Lenin: As I have had occasion to point out more than once…the dictatorship of the proletariat is not only the use of force against the exploiters, and not even mainly the use of force. The economic foundation of this use of revolutionary force, the guarantee of its effectiveness and success is the fact that the proletariat represents and creates a higher type of social organization of labor compared with capitalism. This is what is important, this is the source of the strength and the guarantee that the final triumph of communism is inevitable. The feudal organization of social labor rested on the discipline of the bludgeon, while the working people, robbed and tyrannized by a handful of landowners, were utterly ignorant and downtrodden. The capitalist organization of social labor rested on the discipline of hunger, and, not-withstanding all the progress of bourgeois culture and bourgeois democracy, the vast mass of the working people in the most advanced, civilized an
... Show more...Lenin: As I have had occasion to point out more than once…the dictatorship of the proletariat is not only the use of force against the exploiters, and not even mainly the use of force. The economic foundation of this use of revolutionary force, the guarantee of its effectiveness and success is the fact that the proletariat represents and creates a higher type of social organization of labor compared with capitalism. This is what is important, this is the source of the strength and the guarantee that the final triumph of communism is inevitable. The feudal organization of social labor rested on the discipline of the bludgeon, while the working people, robbed and tyrannized by a handful of landowners, were utterly ignorant and downtrodden. The capitalist organization of social labor rested on the discipline of hunger, and, not-withstanding all the progress of bourgeois culture and bourgeois democracy, the vast mass of the working people in the most advanced, civilized and democratic republics remained an ignorant and downtrodden mass of wage-slaves or oppressed peasants, robbed and tyrannized by a handful of capitalists. The communist organization of social labor, the first step towards which is socialism, rests, and will do so more and more as time goes on, on the free and conscious discipline of the working people themselves who have thrown off the yoke both of the landowners and capitalists. This new discipline does not drop from the skies, nor is it born from pious wishes; it grows out of the material conditions of large-scale capitalist production, and out of them alone. Without them it is impossible. And the repository, or the vehicle, of these material conditions is a definite historical class, created, organized, united, trained, educated and hardened by large-scale capitalism. This class is the proletariat.
Quotes
- Fannie Lou Hamer: Christianity is being concerned about [others], not building a million-dollar church while people are starving right around the corner. Christ was a revolutionary person, out there where it was happening. That's what God is all about, and that's where I get my strength.
- Fannie Lou Hamer: If the white man gives you anything - just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves.
- Fannie Lou Hamer: If I fall, I will fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom.
- Fannie Lou Hamer: Just because people are fat, it doesn't mean they are well fed. The cheapest foods are the fattening ones, not the most nourishing.
- Fannie Lou Hamer: [On her Freedom Farm Cooperative:] If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. [But] if you give him land, he will grow his own food.
- Enver Hoxha: How sorry I feel for the Palestinian people, expelled from their homeland and persecuted in the cruellest ways by the Israeli aggressors and other reactionary forces. And why? Because they are fighting for their rights, to return to their homeland, because they demand justice from those who do not want to know what justice is, but simply trample the rights of other peoples underfoot, as the Israelis and their patrons, the American imperialists, do.
- Lenin: Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice!
- Albert Einstein: If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?
- Albert Einstein: Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
- Stalin: It is not surprising that fascism has now become the most fashionable commodity among war-mongering bourgeois politicians. I am referring not only to fascism in general, but primarily to fascism of the German type, wrongly called national-socialism - wrongly because the most searching examination will fail to reveal even an atom of socialism in it. In this connection the victory of fascism in Germany must be regarded not only as a symptom of the weakness of the working class and a result of the betrayals of the working class by Social-Democracy, which paved the way for fascism; it must also be regarded as a sign of the weakness of the bourgeoisie, a sign that the bourgeoisie is no longer able to rule by the old methods of parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy. As a consequence, it is compelled in its home policy to resort to terrorist methods of rule - a sign that it is no longer able to find a way out of the present situation on the basis of a peaceful foreign policy, and, as a consequence, is compelled to resort to a policy of war.
