Friday, April 06, 2018

Useful quotes

The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” ― Voltaire

The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.” - Victor Hugo

Behind every great fortune, is a great crime.”- Balzac (“The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.”)

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." - Herbert Spencer


"The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.’ Marx and Engels

"I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands."- Eugene V. Debs

William Morris explained:
One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman: two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon the earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question.”


Engels pointed out as long ago as 1872:
As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself’ (The Housing Question).

"You do not need the capitalist. He could not exist one second without you. You would begin to live without him. You DO everything. Some of you imagine that if it was not for the capitalist you would have no work. Really he does not employ you at all. You employ him to take from you what you produce, and he sticks faithfully to his job. If you can stand it – he can – and if you don’t change it – he won’t." - Eugene Debs

"If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a  congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head  to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." - Marx

"He who is morally impressed by power is never in a critical mood, and he is never a revolutionary character" - Erich Fromm

"State capitalism would be a step forward for us." - Lenin

"What you have is state capitalism." John Foster Dulles to Nikita Khruschev


The “Anarcho-Marxist” case, some quotes from Marx and Engels about the abolition of the State:-

In 1844 Marx wrote that "the existence of the state and the existence of slavery are inseparable" - "The King of Prussia and Social Reform"

Again, as Engels wrote in a letter to Bebel in March 1875, "Marx's book against Proudhon and later the Communist Manifesto directly declare that with the introduction of the socialist order of society the state will dissolve itself and disappear."

Then, in a circular against the Bakunin prepared for the First International in 1875, Marx wrote: "To all socialists anarchy means this: the aim of the proletarian movement--that is to say the abolition of social classes--once achieved, the power of the state, which now serves only to keep the vast majority of producers under the yoke of a small minority of exploiters, will vanish, and the functions of government become purely administrative"

 Joseph Dietzgen (who greatly influenced the council communist Pannekoek) had this to say:-
"The terms anarchist, socialist, communist should be so "mixed" together, that no muddlehead could tell which is which. Language serves not only the purpose of distinguishing things but also of uniting them- for it is dialectic." June 9, 1886

And on anarchists and socialists generally, he said:
"For my part, I lay little stress on the distinction, whether a man is an anarchist or a socialist, because it seems to me that too much weight is attributed to this difference."....
..."While the anarchists may have mad and brainless individuals in their ranks, the socialists have an abundance of cowards. For this reason I care as much for one as the other...The majority in both camps are still in great need of education, and this will bring about a reconciliation in time"- April 20, 1886

" If a worker wants to take part in the self-emancipation of his class, the basic requirement is that he should cease allowing others to teach him and should set about teaching himself." - Joseph Dietzgen






No comments: