commiebot

It is the duty of the revolution to put an end to compromise, and to put an end to compromise means taking the path of socialist revolution. - Lenin, Speech On The Agrarian Question November 14 (1917)

Capital is money: Capital is commodities. ... Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs. - Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 4 (1867)

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite! - Marx

What is known as ‘Marxism’ in France is, indeed, an altogether peculiar product — so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: ‘Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.’ [If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist] - Engels, Letter to Eduard Bernstein (1882)

Dialectics constitutes the most important form of thinking for present-day natural science, for it alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connections in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to another. - Engels, On Dialectics (1878)

Experience has proved that, on certain very important questions of the proletarian revolution, all countries will inevitably have to do what Russia has done. - Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

This struggle must be organised, according to “all the rules of the art”, by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity. The fact that the masses are spontaneously being drawn into the movement does not make the organisation of this struggle less necessary. On the contrary, it makes it more necessary. - Lenin, The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organization of the Revolutionaries (1901)

Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. - Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32 (1867)

One must not count in thousands, like the propagandist belonging to a small group that has not yet given leadership to the masses; in these circumstances one must count in millions and tens of millions. - Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living. - Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone. On the contrary, to be successful, all serious revolutionary work requires that the idea that revolutionaries are capable of playing the part only of the vanguard of the truly virile and advanced class must be understood and translated into action. - Lenin, The Significance of Militant Materialism (1922)

Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes). - Lenin, Summary of Dialectics (1914)

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. - Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. - Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)

History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.. - Marx, The Holy Family, Chapter 6 (1846)

Napoleon, I think, wrote: “On s’engage et puis ... on voit.” rendered freely this means: “First engage in a serious battle and then see what happens. ” Well, we did first engage in a serious battle in October 1917. And now there can be no doubt that in the main we have been victorious. - Lenin, Our Revolution (1923)

Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life. - Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 3 (1867)

What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor.... - Engels, Principles of Communism (1847)

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending. - Marx, Doctoral Thesis, Chapter 1 (1841)

Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, development (inflation, distension) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge, into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosised. - Lenin, Summary of Dialectics (1914)

Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life. - Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 3 (1867)

Socialists must explain to the masses that they have no other road of salvation except the revolutionary overthrow of “their” governments, and that advantage must be taken of these governments’ embarrassments in the present war precisely for this purpose. - Lenin, Socialism and War (1915)

A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it. - Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 25 (1867)

History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.. - Marx, The Holy Family, Chapter 6 (1846)

Behind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism one must not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society. - Lenin, The Recent Revolution in Natural Science and Philosophical Idealism, Conclusion (1908)

Capital is an international force. To vanquish it, an international workers' alliance, an international workers' brotherhood, is needed. We are opposed to national enmity and discord, to national exclusiveness. We are internationalists. - Lenin, Letter to the Workers and Peasants of the Ukraine (1919)

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite! - Marx

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. - Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 4 (1867)

The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. - Marx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. - Marx

Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science. - Marx, Private Property and Communism (1844)

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes. - Marx, The Paris Commune (1871)

Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. - Marx, The Grundrisse (1857)

Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source — next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself. - Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876)

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living. - Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

While the bourgeois state methodically concentrates all its efforts on doping the urban workers, adapting all the literature published at state expense and at the expense of the tsarist and bourgeois parties for this purpose, we can and must utilise our political power to make the urban worker an effective vehicle of communist ideas among the rural proletariat. - Lenin, Pages from a Diary (1923)

[...] I must say that the tasks of the youth in general, and of the Young Communist Leagues and all other organisations in particular, might be summed up in a single word: learn. - Lenin, The Tasks of the Youth Leagues (1920)