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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

    “There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before. I do not allude to European despotism, planted upon Asiatic despotism, by the British East India Company, forming a more monstrous combination than any of the divine monsters startling us in the Temple of Salsette; All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid, and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo, and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history; Now, the British in East India accepted from their predecessors the department of finance and of war, but they have neglected entirely that of public works. Hence the deterioration of an agriculture which is not capable of being conducted on the British principle of free competition, of laissez-faire and laissez-aller. But in Asiatic empires we are quite accustomed to see agriculture deteriorating under one government and reviving again under some other government. There the harvests correspond to good or bad government, as they change in Europe with good or bad seasons. Thus the oppression and neglect of agriculture, bad as it is, could not be looked upon as the final blow dealt to Indian society by the British intruder, had it not been attended by a circumstance of quite different importance, a novelty in the annals of the whole Asiatic world; It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the spinning-wheel. England began with driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then introduced twist into Hindostan, and in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton with cottons. From 1818 to 1836 the export of twist from Great Britain to India rose in the proportion of 1 to 5,200. In 1824 the export of British muslins to India hardly amounted to 1,000,000 yards, while in 1837 it surpassed 64,000,000 of yards. But at the same time the population of Dacca decreased from 150,000 inhabitants to 20,000. This decline of Indian towns celebrated for their fabrics was by no means the worst consequence. British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindostan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing industry” - Karl Marx

    “In short, the rural commune finds it in a state of crisis that will only end when the social system is eliminated through the return of modern societies to the ‘archaic’ type of communal property. In the words of an American writer, who supported in his work by the Washington government, is not at all to be suspected of revolutionary tendencies, [‘the higher plane’] ‘the new system’ to which society is tending ‘will be a revival, in a superior form, of an archaic social type.’ We should not, then, be too frightened by the word ‘archaic’” - Karl Marx

    “In order to arouse sympathy the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of the coming catastrophe. In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history” - Karl Marx

    “On the ruins and remnants of a [Peruvian] socialist economy, they [the Spanish] established the bases of a feudal economy (- José Carlos Mariátegui); Artificially developed Communism of the Peruvians [Incas]” - Karl Marx

    “Thus the absolute monarchy in Spain, bearing but a superficial resemblance to the absolute monarchies of Europe in general, is rather to he ranged in a class with Asiatic forms of government. Spain, like Turkey remained an agglomeration of mismanaged republics with a nominal sovereign at their head… Despotism changed character in the different provinces with the arbitrary interpretation of the general laws by viceroys and governors; but despotic as was the government it did not prevent the provinces from subsisting with different laws and customs, different coins, military banners of different colours, and with their respective systems of taxation. The oriental despotism attacks municipal self-government only when opposed to its direct interests, but is very glad to allow those institutions to continue so long as they take off its shoulders the duty of doing something and spare it the trouble of regular administration” - Karl Marx

    “This anticipation of coming stages of historic development, forced in itself, but a natural outcome of the life conditions of the plebeian grouop, is firsted noted in Germany, in the teachings of Thomas Muenzer and his party; Only in the teachings of Muenzer did these Communist notions find expression as the desires of a vital section of society. Through him they were formulated with a certain definiteness, and were afterwards found in every great convulsion of the people, until gradually, they merged with the modern proletarian movement” - Friedrich Engels

    “Turks, particularly those of the Ottoman Empire in its heyday, are the most perfect nation on earth in every possible way. The Turkish language is the most perfect and melodious in the world… If a European is maltreated in Turkey, he has only himself to blame; your Turk hates neither the religion of the Frank, nor his character, but only his narrow trousers. Imitation of Turkish architecture, etiquette, etc. is strongly recommended. The author himself was several times kicked in the bottom by Turks, but subsequently realised that he alone was to blame… In short, only the Turk is a gentleman and freedom exists only in Turkey” - Friedrich Engels

    “The most outstanding contribution of Ivan the Terrible was that he was the first to introduce the government monopoly of external trade. Ivan the Terrible was the first and Lenin was the second” - J.V. Stalin

    “The nomadic system of Mongolia and Central Asia has been directly linked with socialism” - Mao Zedong

    “One of Caesar’s first acts upon becoming consul was to have the proceedings of the Senate and Assembly publicly posted daily, making both bodies more accountable to the citizenry. During his first consulship in 59, he regularly disgarded auspices. He updated and streamlined the voter registration rolls. And he decisively terminated Cicero’s political witch-hunts against popular leaders, supporting Clodius in driving Cicero into exile in 58 for what proved to be only a brief period. During his later consulships he divested the senatorial oligarchy of its unaccountable executive powers including its control over the treasury, and secured the powers of the people’s tribunate to initiate legislation. Whether such moves are deemed despotic or democratic depends on the perspective from which they are viewed. He accumulated individual power in order to break the oligarchic stranglehold and thereby initiate popular reforms. Without too much overreaching, we might say his reign can be called a dictatorship of the proletarii, an instance of ruling autocratically against plutocracy on behalf of the citizenry’s substantive interests” - (Michael Parenti, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome)