific analysis is indispensable.\nMarxism in Our Time (1939)", "It was not Marx\u2019s aim to discover the \u2018eternal laws\u2019 of economy. He denied the existence of such laws. The history of the development of human society is the history of the succession of various systems of economy, each operating in accordance with its own laws. ... In his Capital, Marx does not study economy in general, but capitalist economy, which has its own specific laws. Only in passing does he refer to the other economic systems to elucidate the characteristics of capitalism.\nMarxism in Our Time (1939)", "Just as the operation of the laws of physiology yields different results in a growing than in a dying organism, so the laws of Marxist economy assert themselves differently in a developing and disintegrating capitalism.\nMarxism in Our Time (1939)", "Problems of Everyday Life\nOur Soviet bureaucratic machine is unique, complex, containing as it does the traditions of different epochs together with the germs of future relationships. With us, civility, as a general rule, does not exist. But of rudeness, inherited from the past, we have as much as you please.\nCivility and Politeness as a Necessary Lubricant in Daily Relations (1923)\n\u00a0\nThere are two big facts which have set a new stamp on working class life. The one is the advent of the eight-hour working day; the other, the prohibition of the sale of vodka.\nVodka, the Church and the Cinema (1923)\n\u00a0\nThe workers\u2019 state must become wealthier in order that it may be possible seriously to tackle the public education of children and the releasing of the family from the burden of the kitchen and the laundry. Socialization of family housekeeping and public education of children are unthinkable without a marked improvement in our economics as a whole. We need more socialist economic forms. Only under such conditions can we free the family from the functions and cares that now oppress and disintegrate it. Washing must be done by a public laundry, catering by a public restaurant, sewing by a public workshop. Children must be educated by good public teachers who have a real vocation for the work. Then the bond between husband and wife would be freed from everything external and accidental, and the one would cease to absorb the life of the other. Genuine equality would at last be established.\nVodka, the Church and the Cinema (1923)\n\u00a0\nA certain advance towards the new family is possible even now. It is true that the state cannot as yet undertake either the education of children or the establishment of public kitchens that would be an improvement on the family kitchen, or the establishment of public laundries where the clothes would not be torn or stolen. But this does not mean that the more enterprising and progressive families cannot group themselves even now into collective house keeping units. Experiments of this kind must, of course, be made carefully.\nVodka, the Church and the Cinema (1923)\n\u00a0\nThe proletariat has made a big stride, but more in politics than in life and morals. Life is conservative. In its primitive aspect, of course, Rasteryaev Street [referring to a book by Uspensky] no longer exists. The brutal treatment accorded to apprentices, the servility practiced before employers, the vicious drunkenness, and the street hooliganism have vanished. But in the relations of husband and wife, parents and children, in the domestic life of the family, fenced off from the whole world, Rasteryaevism is still firmly implanted. We need years and decades of economic growth and culture to banish Rasteryaevism from its last refuge \u2013 individual and family life \u2013 recreating it from top to bottom in the spirit of collectivism.\nHabit and Custom (1923)\n\u00a0\nAbusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one\u2019s own and that of other people.\nThe Struggle for Cultured Speech (1923)\n\u00a0\nThe husband, torn away from his usual surroundings by mobilization, changed into a revolutionary citizen at the civic front. A momentous change. His outlook is wider, his spiritual aspirations higher and of a more complicated order. He is a different man. And then he returns to find everything there practically unchanged. The old harmony and understanding with the people at home in family relationship is gone. No new understanding arises. The mutual wondering changes into mutual discontent, then into ill will. The family is broken up.\nFrom the Old Family to the New (1923)\n\u00a0\nThe workers state has rejected church ceremony, and informed its citizens that they have the right to be born, to marry, and to die without the mysterious gestures and exhortations of persons clad in cassocks, gowns, and other ecclesiastical vestments. But custom finds it harder to discard ceremony than the state.\nThe Family and Ceremony (1923)\n\u00a0\nThe dictatorship will have to become softer and milder as the economic welfare of the country is raised. The present method of commanding human beings will give way to one of disposing over things. The road leads not to the robot but to man of a higher order.\nFamily Relations Under the Soviets (1932)\n\u00a0\nThese gentlemen have, it seems, completely forgotten that socialism was to remove the cause which impels woman to abortion, and not force her into the \u201cjoys of motherhood.\u201d with the help of a foul police interference in what is to every woman the most intimate sphere of life.\nThermidor in the Family\u2014from Revolution Betrayed (1936)\n\u00a0\nThe place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, school and hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organisations, film theatres, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring women, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters.\nTrotsky, Thermidor in the Family\u2014from Revolution Betrayed (1936)\n\u00a0\nOn Revolution\nJust as a blacksmith cannot seize the red hot iron in his naked hand, so the proletariat cannot directly seize the power; it has to have an organisation accommodated to this task. The co-ordination of the mass insurrection with the conspiracy, the subordination of the conspiracy to the insurrection, the organisation of the insurrection through the conspiracy, constitutes that complex and responsible department of revolutionary politics which Marx and Engels called \u201cthe art of insurrection.\u201d It presupposes a correct general leadership of the masses, a flexible orientation in changing conditions, a thought-out plan of attack, cautiousness in technical preparation, and a daring blow.\nHistory of the Russian Revolution, Chpter 30 (1930)\n\u00a0\nEclectics live by means of episodic thoughts and improvisations that originate under the impact of events. Marxist cadres capable of leading the proletarian revolution are trained only by the continual and successive working out of problems and disputes.\nWhat Next for the German Revolution? (1932)\n\u00a0\nA revolution is \u201cmade\u201d directly by a minority.\nHue and Cry Over Kronstadt (1938)\n\u00a0\nNothing is more dangerous in politics, especially in a critical period, than to repeat general formulas without examining their social content.\nWhither France? (1934)\n\u00a0\n \u201cGuerrillaism\u201d was the military expression of the peasant background of the revolution.\nPreface to the Military Writings (1923)\n\u00a0\nArguments to the effect that all violence, including revolutionary violence, is evil and that Communists therefore ought not to engage in \u201cglorification\u201d of armed struggle and the revolutionary army, amount to a philosophy worthy of Quakers and the old maids of the Salvation Army. Permitting such propaganda in a Communist Party is like permitting Tolstoyan propaganda in the garrison of a besieged fortress.\nIntroduction to the Military Writings (1923)\n\u00a0\nOn Permanent Revolution\nWith regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.\nTheory of Permanent Revolution (1931)\n\u00a0\nThe dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and, very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.\nTheory of Permanent Revolution (1931)\n\u00a0\nThe utopian hopes of the epoch of military communism came in later for a cruel, and in many respects just, criticism. The theoretical mistake of the ruling party remains inexplicable, however, only if you leave out of account the fact that all calculations at that time were based on the hope of an early victory of the revolution in the West.\nRevolution Betrayed (1936)\n\u00a0\nThe completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable.\nTheory of Permanent Revolution (1931)\n\u00a0\nOn the United Front and the Fight Against Fascism\nTo say to the Social Democratic workers: \u201cCast your leaders aside and join our \u2018non-party\u2019 united front\u201d means to add just one more hollow phrase to a thousand others. We must understand how to tear the workers away from their leaders in reality. But reality today is the struggle against fascism. ... The overwhelming majority of the Social Democratic workers will fight against the fascists, but \u2013 for the present at least \u2013 only together with their organizations. This stage cannot be skipped. \nFor a Workers\u2019 United Front Against Fascism (1931)\n\u00a0\nWhen a state turns fascist, it doesn\u2019t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance with the patterns set by Mussolini \u2013 the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role \u2013 but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers\u2019 organizations are annihilated;  that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of \nadministration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat.  Therein precisely is the gist of fascism.\nWhat Next for the German Revolution? (1932)\n\u00a0\nThe progress of a class toward class consciousness, that is, the building of a revolutionary party which leads the proletariat, is a complex and a contradictory process. The class itself is not homogeneous. Its different sections arrive at class consciousness by different paths and at different times. The bourgeoisie participates actively in this process. Within the working class, it creates its own institutions, or utilizes those already existing, in order to oppose certain strata of workers to others. Within the proletariat several parties are active at the same time. Therefore, for the greater part of its historical journey, it remains split politically. The problem of the united front \u2013 which arises during certain periods most sharply originates therein. The historical interests of the proletariat find their expression in the Communist Party \u2013 when its policies are correct. The task of the Communist Party consists in winning over the majority of the proletariat; and only thus is the socialist revolution made possible. The Communist Party cannot fulfill its mission except by preserving, completely and unconditionally, its political and organizational independence apart from all other parties and organizations within and without the working class.\nBureaucratic Ultimatism (1932)\n\u00a0\nUltimatism is an attempt to rape the working class after failing to convince it.\nBureaucratic Ultimatism (1932)\n\u00a0\nThe stubborn, doltish, and insensate rejection by the Communist Party of the policies of the united front provides the Social Democracy, under the present conditions, with its most important political weapon. \nBureaucratic Ultimatism (1932)\n\u00a0\nAll talk to the effect that we should accept a united front with the masses but not with the leaders is sheer scholasticism. This is like saying that we agree to conduct strikes against the capitalists but refuse to enter into negotiations with them. It is impossible to lead strike struggles without entering at a certain moment into negotiations with the capitalists or their plenipotentiaries. It is just as impossible to summon the organized masses to a united struggle without entering into negotiations with those whom a particular section of the mass has made its plenipotentiaries. \nFirst Five Years of the Communist International (1924)\n\u00a0\nThe Fascists find their human material mainly in the petty bourgeoisie. The latter has been entirely ruined by big capital. There is no way out for it in the present social order, but it knows of no other.  \nWhither France? (1934)\n\u00a0\nThe situation is revolutionary, as revolutionary as it can be, granted the non-revolutionary policies of the working-class parties. More exactly, the situation is pre-revolutionary. In order to bring the situation to its full maturity, there must be an immediate, vigorous, unremitting mobilization of the masses, under the slogan of the conquest of power in the name of socialism. This is the only way through which the pre-revolutionary situation will be changed into a revolutionary situation.  \nWhither France? (1934)\n\u00a0\nContemporary society is composed of three classes: the big bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the \u2018middle classes\u2019, or the petty bourgeoisie. The relations among these three classes determine in the final analysis the political situation in the country. The fundamental classes of society are the big bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Only these two classes can have a clear, consistent, independent policy of their own. The petty bourgeoisie is distinguished by its economic dependence and its social heterogeneity. Its upper stratum is linked directly to the big bourgeoisie. Its lower stratum merges with the proletariat and even falls to the status of lumpen proletariat. In accordance with its economic situation, the petty bourgeoisie can have no policy of its own. It always oscillates between the capitalists and the workers. Its own upper stratum pushes it to the right; its lower strata, oppressed and exploited, are capable in certain conditions of turning sharply to the left. \nWhither France? (1934)\n\u00a0\nThese [Fascist] demagogues shake their fists at the bankers, the big merchants and the capitalists. Their words and gestures correspond to the feelings of the small proprietors bogged up a blind alley. The Fascists show boldness, go out into the streets, attack the police, and attempt to drive out parliament by force. That makes an impression on the despairing petty bourgeois. He says to himself: \u201cThe Radicals, among whom there are too many swindlers, have definitely sold themselves to the bankers; the Socialists have promised for a long time to abolish exploitation but they never pass from words to deeds, the Communists one cannot understand at all \u2013 today it is one thing tomorrow another; let\u2019s see if the Fascists cannot save us.\u201d \nWhither France? (1934)\n\u00a0\nOn Planning\nIf a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace \u2013 a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions \u2013 such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy.\nThe Art of Planning (1932)\n\u00a0\nThe politicians of reformism, these dexterous wirepullers, artful intriguers and careerists, expert parliamentary and ministerial maneuvrists, are no sooner thrown out of their habitual sphere by the course of events, no sooner placed face to face with momentous contingencies, than they reveal themselves to be utter and complete fools.\nWhat Next for the German Revolution? (1932)\n\u00a0\nAnd as to prices, they will serve the cause of socialism better, the more honestly they begin to express the real economic relations of the present day.\nRevolution Betrayed (1936)\n\u00a0\nIt is possible to build gigantic factories according to a ready-made Western pattern by bureaucratic command \u2013 although, to be sure, at triple the normal cost. But the farther you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality, which slips out of the hands of a bureaucracy like a shadow. The Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative \u2013 conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.\nRevolution Betrayed (1936)\n\u00a0\nOn the Party\nThe party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.\nWhat Next for the German Revolution? (1932)\n\u00a0\nThe Jesuits represented a militant organization, strictly centralized, aggressive, and dangerous not only to enemies but also to allies. In his psychology and method of action the Jesuit of the heroicperiod distinguished himself from an average priest as the warrior of a church from its shopkeeper. We have no reason to idealize either one or the other. But it is altogether unworthy to look upon a fanatic warrior with the eyes of an obtuse and slothful shopkeeper. ... Opportunists are peaceful shopkeepers in socialist ideas while Bolsheviks are its inveterate warriors.\nTheir Morals and Ours (1938)\n\u00a0\nThe petty-bourgeois moralist is the younger brother of the bourgeois pacifist who want to \u2018humanize\u2019 warfare by prohibiting the use of poison gases, the bombardment of unfortified cities, etc. Politically, such programs serve only to deflect the thoughts of the people from revolution as the only method of putting an end to war.\nMoralists and Sycophants Against Marxism (1939)\n\u00a0\nThere is only one way of avoiding the war \u2013 that is the overthrow of this society. However, as we are too weak for this task, the war is inevitable.\nSome Questions on American Problems (1940)\n\u00a0\nOn the 3rd of April Lenin arrived in Petrograd from abroad. Only from that moment does the Bolshevik Party begin to speak out loud, and, what is more important, with its own voice.\nHistory of the Russian Revolution, Chapter 15 (1930)\n\u00a0\nOn the Chinese Revolution\nIt is one thing when a Communist party, firmly resting on the flower of the urban proletariat, strives through the workers to lead a peasant war. It is an altogether different thing when a few thousand or even tens of thousands of revolutionists, who are truly Communists or only take the name, assume the leadership of a peasant war without having serious support from the proletariat. This is precisely the situation in China.\nProblems of the Chinese Revolution (1932)\n\u00a0\nOn the Fourth International\nThe strategic task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism but in its overthrow. The present epoch is distinguished not for the fact that it frees the revolutionary party from day-to-day work but because it permits this work to be carried on indissolubly with the actual tasks of the revolution.\nThe Fourth International does not discard the program of the old \u201cminimal\u201d demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct actual, that is, revolutionary perspective. Insofar as the old, partial, \u201cminimal\u201d demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism - and this occurs at each step-the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old \u201cminimal program\u201d is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.\nTransitional Program (1938)\n\u00a0\nOn Conscription\nWe can\u2019t oppose compulsory military training by the bourgeois state just as we can\u2019t oppose compulsory education by the bourgeois state. Military training in our eyes is a part of education.\nOn Conscription (1940) \n\u00a0\nOn Britain\nThe British monarchy, hypocritical British conservatism, religiosity, servility, sanctimoniousness all this is old rags, rubbish, the refuse of centuries which we have no need for whatsoever.\nThrough What Stage Are We Passing? (1921)\n\u00a0\nOur class enemies [the British bourgeoisie] are empiricists, that is, they operate from one occasion to the next, guided not by the analysis of historical development, but by practical experience, routinism, rule of thumb, and instinct.\nMilitary Doctrine or Pseudo-Military Doctrinairism (1921)\n\u00a0\nThe social revolution is entirely based upon the growth of proletarian consciousness and on the faith of the proletariat in its own strength and in the party which is leading it. One may play a double game with the enemies of the proletariat, but not with the proletariat itself. Our party has made mistakes, together with the masses which it was leading. We have always quite openly acknowledged these mistakes to the masses.\nBetween Red and White (1922)\n\u00a0\nLet us declare frankly: the sincere and profound enthusiasm with which we contemplate the products of the British genius in the most varied spheres of human creative endeavour, only the more sharply and pitilessly accentuates the sincere and profound contempt with which we regard the spiritual narrow-mindedness, the theoretical banality and the lack of revolutionary dignity, which characterize the authorized leaders of British socialism. They are not the heralds of a new world; they are but the surviving relies of an old culture, which in their person expresses anxiety for its further fate. And the spiritual barrenness of these relics seems to be a sort of retribution for the profligate lavish past of bourgeois culture.\nBetween Red and White (1922)\n\u00a0\nThe principle, the end justifies the means, naturally raise the question \u201cand what justifies the end?\u201d In practical life as in the historical movement the end and the means constantly change places. A machine under construction is an \u201cend\u201d of production only that upon entering the factory it may become the \u201cmeans\u201d Democracy in certain periods is the end of the class struggle only that later it may be transformed into its \u201cmeans.\u201d \nTheir Morals and Ours (1938)\n\u00a0\nDespite all the indisputable greatness of Anglo-Saxon genius one cannot help observing that it is precisely in the Anglo-Saxon countries that the laws of revolution are least understood. This can be explained on the one hand by the fact that the phenomenon of revolution itself in these countries relates to a far distant past and evokes from the official \u201csociologists\u201d the condescending smile intended for a naughty child. On the other hand the pragmatism so characteristic of Anglo-Saxon thinking is of least avail for the understanding of revolutionary crises.\nThe Philosophy of British Capitalism (1938)\n\n\u00a0\n\nLeon Trotsky Internet Archive\n", "Our Soviet bureaucratic machine is unique, complex, containing as it does the traditions of different epochs together with the germs of future relationships. With us, civility, as a general rule, does not exist. But of rudeness, inherited from the past, we have as much as you please.\nCivility and Politeness as a Necessary Lubricant in Daily Relations (1923)", "There are two big facts which have set a new stamp on working class life. The one is the advent of the eight-hour working day; the other, the prohibition of the sale of vodka.\nVodka, the Church and the Cinema (1923)", "The workers\u2019 state must become wealthier in order that it may be possible seriously to tackle the public education of children and the releasing of the family from the burden of the kitchen and the laundry. Socialization of family housekeeping and public education of children are unthinkable without a marked improvement in our economics as a whole. We need more socialist economic forms. Only under such conditions can we free the family from the functions and cares that now oppress and disintegrate it. Washing must be done by a public laundry, catering by a public restaurant, sewing by a public workshop. Children must be educated by good public teachers who have a real vocation for the work. Then the bond between husband and wife would be freed from everything external and accidental, and the one would cease to absorb the life of the other. Genuine equality would at last be established.\nVodka, the Church and the Cinema (1923)", "A certain advance towards the new family is possible even now. It is true that the state cannot as yet undertake either the education of children or the establishment of public kitchens that would be an improvement on the family kitchen, or the establishment of public laundries where the clothes would not be torn or stolen. But this does not mean that the more enterprising and progressive families cannot group themselves even now into collective house keeping units. Experiments of this kind must, of course, be made carefully.\nVodka, the Church and the Cinema (1923)", "The proletariat has made a big stride, but more in politics than in life and morals. Life is conservative. In its primitive aspect, of course, Rasteryaev Street [referring to a book by Uspensky] no longer exists. The brutal treatment accorded to apprentices, the servility practiced before employers, the vicious drunkenness, and the street hooliganism have vanished. But in the relations of husband and wife, parents and children, in the domestic life of the family, fenced off from the whole world, Rasteryaevism is still firmly implanted. We need years and decades of economic growth and culture to banish Rasteryaevism from its last refuge \u2013 individual and family life \u2013 recreating it from top to bottom in the spirit of collectivism.\nHabit and Custom (1923)", "Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one\u2019s own and that of other people.\nThe Struggle for Cultured Speech (1923)", "The husband, torn away from his usual surroundings by mobilization, changed into a revolutionary citizen at the civic front. A momentous change. His outlook is wider, his spiritual aspirations higher and of a more complicated order. He is a different man. And then he returns to find everything there practically unchanged. The old harmony and understanding with the people at home in family relationship is gone. No new understanding arises. The mutual wondering changes into mutual discontent, then into ill will. The family is broken up.\nFrom the Old Family to the New (1923)", "The workers state has rejected church ceremony, and informed its citizens that they have the right to be born, to marry, and to die without the mysterious gestures and exhortations of persons clad in cassocks, gowns, and other ecclesiastical vestments. But custom finds it harder to discard ceremony than the state.\nThe Family and Ceremony (1923)", "The dictatorship will have to become softer and milder as the economic welfare of the country is raised. The present method of commanding human beings will give way to one of disposing over things. The road leads not to the robot but to man of a higher order.\nFamily Relations Under the Soviets (1932)", "These gentlemen have, it seems, completely forgotten that socialism was to remove the cause which impels woman to abortion, and not force her into the \u201cjoys of motherhood.\u201d with the help of a foul police interference in what is to every woman the most intimate sphere of life.\nThermidor in the Family\u2014from Revolution Betrayed (1936)", "The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, school and hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organisations, film theatres, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring women, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters.\nTrotsky, Thermidor in the Family\u2014from Revolution Betrayed (1936)", "Just as a blacksmith cannot seize the red hot iron in his naked hand, so the proletariat cannot directly seize the power; it has to have an organisation accommodated to this task. The co-ordination of the mass insurrection with the conspiracy, the subordination of the conspiracy to the insurrection, the organisation of the insurrection through the conspiracy, constitutes that complex and responsible department of revolutionary politics which Marx and Engels called \u201cthe art of insurrection.\u201d It presupposes a correct general leadership of the masses, a flexible orientation in changing conditions, a thought-out plan of attack, cautiousness in technical preparation, and a daring blow.\nHistory of the Russian Revolution, Chpter 30 (1930)", "Eclectics live by means of episodic thoughts and improvisations that originate under the impact of events. Marxist cadres capable of leading the proletarian revolution are trained only by the continual and successive working out of problems and disputes.\nWhat Next for the German Revolution? (1932)", "A revolution is \u201cmade\u201d directly by a minority.\nHue and Cry Over Kronstadt (1938)", "Nothing is more dangerous in politics, especially in a critical period, than to repeat general formulas without examining their social content.\nWhither France? (1934)", " \u201cGuerrillaism\u201d was the military expression of the peasant background of the revolution.\nPreface to the Military Writings (1923)", "Arguments to the effect that all violence, including revolutionary violence, is evil and that Communists therefore ought not to engage in \u201cglorification\u201d of armed struggle and the revolutionary army, amount to a philosophy worthy of Quakers and the old maids of the Salvation Army. Permitting such propaganda in a Communist Party is like permitting Tolstoyan propaganda in the garrison of a besieged fortress.\nIntroduction to the Military Writings (1923)", "With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.\nTheory of Permanent Revolution (1931)", "The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and, very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.\nTheory of Permanent Revolution (1931)", "The utopian hopes of the epoch of military communism came in later for a cruel, and in many respects just, criticism. The theoretical mistake of the ruling party remains inexplicable, however, only if you leave out of account the fact that all calculations at that time were based on the hope of an early victory of the revolution in the West.\nRevolution Betrayed (1936)", "The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable.\nTheory of Permanent Revolution (1931)", "To say to the Social Democratic workers: \u201cCast your leaders aside and join our \u2018non-party\u2019 united front\u201d means to add just one more hollow phrase to a thousand others. We must understand how to tear the workers away from their leaders in reality. But reality today is the struggle against fascism. ... The overwhelming majority of the Social Democratic workers will fight against the fascists, but \u2013 for the present at least \u2013 only together with their organizations. This stage cannot be skipped. \nFor a Workers\u2019 United Front Against Fascism (1931)", "When a state turns fascist, it doesn\u2019t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance with the patterns set by Mussolini \u2013 the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role \u2013 but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers\u2019 organizations are annihilated;  that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of \nadministration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat.  Therein precisely is the gist of fascism.\nWhat Next for the German Revolution? (1932)", "The progress of a class toward class consciousness, that is, the building of a revolutionary party which leads the proletariat, is a complex and a contradictory process. The class itself is not homogeneous. Its different sections arrive at class consciousness by different paths and at different times. The bourgeoisie participates actively in this process. Within the working class, it creates its own institutions, or utilizes those already existing, in order to oppose certain strata of workers to others. Within the proletariat several parties are active at the same time. Therefore, for the greater part of its historical journey, it remains split politically. The problem of the united front \u2013 which arises during certain periods most sharply originates therein. The historical interests of the proletariat find their expression in the Communist Party \u2013 when its policies are correct. The task of the Communist Party consists in winning over the majority of the proletariat; and only thus is the socialist revolution made possible. The Communist Party cannot fulfill its mission except by preserving, completely and unconditionally, its political and organizational independence apart from all other parties and organizations within and without the working class.\nBureaucratic Ultimatism (1932)", "Ultimatism is an attempt to rape the working class after failing to convince it.\nBureaucratic Ultimatism (1932)", "The stubborn, doltish, and insensate rejection by the Communist Party of the policies of the united front provides the Social Democracy, under the present conditions, with its most important political weapon. \nBureaucratic Ultimatism (1932)", "All talk to the effect that we should accept a united front with the masses but not with the leaders is sheer scholasticism. This is like saying that we agree to conduct strikes against the capitalists but refuse to enter into negotiations with them. It is impossible to lead strike struggles without entering at a certain moment into negotiations with the capitalists or their plenipotentiaries. It is just as impossible to summon the organized masses to a united struggle without entering into negotiations with those whom a particular section of the mass has made its plenipotentiaries. \nFirst Five Years of the Communist International (1924)", "The Fascists find their human material mainly in the petty bourgeoisie. The latter has been entirely ruined by big capital. There is no way out for it in the present social order, but it knows of no other.  \nWhither France? (1934)", "The situation is revolutionary, as revolutionary as it can be, granted the non-revolutionary policies of the working-class parties. More exactly, the situation is pre-revolutionary. In order to bring the situation to its full maturity, there must be an immediate, vigorous, unremitting mobilization of the masses, under the slogan of the conquest of power in the name of socialism. This is the only way through which the pre-revolutionary situation will be changed into a revolutionary situation.  \nWhither France? (1934)", "Contemporary society is composed of three classes: the big bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the \u2018middle classes\u2019, or the petty bourgeoisie. The relations among these three classes determine in the final analysis the political situation in the country. The fundamental classes of society are the big bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Only these two classes can have a clear, consistent, independent policy of their own. The petty bourgeoisie is distinguished by its economic dependence and its social heterogeneity. Its upper stratum is linked directly to the big bourgeoisie. Its lower stratum merges with the proletariat and even falls to the status of lumpen proletariat. In accordance with its economic situation, the petty bourgeoisie can have no policy of its own. It always oscillates between the capitalists and the workers. Its own upper stratum pushes it to the right; its lower strata, oppressed and exploited, are capable in certain conditions of turning sharply to the left. \nWhither France? (1934)", "These [Fascist] demagogues shake their fists at the bankers, the big merchants and the capitalists. Their words and gestures correspond to the feelings of the small proprietors bogged up a blind alley. The Fascists show boldness, go out into the streets, attack the police, and attempt to drive out parliament by force. That makes an impression on the despairing petty bourgeois. He says to himself: \u201cThe Radicals, among whom there are too many swindlers, have definitely sold themselves to the bankers; the Socialists have promised for a long time to abolish exploitation but they never pass from words to deeds, the Communists one cannot understand at all \u2013 today it is one thing tomorrow another; let\u2019s see if the Fascists cannot save us.\u201d \nWhither France? (1934)", "If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace \u2013 a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions \u2013 such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy.\nThe Art of Planning (1932)", "The politicians of reformism, these dexterous wirepullers, artful intriguers and careerists, expert parliamentary and ministerial maneuvrists, are no sooner thrown out of their habitual sphere by the course of events, no sooner placed face to face with momentous contingencies, than they reveal themselves to be utter and complete fools.\nWhat Next for the German Revolution? (1932)", "And as to prices, they will serve the cause of socialism better, the more honestly they begin to express the real economic relations of the present day.\nRevolution Betrayed (1936)", "It is possible to build gigantic factories according to a ready-made Western pattern by bureaucratic command \u2013 although, to be sure, at triple the normal cost. But the farther you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality, which slips out of the hands of a bureaucracy like a shadow. The Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative \u2013 conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.\nRevolution Betrayed (1936)", "The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.\nWhat Next for the German Revolution? (1932)", "The Jesuits represented a militant organization, strictly centralized, aggressive, and dangerous not only to enemies but also to allies. In his psychology and method of action the Jesuit of the heroicperiod distinguished himself from an average priest as the warrior of a church from its shopkeeper. We have no reason to idealize either one or the other. But it is altogether unworthy to look upon a fanatic warrior with the eyes of an obtuse and slothful shopkeeper. ... Opportunists are peaceful shopkeepers in socialist ideas while Bolsheviks are its inveterate warriors.\nTheir Morals and Ours (1938)", "The petty-bourgeois moralist is the younger brother of the bourgeois pacifist who want to \u2018humanize\u2019 warfare by prohibiting the use of poison gases, the bombardment of unfortified cities, etc. Politically, such programs serve only to deflect the thoughts of the people from revolution as the only method of putting an end to war.\nMoralists and Sycophants Against Marxism (1939)", "There is only one way of avoiding the war \u2013 that is the overthrow of this society. However, as we are too weak for this task, the war is inevitable.\nSome Questions on American Problems (1940)", "On the 3rd of April Lenin arrived in Petrograd from abroad. Only from that moment does the Bolshevik Party begin to speak out loud, and, what is more important, with its own voice.\nHistory of the Russian Revolution, Chapter 15 (1930)", "It is one thing when a Communist party, firmly resting on the flower of the urban proletariat, strives through the workers to lead a peasant war. It is an altogether different thing when a few thousand or even tens of thousands of revolutionists, who are truly Communists or only take the name, assume the leadership of a peasant war without having serious support from the proletariat. This is precisely the situation in China.\nProblems of the Chinese Revolution (1932)", "The strategic task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism but in its overthrow. The present epoch is distinguished not for the fact that it frees the revolutionary party from day-to-day work but because it permits this work to be carried on indissolubly with the actual tasks of the revolution.\nThe Fourth International does not discard the program of the old \u201cminimal\u201d demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct actual, that is, revolutionary perspective. Insofar as the old, partial, \u201cminimal\u201d demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism - and this occurs at each step-the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old \u201cminimal program\u201d is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.\nTransitional Program (1938)", "We can\u2019t oppose compulsory military training by the bourgeois state just as we can\u2019t oppose compulsory education by the bourgeois state. Military training in our eyes is a part of education.\nOn Conscription (1940) ", "The British monarchy, hypocritical British conservatism, religiosity, servility, sanctimoniousness all this is old rags, rubbish, the refuse of centuries which we have no need for whatsoever.\nThrough What Stage Are We Passing? (1921)", "Our class enemies [the British bourgeoisie] are empiricists, that is, they operate from one occasion to the next, guided not by the analysis of historical development, but by practical experience, routinism, rule of thumb, and instinct.\nMilitary Doctrine or Pseudo-Military Doctrinairism (1921)", "The social revolution is entirely based upon the growth of proletarian consciousness and on the faith of the proletariat in its own strength and in the party which is leading it. One may play a double game with the enemies of the proletariat, but not with the proletariat itself. Our party has made mistakes, together with the masses which it was leading. We have always quite openly acknowledged these mistakes to the masses.\nBetween Red and White (1922)", "Let us declare frankly: the sincere and profound enthusiasm with which we contemplate the products of the British genius in the most varied spheres of human creative endeavour, only the more sharply and pitilessly accentuates the sincere and profound contempt with which we regard the spiritual narrow-mindedness, the theoretical banality and the lack of revolutionary dignity, which characterize the authorized leaders of British socialism. They are not the heralds of a new world; they are but the surviving relies of an old culture, which in their person expresses anxiety for its further fate. And the spiritual barrenness of these relics seems to be a sort of retribution for the profligate lavish past of bourgeois culture.\nBetween Red and White (1922)", "The principle, the end justifies the means, naturally raise the question \u201cand what justifies the end?\u201d In practical life as in the historical movement the end and the means constantly change places. A machine under construction is an \u201cend\u201d of production only that upon entering the factory it may become the \u201cmeans\u201d Democracy in certain periods is the end of the class struggle only that later it may be transformed into its \u201cmeans.\u201d \nTheir Morals and Ours (1938)", "Despite all the indisputable greatness of Anglo-Saxon genius one cannot help observing that it is precisely in the Anglo-Saxon countries that the laws of revolution are least understood. This can be explained on the one hand by the fact that the phenomenon of revolution itself in these countries relates to a far distant past and evokes from the official \u201csociologists\u201d the condescending smile intended for a naughty child. On the other hand the pragmatism so characteristic of Anglo-Saxon thinking is of least avail for the understanding of revolutionary crises.\nThe Philosophy of British Capitalism (1938)", "A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.  \u201cReport on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan\u201d (March 1927), \tSelected Works, Vol. I, p. 28. (Mao)", "In the sphere of theory, destroy the roots of ultra-democracy. First, it should be pointed out that the danger of ultrademocracy lies in the fact that it damages or even completely wrecks the Party organization and weakens or even completely undermines the Party's fighting capacity, rendering the Party incapable of fulfilling its fighting tasks and thereby causing the defeat of the revolution. Next, it should be pointed out that the source of ultra-democracy consists in the petty bourgeoisie's individualistic aversion to discipline. When this characteristic is brought into the Party, i t develops into ultra-democratic ideas politically and organizationally. These ideas are utterly incompatible with the fighting tasks of the proletariat.  \u201cOn Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party\u201d (December 1929), \tSelected Works, Vol. I, p. 108. (Mao)", "Inner-Party criticism is a weapon for strengthening the Party organization and increasing its fighting capacity. In the Party organization of the Red Army, however, criticism is not always of this character, and sometimes turns into personal attack. As a result, it damages the Party organization as well as individuals. This is a manifestation of petty-bourgeois individualism. The method of correction is to help Party members understand that the purpose of criticism is to increase the Party's fighting capacity in order to achieve victory in the class struggle and that it should not be used as a means of personal attack.  \u201cOn Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party\u201d (December 1929), \tSelected Works, Vol. I, p. 110. (Mao)", "When we look at a thing, we must examine its essence and treat its appearance merely as an usher at the threshold, and once we cross the threshold, we must grasp the essence of the thing; this is the only reliable and scientific method of analysis.  \u201cA Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire\u201d (January 5, 1930), \tSelected Works, Vol. I, p. 119. (Mao)", "The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; only mobilizing the masses and relying on them can wage it.  \u201cBe Concerned with the Well-Being of the Masses, Pay Attention to Methods of Work\u201d (January 27, 1934), \tSelected Works, Vol. I, p. 147. (Mao)", "In approaching a problem a Marxist should see the whole as well as the parts. A frog in a well says, \u201cThe sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well.\u201d That is untrue, for the sky is not just the size of the mouth of the well. If it said, \u201cA part of the sky is the size of the mouth of a well\u201d, that would be true, for it tallies with the facts.  \u201cOn Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism\u201d (December 27, 1935), \tSelected Works, Vol. I, p. 159. (Mao)", "We the Chinese nation have the spirit to fight the enemy to the last drop of our blood, the determination to recover our lost territory by our own efforts, and the ability to stand on our own feet in the family of nations.  \u201cOn Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism\u201d (December 27, 1935), \tSelected Works, Vol. I, p. 170.  (Mao)", "It is well known that when you do anything, unless you understand its actual circumstances, its nature and its relations to other things, you will not know the laws governing it, or know how to do it, or be able to do it well.  \u201cProblems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War\u201d (December 1936), \tSelected Works, Vol. I, p. 179. (Mao)", "War is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions, when they have developed to a certain stage, between classes, nations, states, or political groups, and it has existed ever since the emergence of private property and of classes.  \u201cProblems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War\u201d (December 1936), \tSelected Works, Vol. I, p. 180. (Mao)", "What we need is an enthusiastic but calm state of mind and intense but orderly work.  \u201cProblems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War\u201d (December 1936), \tSelected Works, Vol. I, p. 211. (Mao)", "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.  \u201cOn Practice,\u201d (July 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 296. (Mao)", "If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by \u201cfailure is the mother of success\u201d and \u201ca fall into the pit, a gain in your wit\u201d.  \u201cOn Practice,\u201d (July 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 296-97. (Mao)", "The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism has two outstanding characteristics. One is its class nature: it openly avows that dialectical materialism is in the service of the proletariat. The other is its practicality: it emphasizes the dependence of theory on practice, emphasizes that theory is based on practice and in turn serves practice.\u201cOn Practice,\u201d (July 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 297. (Mao)", "Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practicing) in its environment. ... If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.... If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.  \u201cOn Practice,\u201d (July 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 299-300. (Mao)", "Only those who are subjective, one-sided and superficial in their approach to problems will smugly issue orders or directives the moment they arrive on the scene, without considering the circumstances, without viewing things in their totality (their history and their present state as a whole) and without getting to the essence of things (their nature and the internal relations between one thing and another). Such people are bound to trip and fall.  \u201cOn Practice,\u201d (July 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 302. (Mao)", "Knowledge begins with practice, and theoretical knowledge, which is acquired through practice, must then return to practice. The active function of knowledge manifests itself not only in the active leap from perceptual to rational knowledge, but - and this is more important - it must manifest itself in the leap from rational knowledge to revolutionary practice.  \u201cOn Practice,\u201d (July 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 304. (Mao)", "If we have a correct theory but merely prate about it, pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice, then that theory, however good, is of no significance.  \u201cOn Practice,\u201d (July 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 304. (Mao)", "Marxist philosophy holds that the most important problem does not lie in understanding the laws of the objective world and thus being able to explain it, but in applying the knowledge of these laws actively to change the world. \"\tOn Practice,\u201d (July 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 304. (Mao)", "The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. This internal contradiction exists in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes.  \u201cOn Contradiction,\u201d (August 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 313. (Mao)", "Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society, that is, the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction between classes and the contradiction between the old and the new; it is the development of these contradictions that pushes society forward and gives the impetu6 for the suppression of the old society by the new.  \u201cOn Contradiction,\u201d (August 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 314. (Mao)", "It [materialist dialectics] holds that external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change, and that external causes become operative through internal causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis.  \u201cOn Contradiction,\u201d (August 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I p. 314. (Mao)", "Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the Party; this is a reflection within the Party of contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society. If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party's life would come to an end.  \u201cOn Contradiction,\u201d (August 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 317. (Mao)", "If in any process there are a number of contradictions, one of them must be the principal contradiction playing the leading and decisive role, while the rest occupy a secondary and subordinate position. Therefore, in studying any complex process in which there are two or more contradictions, we must devote every effort to finding its principal contradiction. Once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved.  \u201cOn Contradiction,\u201d (August 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 332.  (Mao)", "Of the two contradictory aspects, one must be principal and the other secondary. The principal aspect is the one playing the leading role in the contradiction. The nature of a thing is determined mainly by the principal aspect of a contradiction, the aspect that has gained the dominant position. But this situation is not static; the principal and the non-principal aspects of a contradiction transform themselves into each other and the nature of the thing changes accordingly.  \u201cOn Contradiction,\u201d (August 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 333. (Mao)", "While we recognize that in the general development of history the material determines the mental and social being determines social consciousness, we also - and indeed must - recognize the reaction of mental on material things, of social consciousness on social being and of the superstructure on the economic base. This does not go against materialism; on the contrary, it avoids mechanical materialism and firmly upholds dialectical materialism.  \u201cOn Contradiction,\u201d (August 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 336.  (Mao)", "Contradiction and struggle are universal and absolute, but the methods of resolving contradictions, that is, the forms of struggle, differ according to the differences in the nature of the contradictions. Some contradictions are characterized by open antagonism and others are not. In accordance with the concrete development of things, some contradictions, which were originally non-antagonistic, develop into antagonistic ones, while others which were originally antagonistic develop into non-antagonistic ones.  \u201cOn Contradiction,\u201d (August 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p 344. (Mao)", "Revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in class society, and without them it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development and to overthrow the reactionary ruling classes and therefore impossible for the people to win political power.  \u201cOn Contradiction,\u201d (August1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 344. (Mao)", "The system of Party representatives and of political departments, adopted for the first time in China, entirely changed the complexion of these armed forces. The Red Army, which was founded in 1927 and the Eighth Route Army of today have inherited this system and developed it.  \u201cInterview with the British Journalist James Bertram\u201d (October 25, 1937), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 54. (Mao)", "Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale. People necessarily wield military and economic power.  \u201cOn Protracted War\u201d (May 1958), Selected Works, Vol. II, pp. 143-44. (Mao)", "History shows that wars are divided into two kinds, just and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust. We Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive, just wars. Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars; we actively participate in them. As for unjust wars, World War I is an instance in which both sides fought for imperialist interests; therefore, the Communists of the whole world firmly opposed that war. The way to oppose a war of this kind is to do everything possible to prevent it before it breaks out and, once it breaks out, to oppose war with war, to oppose unjust war with just war, whenever possible.  \u201cOn Protracted War\u201d (May 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 150. (Mao)", "In seeking victory, those who direct a war cannot overstep the limitations imposed by the objective conditions. Within these limitations, however, they can and must play a dynamic role in striving for victory. The stage of action for commanders in a war must be built upon objective possibilities, but on that stage they can direct the performance of many a drama, full of sound and color, power and grandeur.  \u201cOn Protracted War\u201d (May 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 152. (Mao)", "Without preparedness, superiority is not real superiority and there can be no initiative either. Having grasped this point, a force that is inferior but prepared can often defeat a superior enemy by surprise attack.  \u201cOn Protracted War\u201d (May 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, pp. 165-66. (Mao)", "The army must become one with the people so that they see it as their own army. Such an army will be invincible....  \u201cOn Protracted War\u201d (May 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 186. (Mao)", "A proper measure of democracy should be put into effect in the army, chiefly by abolishing the feudal practice of bullying and beating and by having officers and men share weal and woe. Once this is done, unity will be achieved between officers and men, the combat effectiveness of the army will be greatly increased, and there will be no doubt of our ability to sustain the long, cruel war.  \u201cOn Protracted War\u201d (May 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 186. (Mao)", "The exemplary vanguard role of the Communists is of vital importance. Communists in the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies should set an example in fighting bravely, carrying out orders, observing discipline, doing political work and fostering internal unity and solidarity.  \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938),  Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 197. (Mao)", "Communists should set an example in being practical as well as far-sighted. For only by being practical can they fulfil the appointed tasks, and only far-sightedness can prevent them from losing their bearings in the march forward.  \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 198. (Mao)", "Communists should set an example in study; at all times they should be pupils of the masses as well as their teachers.  \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 198. (Mao)", "Every Communist working in the mass movements should be a friend of the masses and not a boss over them, an indefatigable teacher and not a bureaucratic politician.  \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II.  (Mao)", "The attitude of Communists towards any person who has made mistakes in his work should be one of persuasion in order to help him change and start afresh and not one of exclusion, unless he is incorrigible.  \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 198. (Mao)", "As for people who are politically backward, Communists should not slight or despise them, but should befriend them, unite with them, convince them and encourage them to go forward. \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II. (Mao)", "Communists must never separate themselves from the majority of the people or neglect them by leading only a few progressive contingents in an isolated and rash advance, but must take care to forge close links between the progressive elements and the broad masses. This is what thinking in terms of the majority means.  \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 201. (Mao)", "Cadres are a decisive factor, once the political line is determined. Therefore, it is our fighting task to train large numbers of new cadres in a planned way.  \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 202. (Mao)", "Education in democracy must be carried on within the Party so that members can understand the meaning of democratic life, the meaning of the relationship between democracy and centralism, and the way in which democratic centralism should be put into practice. Only in this way can we really extend democracy within the Party and at the same time avoid ultra-democracy and the laissez-faire that destroys discipline.  \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 205.  (Mao)", "No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement.  \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 208. (Mao)", "The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is universally applicable. We should regard it not as a dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is not merely a matter of learning terms and phrases but of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of revolution. It is not just a matter of understanding the general laws derived by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin from their extensive study of real life and revolutionary experience, but of studying their standpoint and method in examining and solving problems.  \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, pp. 208-09. (Mao)", "The criterion the Communist Party should apply in its cadres policy is whether or not a cadre is resolute in carrying out the Party line, keeps to Party discipline, has close ties with the masses, has the ability to find his bearings independently, and is active, hardworking and unselfish. This is what \u201cappointing people on their merit\u201d means.  \u201cThe Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War\u201d (October 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II. (Mao)", "The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution. This Marxist-Leninist principle of revolution holds well universally, for China and for all other countries.  \u201cProblems of War and Strategy\u201d (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 219. (Mao)", "Every Communist must grasp the truth; \u201cPolitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun.\u201d  \u201cProblems of War and Strategy\u201d (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224. (Mao)", "Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.  \u201cProblems of War and Strategy\u201d (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224. (Mao)", "We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.  \u201cProblems of War and Strategy\u201d (November 6, 1938), \tSelected Works, Vol. II.  (Mao)", "We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports.  \u201cInterview with Three Correspondents from the Central News Agency, the Sao Tang Pao and the Hsin Min Pao\u201d (September 16, 1939), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 272. (Mao)", "Without armed struggle neither the proletariat, nor the people, nor the Communist Party would have any standing at all in China and it would be impossible for the revolution to triumph. In these years [the eighteen years since the founding of the Party] the development, consolidation and bolshevization of our Party have proceeded in the midst of revolutionary wars; without armed struggle the Communist Party would assuredly not be what it is today. Comrades throughout the Party must never forget this experience for which we have paid in blood.  \u201cIntroducing The Communist\u201d (October 4, 1939), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 292. (Mao)", "The ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression of the peasants by the landlord class forced them into numerous uprisings against its rule.... It was the class struggles of the peasants, the peasant uprisings and peasant wars that constituted the real motive force of historical development in Chinese feudal society.  \u201cThe Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party\u201d (December 1939), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 308. (Mao)", "The intellectuals often tend to be subjective and individualistic, impractical in their thinking and irresolute in action until they have thrown themselves heart and soul into mass revolutionary struggles, or made up their minds to serve the interests of the masses and become one with them. Hence although the mass of revolutionary intellectuals in China can play a vanguard role or serve as a link with the masses, not all of them will remain revolutionaries to the end. Some will drop out of the revolutionary ranks at critical moments and become passive, while a few may even become enemies of the revolution. The intellectuals can overcome their shortcomings only in mass struggles over a long period.  \u201cThe Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party\u201d (December 1939), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 322. (Mao)", "Taken as a whole, the Chinese revolutionary movement led by the Communist Party embraces the two stages, i.e., the democratic and the socialist revolutions, which are two essentially different revolutionary processes, and the second process can be carried through only after the first has been completed. The democratic revolution is the necessary preparation for the socialist revolution, and the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the democratic revolution. The ultimate aim for which all communists strive is to bring about a socialist and communist society.  \u201cThe Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party\u201d (December 1939), Selected Works, Vol. II, pp. 330-31.  (Mao)", "What kind of spirit is this that makes a foreigner selflessly adopt the cause of the Chinese people's liberation as his own? It is the spirit of internationalism, the spirit of communism, from which every Chinese Communist must learn.... We must unite with the proletariat of all the capitalist countries, with the proletariat of Japan, Britain, the United States, Germany, Italy and all other capitalist countries, before it is possible to overthrow imperialism, to liberate our nation and people, and to liberate the other nations and peoples of the world. This is our internationalism, the internationalism with which we oppose both narrow nationalism and narrow patriotism.  \u201cIn Memory of Norman Bethune\u201d (December 21, 1939), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 337.  (Mao)", "Revolutionary culture is a powerful revolutionary weapon for the broad masses of the people. It prepares the ground ideologically before the revolution comes and is an important, indeed essential, fighting front in the general revolutionary front during the revolution.  \u201cOn New Democracy\u201d (January 1940), \tSelected Works, Vol. II, p. 382. (Mao)", "The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding, it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge.  \u201cPreface and Postscript to Rural Surveys\u201d (March and April 1941), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 12.  (Mao)", "Communists must listen attentively to the views of people outside the Party and let them have their say. If what they say is right, we ought to welcome it, and we should learn from their strong points; if it is wrong, we should let them finish what they are saying and then patiently explain things to them.  \u201cSpeech at the Assembly of Representatives of the Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region\u201d (November 21, 1941), \tSelected Works, Vol. III. (Mao)", "A Communist must never be opinionated or domineering, thinking that he is good in everything while others are good in nothing; he must never shut himself up in his little room, or brag and boast and lord it over others.  \u201cSpeech at the Assembly of Representatives of the Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region\u201d (November 21, 1941), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 33. (Mao)", "We should encourage comrades to take the interests of the whole into account. Every Party member, every branch of work, every statement and every action must proceed from the interests of the whole Party; it is absolutely impermissible to violate this principle.  \u201cRectify the Party's Style of Work\u201d (February 1, 1942), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 44. (Mao)", "Communists must always go into the why's and wherefore's of anything, use their own heads and carefully think over whether or not it corresponds to reality and is really well founded; on no account should they follow blindly and encourage slavishness.  \u201cRectify the Party's Style of Work\u201d (February 1, 1942), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, pp. 49-50. (Mao)", "[Our purpose is] to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind.  \u201cTalks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art\u201d (May 1942), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 70. (Mao)", "Our stand is that of the proletariat and of the masses. For members of the Communist Party, this means keeping to the stand of the Party, keeping to Party spirit and Party policy.  \u201cTalks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art\u201d (May 1942), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 70. (Mao)", "We are Marxists, and Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions, and that we should derive our guiding principles, policies and measures from an analysis of these facts.  \u201cTalks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art\u201d (May 1942), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 74. (Mao)", "Our literary and art workers must accomplish this task and shift their stand; they must gradually move their feet over to the side of the workers, peasants and soldiers, to the side of the proletariat, through the process of going into their very midst and into the thick of practical struggles and through the process of studying Marxism and society. Only in this way can we have a literature and art that are truly for the workers, peasants and soldiers, a truly proletarian literature and art.  \u201cTalks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art\u201d (May 1942), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 78. (Mao)", "All our literature and art are for the masses of the people, and in the first place for the workers, peasants and soldiers; they are created for the workers, peasants and soldiers and are for their use.  \u201cTalks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art\u201d (May 1942), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 84. (Mao)", "In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.  \u201cTalks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art\u201d (May 1942), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 86. (Mao)", "To criticize the people's shortcomings is necessary, ... but in doing so we must truly take the stand of the people and speak out of whole-hearted eagerness to protect and educate them. To treat comrades like enemies is to go over to the stand of the enemy.  \u201cTalks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art\u201d (May 1942), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 92. (Mao)", "Historically, all reactionary forces on the verge of extinction invariably conduct a last desperate struggle against the revolutionary forces, and some revolutionaries are apt to be deluded for a time by this phenomenon of outward strength but inner weakness failing to grasp the essential fact that the enemy is nearing extinction while they themselves are approaching victory.  \u201cThe Turning Point in World War II\u201d (October 12, 1942), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 103. (Mao)", "The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate and the relatively backward. The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements.  \u201cSome Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership\u201d (June 1, 1943), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 118. (Mao)", "However active the leading group may be, its activity will amount to fruitless effort by a handful of people unless combined with the activity of the masses. On the other hand, if the masses alone are active without a strong leading group to organize their activity properly, such activity cannot be sustained for long, or carried forward in the right direction, or raised to a high level.  \u201cSome Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership\u201d (June 1, 1943), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 118. (Mao)", "No one in a leading position is competent to give general guidance to all the units unless he derives concrete experience from particular individuals and events in particular subordinate units. This method must be promoted everywhere so that leading cadres at all levels learn to apply it. \u201cSome Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership\u201d (June 1, 1943), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 118. (Mao)", "Take the ideas of the masses and concentrate them, then go to the masses, persevere in the ideas and carry them through, so as to form correct ideas of leadership - such is the basic method of leadership.  \u201cSome Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership\u201d (June 1, 1943), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 120. (Mao)", "We have an army for fighting as well as an army for labour. For fighting, we have the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies but even they do a dual job, warfare and production. With these two kinds of armies, and with a fighting army skilled in these two tasks and in mass work, we can overcome our difficulties and defeat Japanese imperialism.  \u201cGet Organized!\u201d (November 29, 1943), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 153. (Mao)", "We should go to the masses and learn from them, synthesize their experience into better, articulated principles and methods, then do propaganda among the masses, and call upon them to put these principles and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and help them achieve liberation and happiness.  \u201cGet Organized!\u201d (November 29, 1943), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 158. (Mao)", "We Communists must be able to integrate ourselves with the masses in all things. If our Party members spend their whole lives sitting indoors and never go out to face the world and brave the storm, what good will they be to the Chinese people? None at all, and we do not need such people as Party members. We Communists ought to face the world and brave the storm the great world of mass struggle and the mighty storm of mass struggle.  \u201cGet Organized!\u201d (November 29, 1943), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 158. (Mao)", "We should always use our brains and think everything over carefully. A common saying goes, \u201cKnit your brows and you will hit upon a stratagem.\u201d In other words much thinking yields wisdom. In order to get rid of the blindness that exists to a serious extent in our Party, we must encourage our comrades to think, to learn the method of analysis and to cultivate the habit of analysis.  \u201cOur Study and the Current Situation\u201d (April 12, 1944), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, pp. 174-75.  (Mao)", "If we have shortcomings, we are not afraid to have them pointed out and criticized, because we serve the people. Anyone, no matter who, may point out our shortcomings. If he is right, we will correct them. If what he proposes will benefit the people, we will act upon it.  \u201cServe the People\u201d (September 8, 1941), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 227. (Mao)", "All men must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said, \u201cThough death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.\u201d To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.  \u201cServe the People\u201d (September 8, 1944), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 227. (Mao)", "In times of difficulty we must not lose sight of our achievements, must see the bright future and must pluck up our courage.  \u201cServe the People\u201d (September 8, 1944), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, pp. 227-28. (Mao)", "We hail from all corners of the country and have joined together for a common revolutionary objective.... Our cadres must show concern for every soldier, and all people in the revolutionary ranks must care for each other, must love and help each other. \u201cServe the People\u201d (September 8, 1944), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, pp. 227-28. (Mao)", "Wherever there is struggle there is sacrifice, and death is a common occurrence. But we have the interests of the people and the sufferings of the great majority at heart, and when we die for the people it is a worthy death. Nevertheless, we should do our best to avoid unnecessary sacrifices.  \u201cServe the People\u201d (September 8, 1944), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 228. (Mao)", "An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.  \u201cThe United Front in Cultural Work\u201d (October 30, 1944), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 235. (Mao)", "We stand for self-reliance. We hope for foreign aid but cannot be dependent on it; we depend on our own efforts, on the creative power of the whole army and the entire people.  \u201cWe Must Learn to Do Economic Work\u201d (January 10, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 241. (Mao)", "The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.  \u201cOn Coalition Government\u201d (April 24, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 257. (Mao)", "This army has an indomitable spirit and is determined to vanquish all enemies and never to yield. No matter what the difficulties and hardships, so long as a single man remains, he will fight on.  \u201cOn Coalition Government\u201d (April 24, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 264. (Mao)", "This army has built up a system of political work which is essential for the people's war and is aimed at promoting unity in its own ranks, unity with the friendly armies and unity with the people, and at disintegrating the enemy forces and ensuring victory in battle.  \u201cOn Coalition Government\u201d (April 24, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 265.  (Mao)", "We Communists never conceal our political views. Definitely and beyond all doubt, our future or maximum program is to carry China forward to socialism and communism. Both the name of our Party and our Marxist world outlook unequivocally point to this supreme ideal of the future, a future of incomparable brightness and splendor.  \u201cOn Coalition Government\u201d (April 24, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 282.  (Mao)", "Without a People's army, the people have nothing.  \u201cOn Coalition Government\u201d (April 24, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, pp. 296-97. (Mao)", "Anyone who sees only the bright side but not the difficulties cannot fight effectively for the accomplishment of the Party's tasks.  \u201cOn Coalition Government\u201d (April 24, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 314. (Mao)", "Communists must be ready at all times to stand up for the truth, because truth is in the interests of the people; Communists must be ready at all times to correct their mistakes, because mistakes are against the interests of the people.  \u201cOn Coalition Government\u201d (April 24, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 315. (Mao)", "Every comrade must be helped to understand that as long as we rely on the people, believe firmly in the inexhaustible creative power of the masses and hence trust and identify ourselves with them, we can surmount any difficulty, and no enemy can crush us while we can crush any enemy.  \u201cOn Coalition Government\u201d (April 24, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 316.  (Mao)", "Thousands upon thousands of martyrs have heroically laid down their lives for the people; let us hold their banner high and march ahead along the path crimson with their blood!  \u201cOn Coalition Government\u201d (April 24, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 318. (Mao)", "Be resolute, fear no sacrifice and surmount every difficulty to win victory.  \u201cThe Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains\u201d (June 11, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. III, p. 321.  (Mao)", "The Third Revolutionary Civil War 1945-1949 (Mao)", "Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people. Every word, every act and every policy must conform to the people's interests, and if mistakes occur, they must be corrected - that is what being responsible to the people means.  \u201cThe Situation and Our Policy After the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan\u201d (August 13, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 16. (Mao)", "It is up to us to organize the people. As for the reactionaries in China, it is up to us to organize the people to overthrow them. Everything reactionary is the same; if you do not hit it, it will not fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.  \u201cThe Situation and Our Policy After the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan\u201d (August 13, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 19. (Mao)", "If anyone attacks us and if the conditions are favorable for battle, we will certainly act in self-defense to wipe him out resolutely, thoroughly, wholly and completely (we do not strike rashly, but when we do strike, we must win). We must never be cowed by the bluster of reactionaries.  \u201cOn Peace Negotiations with the Kuomintang - Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China\u201d (August 26, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 49 (Mao)", "We Communists are like seeds and the people are like the soil. Wherever we go, we must unite with the people, take root and blossom among them.  \u201cOn the Chungking Negotiations\u201d (October 17, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 58. (Mao)", "The world is progressing, the future is bright and no one can change this general trend of history. We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory.  \u201cOn the Chungking Negotiations\u201d (October 17, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV. p. 59. (Mao)", "Wherever our comrades go they must build good relations with the masses, be concerned for them and help them overcome their difficulties. We must unite with the masses, the more of the masses we unite with, the better.  \u201cOn the Chungking Negotiations\u201d (October 17, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 59. (Mao)", "We must thoroughly clear away all ideas among our cadres of winning easy victories through good luck, without hard and bitter struggle, without sweat and blood.  \u201cBuild Stable Base Areas in the Northeast\u201d (December 28, 1945), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 84. (Mao)", "As far as our own desire is concerned, we do not want to fight even for a single day. However, if circumstances force us to fight, we can fight to the finish.  \u201cTalk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong\u201d (August 1946), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 97. (Mao)", "The atom bomb is a paper tiger that the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the people decide the outcome of a war, not by one or two new types of weapon.  \u201cTalk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong\u201d (August 1946), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 100. (Mao)", "All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality, they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are powerful.  \u201cTalk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong\u201d (August 1946), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 100. (Mao)", "Give full play to our style of fighting - courage in battle, no fear of sacrifice, no fear of fatigue, and continuous fighting (that is, fighting successive battles in a short time without rest).  \u201cThe Present Situation and Our Tasks\u201d (December 25, 1947), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 161. (Mao)", "We should rid our ranks of all impotent thinking. All views that overestimate the strength of the enemy and underestimate the strength of the people are wrong.  \u201cThe Present Situation and Our Tasks\u201d (December 25, 1947), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 173. (Mao)", "Policy and tactics are the life of the Party; leading comrades at all levels must give them full attention and must never on any account be negligent.  \u201cA Circular on the Situation\u201d (March 20, 1948), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 220. (Mao)", "The most fundamental method of work, which all Communists must firmly bear in mind, is to determine our working policies according to actual conditions. When we study the causes of the mistakes we have made, we find that they all arose because we departed from the actual situation at a given time and place and were subjective in determining our working policies.  \u201cSpeech at a Conference of Cadres in the Shansi-Suiyuan Liberated Area\u201d (April 1, 1948), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, pp. 229-30.  (Mao)", "There are people in our leading organs in some places that think that it is enough for the leaders alone to know the Party's policies and that there is no need to let the masses know them. This is one of the basic reasons why some of our work cannot be done well.  \u201cA Talk to the Editorial Staff of the Shansi-Suiyuan Daily\u201d (April 2, 1948), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 241. (Mao)", "To be good at translating the Party's policy into action of the masses, to be good at getting not only the leading cadres but also the broad masses to understand and master every movement and every struggle we launch - this is an art of Marxist-Leninist leadership. It is also the dividing line that determines whether or not we make mistakes in our work.  \u201cA Talk to the Editorial Staff of the Shansi-Suiyuan Daily\u201d (April 2, 1948), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, pp 242-43. (Mao)", "If we tried to go on the offensive when the masses are not yet awakened, that would be adventurism. If we insisted on leading the masses to do anything against their will, we would certainly fail. If we did not advance when the masses demand advance, that would be Right opportunism.  \u201cA Talk to the Editorial Staff of the Shansi-Suiyuan Daily\u201d (April 2, I948), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 243. (Mao)", "Our slogan in training troops is \u201cOfficers teach soldiers, soldiers teach officers and soldiers teach each other\u201d. The fighters have a lot of practical combat experience. The officers should learn from the fighters, and when they have made other people's experience their own, they will become more capable.  \u201cA Talk to the Editorial Staff of the Shansi-Suiyuan Daily\u201d (April 2, 1948), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 243. (Mao)", "If there is to be revolution, there must be a revolutionary party. Without a revolutionary party, without a party built on the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory and in the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary style, it is impossible to lead the working class and the broad masses of the people in defeating imperialism and its running dogs.  \u201cRevolutionary Forces of the World Unite, Fight Against Imperialist Aggression!\u201d (November 1948), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 284. (Mao)", "The enemy will not perish of himself. Neither will the Chinese reactionaries nor the aggressive forces of U.S. imperialism in China step down from the stage of history of their own accord.  \u201cCarry the Revolution Through to the End\u201d (December 30, 1948), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 301. (Mao)", "The commanders and fighters of the entire Chinese People's Liberation Army absolutely must not relax in the least their will to fight; any thinking that relaxes the will to fight and belittles the enemy is wrong.  \u201cReport to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China\u201d (March 5, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 361. (Mao)", "After the enemies with guns have been wiped out, there will still be enemies without guns; they are bound to struggle desperately against us, and we must never regard these enemies lightly. If we do nor now raise and understand the problem in this way, we shall commit the gravest mistakes.  \u201cReport to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China\u201d (March 5, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 364. (Mao)", "We can learn what we did not know. We are not only good at destroying the Old World, we are also good at building the new.  \u201cReport to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China\u201d (March 5, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 374. (Mao)", "\u201cExchange information.\u201d This means that members of a Party committee should keep each other informed and exchange views on matters that have come to their attention. This is of great importance in achieving a common language. Some fail to do so and, like the people described by Lao Tzu, \u201cdo not visit each other all their lives, though the crowing of their cocks and the barking of their dogs are within hearing of each other\u201d. The result is that they lack a common language.  \u201cMethods of Work of Party Committees\u201d (March 13, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 378. (Mao)", "In all mass movements we must make a basic investigation and analysis of the number of active supporters, opponents and neutrals and must not decide problems subjectively and without basis.  \u201cMethods of Work of Party Committees\u201d (March 13, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 380. (Mao)", "Pay attention to uniting and working with comrades who differ with you. This should be borne in mind both in the localities and in the army. It also applies to relations with people outside the Party. We have come together from every corner of the country and should be good at uniting in our work not only with comrades who hold the same views as we but also with those who hold different views.  \u201cMethods of Work of Party Committees\u201d (March 13, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV (Mao)", "Guard against arrogance. For anyone in a leading position, this is a matter of principle and an important condition for maintaining unity. Even those who have made no serious mistakes and have achieved very great success in their work should not be arrogant.  \u201cMethods of Work of Party Committees\u201d (March 13, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV (Mao)", "Just because we have won victory, we must never relax our vigilance against the frenzied plots for revenge by the imperialists and their running dogs. Whoever relaxes vigilance will disarm himself politically and land himself in a passive position.  \u201cAddress to the Preparatory Committee of the New Political Consultative Conference\u201d (June 15, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 407. (Mao)", "\u201cDon't you want to abolish state power?\u201d Yes, we do, but not right now. We cannot do it yet. Why? Because imperialism still exists, because domestic reaction still exists, because classes still exist in our country. Our present task is to strengthen the people's state apparatus - mainly the people's army, the people's police and the people's courts - in order to consolidate national defense and protect the people's interests.  \u201cOn the People's Democratic Dictatorship\u201d (June 30, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 418. (Mao)", "The serious problem is the education of the peasantry. The peasant economy is scattered, and the socialization of agriculture, judging by the Soviet Union's experience, will require a long time and painstaking work. Without socialization of agriculture, there can be no complete, consolidated socialism.  \u201cOn the People's Democratic Dictatorship\u201d June 30, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 419. (Mao)", "The People's democratic dictatorship needs the leadership of the working class. For it is only the working class that is most far-sighted, most selfless and most thoroughly revolutionary. The entire history of revolution proves that without the leadership of the working class revolution fails and that with the leadership of the working class revolution triumphs.  \u201cOn the People's Democratic Dictatorship\u201d (June 30, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 421. (Mao)", "The People's democratic dictatorship is based on the alliance of the working class, the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie, and mainly on the alliance of the workers and the peasants, because these two classes comprise 80 to go per cent of China's population. These two classes are the main force in overthrowing imperialism and the Kuomintang reactionaries. The transition from New Democracy to socialism also depends mainly upon their alliance.  \u201cOn the People's Democratic Dictatorship\u201d (June 30, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 421.  (Mao)", "Taught by mistakes and setbacks, we have become wiser and handle our affairs better. It is hard for any political party or person to avoid mistakes, but we should make as few as possible. Once a mistake is made, we should correct it, and the more quickly and thoroughly the better.  \u201cOn the People's Democratic Dictatorship\u201d (June 30, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 422. (Mao)", "Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years. To interpret history from this viewpoint is historical materialism; standing in opposition to this viewpoint is historical idealism.  \u201cCast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle\u201d (August 14, 1949), \tSelected Works, Vol. IV, p. 428. (Mao)", "The unification of our country, the unity of our people and the unity of our various nationalities - these are the basic guarantees of the sure triumph of our cause.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957). 1st pocket ed., pp. 1-2. (Mao)", "Two types of social contradictions - those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people themselves confront us. The two are totally different in their nature.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), first pocket ed.. p. 2. (Mao)", "The contradictions between the enemy and us are antagonistic contradictions. Within the ranks of the people, the contradictions among the working people are non-antagonistic, while those between the exploited and the exploiting classes have a non-antagonistic aspect in addition to an antagonistic aspect.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), p. 3. (Mao)", "The organs of state must practice democratic centralism, they must rely on the masses and their personnel must serve the people.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), 1st pocket ed., p. 8. (Mao)", "Within the ranks of the people, democracy is correlative with centralism and freedom with discipline. They are the two opposites of a single entity, contradictory as well as united, and we should not one-sidedly emphasize one to the denial of the other. Within the ranks of the people, we cannot do without freedom, nor can we do without discipline; we cannot do without democracy, nor can we do without centralism. This unity of democracy and centralism, of freedom and discipline, constitutes our democratic centralism. Under this system, the people enjoy extensive democracy and freedom, but at the same time they have to keep within the bounds of socialist discipline.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), 1st pocket ed., pp. 10-11. (Mao)", "This democratic method of resolving contradictions among the people was epitomized in 1942 in the formula \u201cunity, criticism, unity\u201d. To elaborate, it means starting from the desire for unity, resolving contradictions through criticism or struggle and arriving at a new unity on a new basis. In our experience this is the correct method of resolving contradictions among the people.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), 1st pocket ed., p. 12. (Mao)", "In ordinary circumstances, contradictions among the people are not antagonistic. However, if they are not handled properly, or if we relax our vigilance and lower our guard, antagonism may arise. In a socialist country, a development of this kind is usually only a localized and temporary phenomenon. The reason is that the system of exploitation of man by man has been abolished and the interests of the people are the same.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), 1st pocket ed., p. 14. (Mao)", "Communists must use the democratic method of persuasion and education when working among the laboring people and must on no account resort to commandism or coercion. The Chinese Communist Party faithfully adheres to this Marxist-Leninist principle.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), 1st pocket ed., p. 15. (Mao)", "Marxist philosophy holds that the law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe. This law operates universally, whether in the natural world, in human society, or in man's thinking. Between the opposites in a contradiction there is at once unity and struggle, and it is this that impels things to move and change. Contradictions exist everywhere, but they differ in accordance with the different nature of different things. In any given phenomenon or thing, the unity of opposites is conditional, temporary and transitory, and hence relative, whereas the struggle of opposites is absolute.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), 1st pocket ed., p. 18. (Mao)", "New things always have to experience difficulties and setbacks as they grow. It is sheer fantasy to imagine that the cause of socialism is all plain sailing and easy success, without difficulties and setbacks or the exertion of tremendous efforts.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), 1st pocket ed., pp. 32-33. (Mao)", "Our educational policy must enable everyone who receives an education to develop morally, intellectually and physically and become a worker with both socialist consciousness and culture.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1959), 1st pocket ed., p. 44. (Mao)", "By over-all planning, we mean planning which takes into consideration the interests of the 600 million people of our country. In drawing up plans, handling affairs or thinking over problems, we must proceed from the fact that China has a population of 600 million people, and we must never forget this fact.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), first pocket ed. p. 47. (Mao)", "Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land. Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science should contend freely. We think that it is harmful to the growth of art and science if administrative measures are used to impose one particular style of art or school of thought and to ban another. Questions of right and wrong in the arts and sciences should be settled through free discussion in artistic and scientific circles and through practical work in these fields. They should not be settled in summary fashion.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), 1st pocket ed., pp. 49-50. (Mao)", "We must learn to look at problems all-sidedly, seeing the reverse as well as the obverse side of things. In given conditions, a bad thing can lead to good results and a good thing to bad results.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), 1st pocket ed., pp. 66-67.  (Mao)", "Now, there are two different attitudes towards learning from others. One is the dogmatic attitude of transplanting everything, whether or not it is suited to our conditions. This is no good. The other attitude is to use our heads and learn those things that suit our conditions, that is, to absorb whatever experience is useful to us. That is the attitude we should adopt.  On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), 1st pocket ed., p. 75. (Mao)", "Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice and from it alone. They come from three kinds of social practice: the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment.  Where Do Correct ideas Come from?, (May 1963), 1st pocket ed., p. 1. (Mao)", "It is man's social being that determines his thinking. Once the correct ideas characteristic of the advanced class are grasped by the masses, these ideas turn into a material force which changes society and changes the world.  Where Do Correct ideas Come from?, (May 1963) (Mao)", "Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.  Where Do Correct ideas Come from?, (May 1963) p. 3. (Mao)"]