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Here are a collection of quotes for fellow Marxism-Leninist’s to counter Ultra-Leftism and Dogmatism from misguided comrades.

Part 1 of This Series:

“The Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however is to change it” - Karl Marx

“‘Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?’ - No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity” - Friedrich Engels

“The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal nobility is the struggle of town against country, industry against landed property, money economy against natural economy; and the decisive weapon of the bourgeoisie in this struggle was its means of economic power, constantly increasing through the development of industry, first handicraft, and then, at a later stage, progressing to manufacture, and through the expansion of commerce” - Friedrich Engels

“The masses must make themselves heard in order to propel the party ship forward. Then we will be able to face the future confidently” - Rosa Luxemburg

“You will find that, given a really revolutionary-democratic state, state - monopoly capitalism inevitably and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism! For if a huge capitalist undertaking becomes a monopoly, it means that it serves the whole nation. If it has become a state monopoly, it means that the state (i.e., the armed organisation of the population, the workers and peasants above all, provided there is revolutionary democracy) directs the whole undertaking. In whose interest? Either in the interest of the landowners and capitalists, in which case we have not a revolutionary-democratic, but a reactionary-bureaucratic state, an imperialist republic. Or in the interest of revolutionary democracy - and then it is a step towards socialism. For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly” - V.I. Lenin

“For the socialist of another country cannot expose the government and bourgeoisie of a country at war with ‘his own’ nation, and not only because he does not know that country’s language, history, specific features, etc., but also because such exposure is part of imperialist intrigue, and not of internationalist duty” - V.I. Lenin

“I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy” - (J.V. Stalin, to V. Molotov, 1943)

“As Stalin has said, leaders must maintain close ties with the masses, and the experience gained by both leaders and masses must be synthesised. Only thus can there be correct leadership” - Zhou Enlai

“The contradictions between ourselves and the enemy are antagonistic contradictions. Within the ranks of the people, the contradictions among the working people are non-antagonistic, while those between the exploited and the exploiting classes have a non-antagonistic as well as an antagonistic aspect. There have always been contradictions among the people, but they are different in content in each period of the revolution and in the period of building socialism. In the conditions prevailing in China today, the contradictions among the people comprise the contradictions within the working class, the contradictions within the peasantry, the contradictions within the intelligentsia, the contradictions between the working class and the peasantry, the contradictions between the workers and peasants on the one hand and the intellectuals on the other, the contradictions between the working class and other sections of the working people on the one hand and the national bourgeoisie on the other, the contradictions within the national bourgeoisie, and so on. Our People’s Government is one that genuinely represents the people’s interests, it is a government that serves the people. Nevertheless, there are still certain contradictions between this government and the people. These include the contradictions between the interests of the state and the interests of the collective on the one hand and the interests of the individual on the other, between democracy and centralism, between the leadership and the led, and the contradictions arising from the bureaucratic style of work of some of the state personnel in their relations with the masses. All these are also contradictions among the people. Generally speaking, the fundamental identity of the people’s interests underlies the contradictions among the people” - Mao Zedong

“Our policy toward the national bourgeoisie has been to redeem their property; on the contrary, in that period our policy should still have been to protect the national bourgeoisie and win it over so as to enable us to concentrate our efforts on fighting the chief enemies” - Mao Zedong

“In our country, the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie comes under the category of contradictions among the people. By and large, the class struggle between the two is a class struggle within the ranks of the people, because the Chinese national bourgeoisie has a dual character. In the period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, it had both a revolutionary and a conciliationist side to its character. In the period of the socialist revolution, exploitation of the working class for profit constitutes one side of the character of the national bourgeoisie, while its support of the Constitution and its willingness to accept socialist transformation constitute the other. The national bourgeoisie differs from the imperialists, the landlords and the bureaucrat-capitalists. The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the working class is one between exploiter and exploited, and is by nature antagonistic. But in the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled, can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods. However, the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie will change into a contradiction between ourselves and the enemy if we do not handle it properly and do not follow the policy of uniting with, criticising and educating the national bourgeoisie, or if the national bourgeoisie does not accept this policy of ours” - Mao Zedong

“Poverty is not socialism… socialism means eliminating poverty. Unless you are developing the productive forces and raising people’s living standards, you cannot. To be rich is glorious” - Deng Xiaoping

“Nevertheless, the superiority of the socialist system has already been proved, even though it still needs to be displayed in more convincing ways, but first and foremost it must be revealed in the rate of economic growth and in economic efficiency. Otherwise, there will be no point in our trying to blow our own horn. And to achieve a high rate of economic growth and high efficiency, it is essential to carry out our political line consistently and unfalteringly” - Deng Xiaoping

“I am convinced that more and more people will come to believe in Marxism, because it is a science. Using historical materialism, it has uncovered the laws governing the development of human society… So don’t panic, don’t think that Marxism has disappeared, that it’s not useful anymore and that it has been defeated. Nothing of the sort!” - Deng Xiaoping

“If your not an Anarchist by the time your twenty you have no heart, if your not a Marxist-Leninist by thirty you have no brain” - Erich Honecker

“All party organs and members should be frugal and make determined efforts to oppose ostentation and reject hedonism” - Xi Jinping

“The capitalist road was tried and found wanting; reformism, liberalism, social Darwinism, anarchism, pragmatism, populism, syndicalism - they were all given their moment on the stage. They all failed to solve the problems of China’s future destiny. It is Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought that guided the Chinese people out of the darkness of that long night and established a New China” - Xi Jinping

“Western Marxism is basically a kind of Marxism which has, as a key characteristic, never exercised political power. It is a Marxism that has, more and more frequently, concerned itself with philosophical and aesthetic issues. It has pulled back, for example, from criticism of political economy and the problem of the conquest of political power. More and more it has taken a historical distance from the concrete experiences of socialist transition in the Soviet Union, China, Viet Nam, Cuba and so forth. This Western Marxism considers itself to be superior to eastern Marxism because it hasn’t tarnished Marxism by transforming it into an ideology of the State like, for example, Soviet Marxism, and it has never been authoritarian, totalitarian or violent. This Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the Earth - this is a very important point. Wherever a victorious socialist revolution has taken place in the West, like Cuba, it is much more closely associated with the so-called eastern Marxism than with this western Marxism produced in Western Europe, the United States, Canada and parts of South America” - Michael Parenti

Comrades if you have anymore good quotes to combat Ultra-Leftism feel free to add them in the comments.

Part 2:

  • enigmaOP
    1•2 years ago

    “The Mongols were responsible for the ability of the East Slavs to resume their expansion eastward. Such movement required a stronger centralised government, which arose under Muscovite leadership because the Mongols had weakened the petty Russian principalities and the power of the aristocracy (boiarstvo). The lower classes were thus unimpeded in supporting the creation of a powerful unified state which could protect Russia from the steppe; Nevskii’s two feats were fighting off the Latin enemies and submitting in all humility to the Mongols, thus saving Russian national consciousness and Orthodoxy. The Mongols saved Russia from the Catholics by defeating Grand Prince Vitovt of Lithuania at the battle on the river Vorskla in 1399” - (George Vernadsky, Eurasianism, the Mongols and Russia)

    “Urukagina claimed to have put an end to all this. He humbled the bureaucrats, he cut taxes and in some cases entirely abolished them; he restored the temple’s property, but ensured that the priests no longer oppressed the lay public. He redressed the inequalities of power, the oppression of the poor by the wealthy: ‘If the house of a rich man is next to the house of a poor man, and if the rich man says to the poor man, ‘I want to buy it,’ then if the poor man wishes to sell he may say ‘pay me in silver as much as I think just, or reimburse me with an equivalent amount of barley’. But if the poor man does not wish to sell the house, the rich man may not force him.’ He freed citizens who had fallen into irretrievable debt, or were falsely accused of theft or murder. ‘He promised the god Ningirsu that he would not allow widows and orphans to be victimised by the powerful. He established freedom for the citizens of Lagash’” - (Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon, Mesopotamia and the birth of civilisation)

    “Vipper’s concept of popular monarchy may be described as ‘divisive’ rather than ‘inclusive’: a ‘democratic monarchy’ in which the ruler attempts to ally himself with the lower classes against the nobility” - Maureen Perrie

    “A closer resemblance - as I have more than once taken occasion to notice - may be found between the Peruvian institutions and some of the despotic governments of Eastern Asia… Such were the Chinese, who the Peruvians resembled in their implicit obedience to authority, their mild yet somewhat stubborn temper, their solicitude for forms, their reverence for ancient usage, their skill in the minuter manufactures, their imitative rather than inventive cast of mind, and their invincible patience, which serves instead of an adventurous spirit for the execution of difficult undertakings. A still closer analogy may be found with the natives of Hindostan in their division into castes, their worship of the heavenly bodies and the elements of nature, and their acquaintance with the scientific principles of husbandry. To the ancient Egyptians, also, they bore considerable resemblance in the same particulars…” - (Historians)

    “‘If the sovereign was the patrimonial owner (votchinnik) of his tsardom, then it belonged to him as his property, with all the unconditionality of ownership rights […]. If the power of the sovereign was based on the consciousness of the people (narodnaia massa), who saw the tsar and grand prince of all Rus’ as the expression of national (narodnoe) unity and the symbol of national (natsional’ naia) independence, then the democratic (demokraticheskii) character of this power is obvious […] Thus power in Muscovy was both absolute and democratic’; But, while stressing the ‘harmonic’ nature of the Muscovite state system, which combined autocracy (samoderzhavie) with local self-government (samoupravlenie), Solonevich also argued that the lower classes, with their anti-boyar attitudes, played an important part in the creation of the Muscovite autocratic system; The monarchy was created and supported by the masses, including the peasants, and this imbued it with its democratic character. ‘In place of an all-powerful despot wielding arbitrary power over cowering slaves, these studies have found a monarch ruling in council with this boyars and elites, constrained to rule according to custom, tradition, piety, and even law, enjoying a high degree of legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects’; But they do not exclude the possibility that peasants, if not serfs and slaves, might be included in the political community. Societal participation; that; describes the seventeenth-century state as a ‘popular monarchy’ (narodnaia monarhiia); Moscow sponsored and protected pretenders to the khanate of Kazan; in the eighteenth century, according to a recent estimate, fully one-third of Russian aristocratic families bore Turkic names; The Muscovite state showed tolerance to the Muslims in Russia, and in a very pronounced manner in the autonomous Khanate… until the end of the seventeenth century tens of thousands of Russian peasants were dependent on Muslim Tatars; ‘Between the Russians and Tatars there is no noticeable mutual hatred and our people now are extraordinarily regretful about the departure of the latter’; ‘The general opinion of those who know the Crimea is unanimously in favour of the Tatars. This people is quiet and submissive and does not have any sort of prejudice against the Russian government’; Toktu was young and inexperienced, and Nogai doubtless expected to find him a docile pupil. Within and without Kipchak, the great viceroy was treated as the real khan. The Russian chroniclers gave him the title of Tsar (‘Tsar’ was the common Russian title for the Khan: only later was it transferred to the native sovereign, the grand Duke of Muscovy)” - (Historians)