Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
George Washington: Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Washington: Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Valley of Song was every bit as wonderful as I thought it would be. It's the first time, though, that I ever saw a Novello play without any of his own songs. Christopher Hassall did such a good job finishing it that I couldn't tell where one man's work ended and the other's began. What really touched my heart, though, is that this took place in Wales, where Ivor was born. More so, was that some of the songs I know as a fact were sung by the Royal Welsh Ladies Choir, and probably by the Novello Davis Choir, both of which were conducted by his mother. It is the closest I will ever come to hearing them, other than one recording I have under another conductor. I almost cried when they sang Ar Hyd y Nos (All Through the Night), which I know they sung and even recorded in 1915 (I don't have it). And of course, there was a beautiful love story, too, as always.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
(Everything I have, except Glamorous Night, and The Dancing Years, can be found on Youtube.) Tomorrow is my birthday, so I've decided to treat myself to an Ivor Novello film. I must be very careful with these, as he only made a few. I'm not counting the silent ones, since I'm blind and obviously can't watch them. I've already seen, and loved, I Lived with You. I'm missing Symphony in Two Flats, But the Flesh is Weak (wrote but not in), and The Truth Game (wrote but not in). But I still have Once A Lady, The Lodger, Sleeping Car, and Autumn Crocus. Which one should I watch?
As for his plays, they are ridiculously difficult to find with full dialogue. If you know of any, please let me know! I managed to locate Perchance to Dream, and King's Rhapsody, both amateur but wonderful. King's Rhapsody was actually performed by the Knowle Operatic Society in 1981. How they managed to capture that in sound I have no idea, since I can't imagine it was a professional recording. Maybe, they used Super8mm. I believe some of those cameras had sound. Anyway, I also watched the film version
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(Everything I have, except Glamorous Night, and The Dancing Years, can be found on Youtube.) Tomorrow is my birthday, so I've decided to treat myself to an Ivor Novello film. I must be very careful with these, as he only made a few. I'm not counting the silent ones, since I'm blind and obviously can't watch them. I've already seen, and loved, I Lived with You. I'm missing Symphony in Two Flats, But the Flesh is Weak (wrote but not in), and The Truth Game (wrote but not in). But I still have Once A Lady, The Lodger, Sleeping Car, and Autumn Crocus. Which one should I watch?
As for his plays, they are ridiculously difficult to find with full dialogue. If you know of any, please let me know! I managed to locate Perchance to Dream, and King's Rhapsody, both amateur but wonderful. King's Rhapsody was actually performed by the Knowle Operatic Society in 1981. How they managed to capture that in sound I have no idea, since I can't imagine it was a professional recording. Maybe, they used Super8mm. I believe some of those cameras had sound. Anyway, I also watched the film version of Glamorous Night, whose only saving graces were Mary Ellis and Trefor Jones, and I'm waiting on the 1950 version of The Dancing Years, with none other than Olive Gilbert! Finding anything with her speaking in it is almost a miracle. If anyone knows where I can find a film called Ivor Novello, from 1956 or so, please let me know. Many of his people are in it, and I would absolutely love to see it, particularly for that reason! I also have a delightful version of Valley of Song, recorded in 1955! This is a special and poignant, as the play was left unfinished at Novello's death and was completed by his librettist, Christopher Hassall, the one man I think should have done it, since he, more than anyone, knew Novello's style and thought process in such matters. A museum actually uploaded it from an audiocassette, but this is not a radio performance. It appears to be the film, which made me laugh, since now, the sighted get to experience how I see films without audio description! But it's really not fair to laugh when the ones suffering are my peers who fight like hell to get anything from/by Novello! It would be amazing, though, to have what does exist audio-described. I think, though, that I will listen to Valley of Song tonight. I am very curious about it. I'll save tomorrow for the film.
I think I'm going to watch Autumn Crocus. There is no particular reason. I willl eventually see all of them, anyway. Now, I just have to decide whether I want to watch it now or tonight.
Lord Acton: Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lord Acton: Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
George Orwell: Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
George Orwell: Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Albert Einstein: There is no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war... Except its ending. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Albert Einstein: There is no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war... Except its ending. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Fidel Castro: Fellow workers and peasants, this is the socialist and democratic revolution of the working people, with the working people, and for the working people. And for this revolution of the working people, by the working people, and for the working people we are prepared to give our lives. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fidel Castro: Fellow workers and peasants, this is the socialist and democratic revolution of the working people, with the working people, and for the working people. And for this revolution of the working people, by the working people, and for the working people we are prepared to give our lives. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Fidel Castro: I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating... because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fidel Castro: I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating... because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Fidel Castro: Warfare is a means and not an end. Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution! The important thing is the revolutionary cause, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary objectives, revolutionary sentiments, revolutionary virtues! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fidel Castro: Warfare is a means and not an end. Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution! The important thing is the revolutionary cause, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary objectives, revolutionary sentiments, revolutionary virtues! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Chris Hedges: The indifference to the plight of others and the cult of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Chris Hedges: The indifference to the plight of others and the cult of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
To those who constantly post politics. I don't mind your following me or commenting on my posts, but I cannot follow you. Barring a few very specific issues, I try to keep my life, and my timeline, as free from politics and drama as possible. I don't follow world affairs in most cases either. I will also not follow you if you hardly post in English, if only because I won't be able to understand most of your posts.
It has just come to my attention that there is only one developer of Friendica. It's a truly wonderful site, with a lot of potential, particularly for those of us coming from Facebook. It allows for extremely long posts, local posting, and you can follow and interact with people from various sites in the Fediverse. But there are a few issues regarding screen reader accessibility, and perhaps some things that I'm not aware of. I have therefore decided to create a Friendica development tag, in order to find people who are willing and able to help resolve these issues.
@Nick's world I use TweeseCake with it and it works very well. The main problems are on the site itself. Even then, it's not truly inaccessible. It's just that it could be better, with normal links instead of menus, and a way to edit posts without resorting to a client. But things do read, and it is possible to make and edit a profile, read and respond to posts, etc. TweeseCake just makes it easier. Pachli for Android also works well, but I prepfer Windows.
@Nick's world Oh, yes. It works very well! And unlike TWBlue, you can edit posts with it. I'm still not sure why they don't have that feature. They also don't allow long posts, as TweeseCake does, but if they're primarily built for Mastodon, that, at least, makes sense. They do allow you to see favourites, though, which TweeseCake seems to have a problem doing. They'll be displayed and then turn to numbers (1 of 250, for instance), and then disappear.
I am not sure how much Friendica has diverged from Hubzilla, Streams, or Forte, but they are all from the same family tree. They all come from Mist Park and Friendika (the MIT licensed version of Friendika before it was renamed Friendica and switched to AGPL).
There are some opportunities for collaboration, but the biggest obstacle is incompatible licenses. Hubzilla is MIT licensed and Friendica is AGPL. That means that Friendica can use code from Hubzilla, but Hubzilla can never use any code from Friendica. The exception being addons, themes, and widgets, that can be any license.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Che Guevara: I am not Christ or a philanthropist. I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Che Guevara: I am not Christ or a philanthropist. I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Mike Pompeo: I was the CIA Director... we lied, we cheated, we stole.
William Faulkner: The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Hugo Chávez: Well, what's the problem? I am also a Trotskyist!
Liu Shaoqi: An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolutionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long process of remoulding, before he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him the remnants of the various ideologies of that society (including its prejudices, habits and traditions), and in the second he has not been through a long period of revolutionary activity. Therefore he does not yet have a really thorough understanding of the enemy, of the people or of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle. In order to change this state of affairs, besides learning from past revolutionary experience (the practice of our predecessors), he must himself participate in contemporary revolutionary practice, and in this revolutionary practice and struggle against all kinds of counter revolutionaries, he must bring his conscious activity into full play and work hard at study and self-cultivation. Only so can he acquire deeper experience and understanding of the laws of social development and revolutionary struggle, acquire a really thorough understanding of the enemy and the people, discover his wrong ideas, habits and prejudices and correct them, and thus raise the level of his political consciousness, cultivate his revolutionary qualities and improve his revolutionary methods. Hence, in order to remould himself and raise his own level, a revolutionary must take part in revolutionary practice from which he must on no account isolate himself. Moreover, he must strive to conduct self-cultivation and study in the course of practice. Otherwise, it will still be impossible for him to make progress.
R. Palme Dutt: The development of a specific Fascist movement is a complicated process, involving a considerable trial and error of rival movements, before the successful technique is found.
Bert Hellinger: The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree. The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations. The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree. Thanks to these members, our trees renew their roots. Its rebellion is fertile soil, its madness is water that nourishes, its stubbornness is new air, its passion is fire that re-ignites the light of the heart of the ancestors. Uncountable repressed desires, unfulfilled dreams, the frustrated talents of our ancestors are manifested in the rebelliousness of these black sheep seeking fulfilment. The genealogical tree, by inertia will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes the task of our sheep a difficult and conflicting work. However, who would bring new flowers to our tree if it were not for them? Who would create new branches? Without them, the unfulfilled dreams of those who support the tree generations ago would die buried beneath their own roots. Let no one cause you to doubt, take care of your rarity as the most precious flower of your tree. You are the dream of all your ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges: Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Jorge Luis Borges: Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Nietzsche: Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.
Stalin: In the conditions prevailing today, imperialism prefers to intervene in a dependent country by organizing civil war, financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by giving moral and financial support to its agents... Intervention through the hands of others - that is where the root of imperialist intervention now lies.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists always go to every possible extreme of violence to crush socialism.
William Z. Foster: The proletarian revolution cannot be crushed by force, even with the assistance of the most tricky Social Fascist and Fascist demagogy.
William Z. Foster: Fascism will not be able to solve the capitalist crisis, and to save the present decaying social system. It cannot liquidate the class struggle; it cannot permanently hold down the workers and poor farmers by force. Faced by constantly worsening conditions and mass starvation, these masses will, under the leadership of the Communist party, eventually break through every system of Fascist terrorism and establish a Soviet regime.
Ibrahim Traoré: May 1 is the symbol of workers' permanent quest for better living conditions while respecting rights and dignity.
Ibrahim Traoré: Watch their films… you will always find the bad guys are either the Russians, South Americans, or black people… Arabs play the role of terrorists… through their communication they can make you hate a people or love a people.
Erik Prince: If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries.
Frantz Fanon: At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.
Lou Harry: Hollywood helps define just about everything in America. And journalism is no exception.
Malcolm X: If the "religious" claim of the Zionists is true that they were to be led to the promised land by their messiah, and Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of that prophesy: where is their messiah whom their prophets said would get the credit for leading them there? It was Ralph Bunche who "negotiated" the Zionists into possession of Occupied Palestine! Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism? If Ralph Bunche is not their messiah, and their messsiah has not yet come, then what are they doing in Palestine ahead of their messiah?
Frantz Fanon: The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion.
Kwame Ture: I've never voted in my life in the Democratic Party, and I'll never vote in the Democratic Party. It's racist and it's capitalist to the core. This is understood.
Kwame Ture: You vote once in four years, and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
Dalton Trumbo: Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.
Dalton Trumbo: Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.
William Z. Foster: The wide development of Fascism in various forms in the several capitalist countries is not a sign of capitalism growing stronger, but weaker. Fascism arises with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. It is the desperate means by which capitalism in its extremity of crisis vainly tries to save itself. It is significant that Fascism is most developed in exactly those countries that are the weakest links in the capitalist world chain.
Karl Marx: In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Mao Zedong: Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.
Joe Biden: I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.
Enver Hoxha: Marxism-Leninism has opened our eyes with the conclusions drawn from the analyses which it has made of the development of society through the class struggle. It teaches us that the class struggle is the motor of society, which keeps you alive, gives you strength, gives you victory. If you extinguish this struggle the bourgeoisie and capitalism will strangle and enslave you, and our people have never liked slavery. On the contrary, our people have always fought against the grip of slavery. Therefore, our Party has never ceased the class struggle, either internally or in the international arena, and never will cease it, even for a moment. For 40 years on end our people and Party have resolutely opposed and combatted everything old and conservative, opportunist and liberal, all those who have tried openly or secretly to divert us from our correct course, we have fought any force or ideology which has aimed to infect the consciousness of our people, to hinder our march towards better days, towards the present and the more secure future. We have always kept the class struggle ablaze, and it is precisely this great and revolutionizing motive force which has made our small Homeland unshakeable “either by the cannon, or the bomb,” as the folk song says, that is, either by revisionism, capitalism or reaction.
Alexei Leonov: The universe is infinite in time and space, the very black sky, black as coal, bright, un-flickering stars, and so many of them.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The cowards are those who take shelter under the rules.
Stalin: It was formerly the 'accepted' idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples... The era of tranquil exploitation and oppression of the colonies and dependent countries has passed away. The era of liberating revolutions in the colonies, the era of the awakening of the proletariat in those countries, the era of its hegemony in the revolution, has begun.
Nikola Tesla: Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Enver Hoxha: No library could hold all the books, magazines, newspapers and other publications which attack Marxism-Leninism. No one can calculate or even imagine the quantity and extent of the anti-communist propaganda of imperialism.
Assata Shakur: Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.
Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Stalin: Imperialism is the omnipotence of monopolistic trusts and syndicates, banks and financial oligarchies in industrial countries.
Lenin: Social chauvinists are our class opponents, the bourgeois among the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, groups, and layers of workers who have been objectively bribed by the bourgeoisie (the best wages, places of honor, etc.) and who help their bourgeoisie to plunder and strangle small and weak peoples, to fight over the division of capitalist spoils.
Stalin: The inevitable result of the imperialist policy of masked intervention will be that it will draw the “small” nations into the sphere of the revolution and extend the base of socialism.
Lenin: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
John Bright: Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour.
James Riddle Hoffa: Too often, the younger generation of workers forgets the bitter hardships and struggles of those who went before them to build the conditions they enjoy today.
Mother Jones: I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
William S. Burroughs: What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.
William Z. Foster: Fascist apologists brazenly lie when they say that Hitler (or Mussolini) has abolished mass unemployment and in- dustrial crises. The fascists have only temporarily obscured these in- curable diseases of capitalism by their present wholesale production of munitions and the gearing of the nation’s whole economy to the waging of war. Only by carrying on the horrible trade of organized mass slaughter can the Nazis keep their industries going, even for the time being. This is true also of American and British capitalism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism teaches young people to die and drives them into mass slaughter; socialism shows them the way to live and provides them the means for so doing.
William Z. Foster: As the world capitalist system, caught in the meshes of its own incurable crisis, strangles and smothers, so also its culture withers and dies. Under fascist regimes, which arose where the capitalist crisis reached a very acute stage, the decay of capitalist culture is the most pronounced. In fascist Germany education is decadent, sci- ence is in decline, and the arts are stultified. The whole educational apparatus – universities, colleges, schools, etc. – has been drasti- cally curtailed. The only science the fascists are interested in is that which advances their war technique, and the same tendency is growing in all other capitalist states. The Nazis have a supreme con- tempt for the popular mind. All they seek is the most effective means to deceive the people into obeying their autocratic com- mands.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism, especially in its fascist aspects, corrodes and destroys human per- sonality; socialism develops personality to its utmost. In the Soviet Union there is literally a new type of man in the making, not only in the economic and political sense, but also with regard to his physi- cal, mental and individual characteristics.
William Z. Foster: For the capitalists the way out of the crisis is by forcing great masses of unemployed into semistarvation, driving down the wage levels of the employed, waging desperate imperialist war, and instituting a regime of Fascist terrorism. This is the way the whole capitalist world development goes. For the workers, the capitalist way out means deeper enslavement and poverty than ever.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will never voluntarily give up control of society and abdicate their system of exploiting the masses. Regardless of the devastating effects of their decaying capitalism; let there be famine, war, pestilence, terrorism, they will hang on to their wealth and power until it is snatched from their hands by the revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists make a great parade of their theory of the “gradual” evolution of capitalism into Socialism through a process of peaceful parliamentarism. Thus Mr. Hilquit, the millionaire leader of the Socialist party says: “In the more democratic countries, especially those in which the Socialist and labor movements constitute important political and social factors, the necessary transitional reforms, or at least a large part of them, may be gradually conquered through the direct control by the proletariat of important organs of the State, such as municipalities or legislatures, or through the indirect influence of the growing labor movement.”1 Mr. Hillquit, like Social Fascists generally, goes on to say that the present imperialist government is actually the “Socialist transitional State, although it would be impossible for us to say just when we entered it”.
William Z. Foster: This Social Fascist theory of “gradualness” is the most insidious that the workers have to deal with. But there are many others, if less important, that tend in a similar direction. Among these are the “folded-arm” general strike conception of the Syndicalists; the sectarian scholasticism of the Socialist Labor party and the Proletarian party; the petty bourgeois Anarchist theories of individual violence; Gandhi’s non-cooperation, non-violence program; the capitalistic Utopias of Carver, Gillette and others for the workers directly to buy out the capitalist industries (expressed in their books respectively, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States and The People’s Corporation); the fatalism of Veblen who, in The Price System and the Engineers, maintains that capitalism will eventually, through the working of its inner contradictions, get into such a chronic and devastating crisis that in desperation society will spontaneously call upon the engineers to take over the operation of the industries and the government.
William Z. Foster: The question of the revolution is not merely one of a ripe objective situation. Such is, of course, a first requisite for the revolution. But the subjective factor is no less decisive. Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood; they must have the necessary organization and revolutionary program; they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party. The real measure of a revolutionary situation in any given country is the strength of the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism established itself as a world system by force. It defeated feudalism and laid the basis of its own power in a whole series of revolutionary civil wars in England, the United States, France, etc. Moreover, it has lived by violence, its regime being marked by the most terrible exploitation and devastating wars in human history. And capitalism will die sword in hand, fighting in vain to beat back the oncoming revolutionary proletariat.
William Z. Foster: The Social Fascists try to create the legend that the difference between them and the Communists is that while they fight for immediate demands, the Communists confine themselves simply to ultimate aims. This is not so. The difference is that while the Communists fight for the immediate demands as well as the final goal, the Social Fascists betray both.
William Z. Foster: A cornerstone of the Communist class struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left,” phrasemongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it. They are a menace and an obstacle to all struggle by the workers. With their prestige as labor leaders, their demagogy is especially demoralizing; with their control of the workers’ mass organizations, they are able to effectively sabotage the struggle. It is idle to try to “convince” the Social Fascist leaders or to “force them to fight by mass pressure,” because they are class enemies of the workers. They must be politically obliterated. To accomplish this is a first condition for successful working class struggle and it is one never lost sight of by the Communist party.
William Z. Foster: It is characteristic that the Social Fascist and Fascist leaders of the Socialist party and A.F. of L., together with many liberals, are advocates of capitalist “planning.” They try to prove that the revolution is not necessary for an ordered economy and prosperity for the workers. As agents of finance capitalism, these elements always manage to find “progress” in every new step that the capitalists find necessary for the exploitation of the workers. The A.F. of L. leaders’ demand now for “planning” and the abrogation of the antitrust laws is just as much in the service of the employers as their support of the tariff, the rationalization of industry, the present wage-cut drive, etc. But these capitalistic economic “plans” must and do fail. They are wrecked on the same reefs as the trusts and cartels: viz., the inability of capitalism, whether “planned” or not, to sell its commodities in a market that lacks the wherewithal to buy them; and the hopelessly competitive character of the capitalist system. Capitalism “cannot eat its cake and have it.” “Planned” capitalist economy cannot bridge over the basic economic and political contradictions of capitalism. It is as fruitless as capitalist “efforts” to end war.
William Z. Foster: The theory of organized capitalism is found best developed in Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s conception of super-imperialism, and it is a foundation premise of Social Fascism in general. Kautsky and other Social Fascist theoreticians hold that the process of capitalist trustification is overcoming and will continue to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That is, eventually trustification will become world-wide, thus at once liquidating the economic crisis, abolishing the class struggle, and dissolving the war conflicts between the rival imperialist nations into an organized and monopolized world system of production and distribution. Meanwhile, as this develops, capitalism will at the same time, by a process of purchase by the ever-more democratic State, be gradually turned into a system of Socialism. This is the theory of the peaceful evolution of capitalism into Socialism. But this whole theory of organized capitalism goes contrary to the most basic development of capitalism. The capitalist system cannot be “organized”; it is fundamentally competitive and chaotic. An ordered, balanced social system is incompatible with the private ownership of the industries and land and with production for profit. Monopolization, instead of diminishing the contradictions of the capitalist system, is increasing and deepening them. While trustification undoubtedly brings a modicum of regulation and system within the confines of its direct organization, it at the same time, aggravates the conflicts within capitalism as a whole. With the development of monopolization, in this period of imperialism, of the decline of capitalism and of the rise of Socialism, the collisions increase in severity between trusts and untrustified industry, between the trusts themselves, between industries as such, between the various imperialist nations, between the producers and the exploiters, and between the decaying capitalist system and the advancing Soviet Union.
William Z. Foster: But the development of the general crisis of capitalism has changed the complexion though not the basic role of the Social Reformistic “lieutenants of capital.” The employers, trying to find a way out of their difficulties and to preserve their profits at the expense of the workers, intensify their wage-cut drive, reduction of unemployment benefits, etc.; not even the skilled workers, although they are partly shielded, escaping the rapid downward trend. The old system of concessions to the skilled workers, the basis of Social Reformism, becomes increasingly narrowed down and is succeeded by more direct and rigorous methods of repression. Adapting themselves to the needs of the employers, the reformist Socialist and trade union leaders have developed their movement into an organ of the bosses for the Fascist repression and intensified exploitation of the working class. They have practically grafted the Social Democracy and the conservative unions onto the capitalist State and the employers’ exploitation machinery. They devote to capitalism their long-established prestige as workers’ leaders, their strong organizational control over the masses, and their unquestioned demagogic skill in covering up their services to capitalism with pleas that it is all necessary in the building of Socialism. Where necessary they do not hesitate to use open violence against the revolutionary toilers. The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism; the beating back of the proletarian revolution, the saving of capitalism and the profits of the employers at the expense of the workers. The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism under a mask of Marxian Socialism. Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism.
William Z. Foster: The practice of the Socialist parties and trade unions conforms to this Fascist theoretical degeneration. There have been no demands made upon them by capitalism in crisis which they have not obeyed. When the capitalists of the various countries called upon them to organize the great World War they responded by identifying everywhere their interests with those of their national bourgeoisie and by mobilizing the workers for the slaughter. And ever since they have worked with their capitalist masters to help them prepare the next war. In Great Britain the MacDonald “Socialist” government maintained intact the great war machine of British imperialism; in Germany the Social Fascists voted for the rebuilding of the German navy; in France they prepared the infamous universal military service law now in force; in Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and many other countries they vote the war budgets. Everywhere they are the special decoy ducks of capitalist pacifism, the shield of imperialist war. In the war plans of the capitalist nations against the Soviet Union the Social Democrats play a leading role. They scoff at the danger of capitalist war against the Soviet Union and thus disarm the workers’ defense; they make the capitalist war appear as a fight against autocracy in the U.S.S.R. The Social Fascists hate the Soviet Union because they see in it the living refutation of their whole policy, a menacing threat to the capitalist system of which they are the most profound theoretical and practical defenders. They have never hesitated, (in Georgia and elsewhere), to take up arms against the Soviet Union. The exposures in the recent political trials in Moscow showed that the Second International is working hand-in-glove with the French imperialists in preparing armed intervention against the U.S.S.R. As a recent resolution of the Communist International says: “The Social Democracy has turned itself into a shock-brigade of world imperialism which is preparing for war against the U.S.S.R.”.
William Z. Foster: The special task of the Social Fascists is to discredit the Soviet Union among the workers. As we have seen, they are the most skilled in building up arguments against the Soviet Union, covering their sophistries with a cloak of pseudo-Marxism. They take up every capitalist anti- Soviet lie and assiduously propagate it among the workers. These they alternate with hypocritical pretensions of friendship, knowing that the masses are sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.
William Z. Foster: In the great revolutionary upheavals following the World War the Social Fascists saved European capitalism. In Italy they betrayed the revolution into the hands of Mussolini. In Germany, in their efforts to preserve the capitalist system, they shot down thousands of revolutionary workers. All this was done in the name of fighting for Socialism. The MacDonald “Socialist” government simply displayed its true Social Fascist character by shooting and jailing thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants in India. The Social Fascists were the main force in the speed-up, rationalization movement, their real leader being Henry Ford, not Karl Marx.
William Z. Foster: Now again, when capitalism is trying to find a way out of its deep crisis by reducing the standards of the workers, its main allies are the Social Fascists. The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. In every capitalist country the Social Fascists are cooperating closely with the capitalists, accepting as their working principle that in the crisis the workers’ living conditions must come down. In the United States J. P. Morgan speaks over the radio for the starvation, “block-aid” system, and so does Norman Thomas. In Great Britain, with the aid of the Labor government, the bosses have deeply cut the wages in every industry, besides making sharp reductions in the State unemployment insurance. In Germany the Bruening and other capitalist governments, all the while receiving the active support of the Social Democratic party, have cut the wages of the workers and the benefits of the jobless to starvation levels.
William Z. Foster: The Socialist parties of the world are the third parties of capitalism. They do not fight for even the most elementary demands of the workers. They are a part of the capitalist machinery for taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers and their families, the principal barrier to the revolution. That is why in Great Britain, Germany and other countries the capitalists have supported Social Fascists to head their governments. In every case their record has been one of subservience to the program of the exploiters. In practice their policy of the gradual building of Socialism has resolved itself simply into a desperate effort to keep the breath of life in capitalism. Their so-called nationalization of industry is only a covert aid to capitalist trustification. In no country have they achieved the slightest progress towards Socialism, or even made serious proposals looking in that direction.
William Z. Foster: The Social Democracy not only increasingly applies more Fascist methods itself against the workers, but it further serves its capitalist masters by preparing the ground for open Fascism. In Italy the betrayal of the great metal strike by the Socialists opened the door to Mussolini. In Austria the Social Democracy disarms the workers before the advancing Fascism. In Great Britain, by their betrayal of the great general strike and by the debacle of the Labor government, the Social Fascists threw demoralization into the ranks of the workers and petty bourgeois sympathizers, giving direct encouragement to Fascism. In Germany the Social Fascist leaders are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of “the lesser evil” With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a “lesser evil” than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers’ rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means.
William Z. Foster: The “fight” between Social Fascism and Fascism is so much “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The two movements are blood-brothers. Manuilsky says: “Fascism and Social Fascism are two aspects of one and the same bulwark of bourgeois dictatorship,” and Stalin says: “Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy.” Their quarrel is only a case of friction between two methods of repressing the workers, between two sets of capitalist agents fighting for the fleshpots of office and control. The Social Fascists would maintain the semblance of capitalist democracy as the best means of forestalling the revolution and they would be its administrators ; whereas the Fascists would sweep aside this fake democracy and its champions and proceed to more direct methods of repression. But an accommodation of these conflicting ideas and interests is being arrived at by the gradual fasciszation of the State and of the mass organizations of the Social Democrats. In due season the Social Fascist leaders, in the name of Socialism, will join with the Hitlerites in shooting down the revolutionary workers.
William Z. Foster: THE DEEPENING of the crisis and the growing revolutionization of the masses is accompanied by a strong development of radical phrase-mongering on the part of many groups of open and covert defenders of capitalism. This demagogy is part of the capitalist offensive against the workers. Its aim is to delude the workers with promises of drastic relief, while at the same time holding them tied in practical policy to the basic capitalist program of exploitation. It is a means to prevent the masses from following the leadership of the Communists. Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely “radical,” containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. The Social Fascists are still more dangerous masters at this demagogic art. As we have seen they have, under pretense of fighting for Socialism, backed up every plan that capitalism has put forward for saving itself and more intensely exploiting the toilers. Under the fig-leaf of Socialism they supported the World War, the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes and Young Plans, the Kellogg Pact, the Chinese butcher, Chang Kai Shek, and the Indian faker, Gandhi. Even as these lines are being written, they are working together with the Spanish coalition government to shoot down the heroic revolt of the Spanish workers, (Daily Worker, Jan. 23, 1932). Nor are the Greens and Wolls anything lacking in demagogic ability, with their blather about the 5-hour day, their vague talk of “revolution if something is not done,” etc. But the most insidious and dangerous to the workers of all this crop of demagogues are the so-called “left” Social Fascists. The substance of their activities is, while giving practical support to the right Social Fascists, to criticize them in the name of the revolution. They are the radical phrase-mongers par excellence. Their objective task is the confusion of the most advanced elements of the workers and therefore the breaking up of serious movements against the capitalists and their reactionary labor henchmen. Throughout the Second International there are such groupings, including the Maxtonites in Great Britain, the “left” Social Democrats in Germany, the various renegade Communist grouplets, etc. Trotzky belongs to this general category. The harm of such elements is typically illustrated by Trotzky’s present denial of an immediate war danger between Japan and the U.S.S.R., while at the same time he poses as an ultra-revolutionist.
William Z. Foster: The “left” Social Fascists are in reality specialized troops of the reactionary bureaucrats for struggle against the revolutionary sections of the working class.
William Z. Foster: NOW LET us see whether or not capitalism is developing in Social Fascism a means with which it can quench the class struggle and beat down the surging proletarian revolution. Even a cursory glance shows that with the narrowing of the economic base of Social Fascism, caused by the inability of capitalism to so widely corrupt the labor aristocracy, goes a narrowing of its mass base among the working class. Social Fascism is bankrupt in theory and practice and, despite (and because of) the support it gets from the employers and the State, it is entering into a period of disintegration. By its daily role in the class struggle Social Fascism shows itself to be the road, not to Socialism but to the still deeper enslavement of the workers. The Social Democratic theory that the capitalist “democracy” would gradually evolve into a Socialist government leads in hard reality to Socialist support of growing Fascist dictatorships all over the capitalist world; its conception of a steadily rising standard of living for the workers under an organized capitalism leads, in the decaying capitalist system, to the acceptance of wholesale wagecuts, starvation of the unemployed, preparations for war against the Soviet Union, etc.
William Z. Foster: The masses of workers can never be dragooned into organizations that are so manifestly carrying out policies hostile to their interest. But this is not to minimize the danger. The Social Fascist method of obscuring the capitalist policy under the guise of Socialism is an insidious menace. It is now and will remain until the revolution the most dangerous capitalist influence among the working class, the most serious brake upon the class struggle. The progress of the revolutionary movement is to be measured by the breaking of the Social Democracy’s grip upon the workers, ideologically and organizationally. That there is such a breaking-down process now going on is self-evident, and this disintegration will increase with the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism. The Social Democratic illusions of the masses are weakening, despite the frantic efforts of the “left” phrase-mongers to keep them alive. Less and less able are the employers to put into effect their traditional policy of corrupting the strategically situated labor aristocracy and thus to play them off against the rest of the working class. The differences between the skilled and unskilled are diminishing, the working class is becoming unified. More and more skillful become the newlyorganized Communist parties in mobilizing the rebellious masses. Consequently, the employers are compelled to make ever greater use of open force against the workers, to resort to a policy of naked Fascism.
William Z. Foster: Fascism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism, the most extreme expression of the capitalistic dictatorship.
Stalin: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism.
Albert Einstein: Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein: This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
Albert Einstein: Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein: The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessary solving of an existing one. One could say it has affected us quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Albert Einstein: As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein: I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Lenin: A minister today, a banker tomorrow; a banker today, a minister tomorrow. It is “war to the end”—both today and tomorrow. This state of affairs prevails not only in Russia, but in every other country where Capital rules. A handful of bankers, who have the whole world in their grip, are making a fortune out of the war.
Kim Jong-il: Of course there is something I believe in like God: the people. I have been worshiping the people as Heaven, and respecting them as if they were God. My God is none other than the people. Only the masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth.
Lenin: A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that "something may stick".
Albert Einstein: I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein: Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.
Albert Einstein: Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.
Otto Kuusinen: Communists are in no way peculiar people; they are plain workers, peasants, intellectuals, in a word, ordinary people. But they are distinguished by their greater class consciousness, ideological steadfastness and, consequently, more intense revolutionary character and readiness to face any ordeal for the sake of the lofty idea which they have united to realise. Their life is bound up with the interests of the people and they are deeply concerned with everything that agitates the people's minds.
Patrice Lumumba: History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers.
Archimedes: Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi: The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
Kim Il Sung: Just as love and science have no national boundaries, revolution knows no boundaries.
The International: The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.
W. E. B. Du Bois: In the end, Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
John Steinbeck: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Lenin: The liberals approach the language question in the same way as they approach all political questions—like hypocritical hucksters, holding out one hand (openly)to democracy and the other (behind their backs) to the feudalists and police. We are against privileges, shout the liberals, and under cover they haggle with the feudalists for first one, then another, privilege.
Lenin: The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.
Lenin: (Women of the working class) must realize what the proletarian dictatorship means for them: complete equality with man in law and practice, in the family, in the state, in society; an end to the power of the bourgeoisie.
Gramsci: The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia.
Enver Hoxha: By going through struggles and revolutions. today our Albania has become a socialist state, where the working class is in power, where our Marxist-Leninist Party is successfully and unfalteringly guiding the future of the people towards socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: Socialism has transcended the borders of one single state, the imperialist bourgeois system is heading for its demise, Marxism-Leninism is enlightening, inspiring, and leading mankind to revolution, to socialism and communism.
Enver Hoxha: We say "class consciousness," "proletarian consciousness," "bourgeois consciousness," "capitalist consciousness," we say, "he has a clear conscience" or "a troubled and heavy conscience," and so on. This means that in life and struggle people do not display a standard consciousness; consciousness reflects different world outlooks, which derive from the developing economic situation. But there is more to it than this, although, as Engels says, this is the main thing, the decisive thing that opens the way. It is also dependent on other social factors and on the superstructure of every economic system, because, on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism, the prevailing ideas in one or another country, in one or another historical epoch, are those of the ruling class. Both the feudal class and the bourgeoisie have each tried to proclaim the "universality" of their ideas, to create, to mould the consciousness of their class, in order to prop up and perpetuate their state power. However, at the same time, their economic system, their reactionary ideology, their class consciousness also created their grave-digger — the proletariat, with its proletarian ideology, with its proletarian consciousness, with its social-economic system — socialism, with its science of the vanguard, of revolutions, the class struggle, and with its own ideological and political superstructure.
Georgiana Brummell
in reply to Georgiana Brummell • •