“Thus in the field of private property, morality teaches that theft is to be condemned; While Communists do not believe in the sacredness of private property, they do not approve of stealing; It is true that Communists by no means recognise the inviolability of private property; the nationalisation of factories is an expropriation of the bourgeoisie; the working class appropriates “the property of others”, trangresses the right of private property, undertakes a ‘despotic intervention in the right of property’ But Communists condemn stealing, for the reason that individual thefts by each worker from the capitalists, for his own advantage, would not result in common struggle, but would make the worker a petty bourgeois. Horse-thieves and swindlers will not fight in the class struggle, even though they may be offspring of the proletariat. If many members of the proletariat should become thieves, the class would break down and be condemned; Therefore Communists condemn stealing, not in order to protect private property, but in order to maintain the integrity of their class, to protect it from ‘demoralisation’ and ‘disintegration’, without which protection the proletariat can never be transformed into the next following stage. We are therefore dealing witth a class standard in the conduct of the proletariat. It is obvious that the rules we have considered are determined by the economic conditions of society” - Karl Marx

“One could just as well have said that only in society can useless and even socially harmful labour become a branch of gainful occupation, that only in society can one live by being idle, etc., etc. - in short, once could just as well have copied the whole of Rousseau” - Karl Marx

“Observation has persuaded me that you are not very industrious by nature, despite spasmodic feverish activity and good intentions. In these circumstances, you will need external support if you are to set out in life with my daughter. I know nothing of your family. Although they may enjoy a comfortable living, that does not in itself mean that they would be disposed to make sacrifices for you. I do not even know with what favour they regard your proposed alliance. I repeat that I must have positive clarification on all these matters. Moreover, as an avowed realist, you cannot, of course, expect that I should behave as an idealist in respect of my daughter’s future” - Karl Marx

“Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars - in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A ‘benevolent society’ - insofar as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the labouring nation. This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognises in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery” - Karl Marx

“The ‘dangerous class,’ the lumpenproletariat, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue” - Karl Marx

“The same relation holds for all services which workers exchange directly for the money of other persons, and which are consumed by these persons. This is consumption of revenue, which, as such, always falls within simple circulation; it is not consumption of capital. Since one of the contracting parties does not confront the other as a capitalist, this performance of a service cannot fall under the category of productive labour. From wh*re to pope, there is a mass of such rabble. But the honest and ‘working’ lumpenproletariat belongs here as well; e.g. the great mob of porters etc. who render service in seaport cities etc” - Karl Marx

“The lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. It is an absolutely venal, an absolutely brazen crew. If the French workers, in the course of the Revolution, inscribed on the houses: Mort aux voleurs! (Death to the thieves!) and even shot down many, they did it, not out of enthusiasm for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary to hold that band at arm’s length. Every leader of the workers who utilises these gutter-proletarians as guards or supports, proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement” - Friedrich Engels

“Rosa acted and felt as a Communist when in an article she championed the cause of the prostitutes who were imprisoned for any transgression of police regulations in carrying on their dreary trade. They are, unfortunately, doubly sacrificed by bourgeois society. First, by its accursed property system, and, secondly, by its accursed moral hypocrisy. That is obvious. Only he who is brutal or short-sighted can forget it. But still, that is not at all the same thing as considering prostitutes - how shall I put it? - to be a special revolutionary militant section, as organising them and publishing a factory paper for them. Aren’t there really any other working women in Germany to organise, for whom a paper can be issued, who must be drawn into your struggles? The other is only a diseased excrescence. It reminds me of the literary fashion of painting every prostitute as a sweet Madonna. The origin of that was healthy, too: social sympathy, rebellion against the virtuous hypocrisy of the respectable bourgeois. But the healthy part became corrupted and degenerate” - V.I. Lenin

“For example. In the eighties of the last century a great controversy flared up among the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. The Narodniks asserted that the main force that could undertake the task of ‘emancipating Russia’ was the petty bourgeoisie, rural and urban. Why? - the Marxists asked them. Because, answered the Narodniks, the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie now constitute the majority and, moreover, they are poor, they live in poverty. To this the Marxists replied: It is true that the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie now constitute the majority and are really poor, but is that the point? The petty bourgeoisie has long constituted the majority, but up to now it has displayed no initiative in the struggle for ‘freedom’ without the assistance of the proletariat. Why? Because the petty bourgeoisie as a class is not growing; on the contrary, it is disintegrating day by day and breaking up into bourgeois and proletarians. On the other hand, nor is poverty of decisive importance here, of course: ‘tramps’ are poorer than the petty bourgeoisie, but nobody will say that they can undertake the task of ‘emancipating Russia.’ As you see, the point is not which class today constitutes the majority, or which class is poorer, but which class is gaining strength and which is decaying” - J.V. Stalin

“In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature - his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence - the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need - the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being” - Karl Marx

“…However impressive the people of this epoch appear to us, they are completely undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still attached to the navel string of the primitive community. The power of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But it was broken by influences which from the very start appear as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile society. The lowest interests - base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth - inaugurate the new, civilised, class society. It is by the vilest means - theft, violence, fraud, treason - that the old gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the society itself during all the 2500 years of its existence has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before” - Friedrich Engels

“What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual - and that will be the end of it” - Friedrich Engels

“The equality of woman thereby achieved will tend in infinitely greater measure to make men really monogamous than to make women polyandrous” - Friedrich Engels

“Thus in the Greek constitution of the heroic age, we see the old gentile order as still a living force. But we also see the beginnings of its disintegration: father right, with transmission of the property to the children by which accumulation of wealth within the family was favoured and the family itself became a power against the gens; reaction of the inequality of wealth on the constitution by the formation of the first rudiments of hereditary nobility and monarchy; slavery at first only of prisoners of war but already preparing the way for the enslavement of fellow members of the tribe and even of the gens; the old wars between tribe and tribe already degenerating into systematic pillage by land and sea for the acquisition of cattle, slaves and treasure, and becoming a regular source of wealth; in short the riches praised and respected as the highest good and the old gentile order misused to justify the violent seizure of riches. Only one thing was wanting: an institution which not only secured the newly acquired riches of individuals against the Communistic traditions of the gentile order, which not only sanctified the private property formerly so little valued and declared this sanctification to be the highest purpose of all human society; but an institution which set the seal of general social recognition on each new method of acquiring property and thus amassing wealth at continually increasing speed; an institution which perpetuated not only this growing cleavage of society into classes but also the right of the possessing class to exploit the non-possessing, and the rule of the former over the latter. And this institution came. The state was invented” - Friedrich Engels

“Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual - a man - and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and of no other. For this purpose, the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man, so this monogamy of the woman did not in any way interfere with open or concealed polygamy on the part of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent, heritable wealth - the means of production - into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting. Having arisen from economic causes, will monogamy then disappear when these causes disappear? One might answer, not without reason: far from disappearing, it will, on the contrary, be realised completely. For with the transformation of the means of production into social property there will disappear also wage-labour, the proletariat, and therefore the necessity for a certain - statistical calculable - number of women to surrender themselves for money. Prostitution disappears; monogamy, instead of collapsing, at last becomes a reality - also for men” - Friedrich Engels

“With the rise of the inequality of property - already at the upper stage of barbarism, therefore - wage-labour appears sporadically side by side with slave labour, and at the same time, as its necessary correlate, the professional prostitution of free women side by side with the forced surrender of the slave. Thus the heritage which group marriage has bequeathed to civilisations is double-edged, just as everything civilisations brings forth is double edged, double tongued, divided against itself, contradictory: here monogamy, there hetaerism with its most extreme form, prostitution. For hetaerism is as much a social institution as any other; it continues the old sexual freedom - to the advantage of men” - Friedrich Engels

"[What will be the influence of Communist society on the family?] It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage - the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents. And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moral philistines against the ‘community of women.’ Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus, Communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes it” - Friedrich Engels

“…So long as wage-slavery exists, inevitably prostitution too will exist. All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have already been forced… to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labour and, second, their women as concubines for the ‘masters’” - V.I. Lenin

“Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach morality at all. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the ‘private individual’ for the sake of the ‘general’, selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination” - Karl Marx

“I have, which will surprise you not a little, been speculating; in English stocks, which are springing up like mushrooms this year; and are forced up to quite an unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapse. In this way, I have made over £400” - Karl Marx

“…Now that the complexity of the political situation affords greater scope, I shall begin all over again. It’s a type of operation that makes demands on one’s time, [but] it’s worthwhile running some risk in order to relieve the enemy of his money” - Karl Marx

“The minor panic in the money market appears to be over, consols [a type of government bond] and railway shares are again rising merrily, money is easier… I don’t believe that the crisis will this time be preceded by a rage for speculation; crucial ill-tidings from overstocked markets must surely come soon. Massive shipments continue to leave for China and India; Calcutta is decidedly overstocked; I don’t believe prosperity will continue beyond October” - Friedrich Engels

“Firstly, he saves himself the trouble of explaining the various forms of distribution which have hitherto existed, their differences and their causes; taken in the lump, they are simply of no account–they rest on oppression, on force. We shall have to deal with this before long. Secondly, he thereby transfers the whole theory of distribution from the sphere of economics to that of morality and law, that is, from the sphere of established material facts to that of more or less vacillating opinions and sentiments. He therefore no longer has any need to investigate or to prove things; he can go on declaiming to his heart’s content and demand that the distribution of the products of labour should be regulated, not in accordance with its real causes, but in accordance with what seems ethical and just to him, Herr Dühring" - Friedrich Engels

“From a scientific standpoint, this appeal to morality and justice does not help us an inch further; moral indignation, however justifiable, cannot serve economic science as an argument, but only as a symptom” - Friedrich Engels

“The moment anyone started to talk to Marx about morality, he would roar with laughter” - Karl Vörlander

“I am closely following the situation in Russia. I try to get testimonies from eyewitnesses, not from newspapers that lie non-stop. I approve of the Russian revolution because it proclaimed the principle of honesty on one-sixth of the earth’s surface. The Soviet Union is facing incredible temptations, but the state is ready to overcome them. The Russians were lucky - they have socialism and Stalin. Happy people with a wise leader. I envy the Russians and pity my compatriots who are ruled by three random people (after the assassination of Alexander, a three-member governorship took over the role of king). Only under the leadership of a wise and strong leader are the people capable of feats. If I could go back half a century, I wouldn’t think for a second, I would go to Moscow and send Bechelor and Edison to hell. In my small library, I keep a collection of texts about the October Revolution, which was given to me by Skvirski (Soviet Ambassador to the United States). I often return to the collection and think with sympathy about the country I cannot visit. Age has many advantages, but also two disadvantages - poor health and thinking in the spirit: ‘I will never succeed in this.’ If I had children or grandchildren, I would probably, for their happiness, decide to go to the U.S.S.R. To go alone, at this age, I will not. I remember saying to Skvirski on one occasion: ‘There is no point in transporting old bones across the ocean. You need to move while you are young so that the new homeland can benefit as much as possible. My departure to the U.S.S.R. would be just a burden for you’” - Nikola Tesla

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all” - John M. Keynes

“[On the industrialisation of the Soviet economy] The result is impressive” - John M. Keynes

“It is said that in that ‘will’ Comrade Lenin suggested to the congress that in view of Stalin’s ‘rudeness’ it should consider the question of putting another comrade in Stalin’s place as General Secretary. That is quite true. Yes, comrades, I am rude to those who grossly and perfidiously wreck and split the Party. I have never concealed this and do not conceal it now. Perhaps some mildness is needed in the treatment of splitters, but I am a bad hand at that. At the very first meeting of the plenum of the Central Committee after the Thirteenth Congress I asked the plenum of the Central Committee to release me from my duties as General Secretary. The congress itself discussed this question. It was discussed by each delegation separately, and all the delegations unanimously, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, obliged Stalin to remain at his post. What could I do? Desert my post? That is not in my nature; I have never deserted any post, and I have no right to do so, for that would be desertion. As I have already said before, I am not a free agent, and when the Party imposes an obligation upon me, I must obey” - J.V. Stalin

“This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole education system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals” - Albert Einstein

“The Russians have proved that their only aim is really the improvement of the lot of the Russian people; There are increasing signs the Russian trials are not faked, but that there is a plot among those who look upon Stalin as a stupid reactionary who has betrayed the ideas of the revolution” - Albert Einstein

“Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid” - Ernest Hemingway

“It was here that in 1919 he brought Nadya Alleluiev, the daughter of his old friend of early Bolshevik days, and now grown into a beautiful woman. He was at this time forty and she seventeen, but for her he was still the same hero who had once come from afar and taken refuge in her parents’ home. This was Stalin’s great love affair. He was by nature monogamous. Those in search of sexual scandal in his life will search in vain. I recall Radek speaking to me of Stalin’s reaction to the vagaries and often abominable aberrations in the sexual life of modern civilisation. Several illustrated German books dealing with the subject lay on Radek’s table, which was as usual piled with volumes newly arrived from Europe and America. Stalin was just about to leave Radek’s room when he noticed these books and began thumbing over their pages. Turning to Radek he asked: ‘Are there really people in Europe who do these kinds of things?’ ‘Yes, of course,’ answered Radek. ‘Stalin,’ Radek said to me, ‘looked utterly disgusted, shrugged his shoulders, and walked away without saying another word.’ To Stalin they reflected a diseased way of life, and he was a normal healthy man in his reactions to disease whether of the mind or of the body” - J.T. Murphy

“I think there are two swords: one is Lenin and the other is Stalin” - Mao Zedong

“Communism is not love. Communism is the hammer we use to destroy the class enemy” - Mao Zedong

“First, Stalin is disowned, now, little by little, it gets to prosecute socialism, the October Revolution, and in no time they will also want to prosecute Lenin and Marx” - Lazar Kaganovich

“There were a large number of Christian churches in our country before the outbreak of the Fatherland Liberation War against the U.S. imperialists. These churches were destroyed by the planes of Americans who they themselves professed to be the so-called ‘apostles of God.’ The crucifixes, icons, Bibles, as well as their worshippers - all destroyed by U.S. bombs. And thus, it were the Americans who destroyed our churches and killed our religious. No god rescued us from this disaster. So after the war, our religious did not hurry to rebuild their churches and temples. Instead they focused their efforts on their survival, first rebuilding what they needed most: dwellings, homes, factories, schools” - Kim Il-sung

“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)

“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)

“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun” - Karl Marx

“It is the work of a man in deep sorrow who expresses his hope that the anger and hatred so generally evoked by suffering can be transformed into compassion and love; But what a strange logic, one that ties the very act of prediction of the mysteries of the dark ground, whereby ‘x is y’ really means, ‘that which is x is that which is y.’ Sheared of predicates of its own, the ground of unity (‘that which is’) is ensnared in darkness, where it is mysteriously joined to the heart. To speak (or sing) its truth is to lighten its burden through 'the generation of sound and meaning out of an interior so full that it can no longer remain in itself; What they all attempted to disclose was, mythically construed, the history of God’s becoming. Forged in the painful contractions of primordial nature, god-Cronus, driven by alternating waves of fear and greed, devours his children. But when the gentle son steps forth, even old Cronus becomes gentle (and for the first time truly the Father), affirming the world in what we still celebrate as the act of creation; His purpose in illuminating the abyss of the pass was to uncover the origin of time itself; Caught between these poles is, of course, the world we now experience; In itself, the absolute future, like the absolute past, is hidden away in eternity; God in his wisdom hides in dark night not only the end of time to come from the beginningg of time past; Recognising it as such is the most difficult task facing humanity. Far from there being hame in the failure to complete the task, the failure itself is one of the secrets of divine wisdom: the compassionate heart is held open by the eternal return of the suffering it seeks to overcome; Imagining the contractions through which God was to give birth to himself was simply too much to bear: 'For man helps man; even God helps him. But nothing can assist the primal being, lost in its terrifying solitude. It has no choice but to fight through its chaotic condition alone and by itself; the image of a not-yet God himself undergoing hell, represents the only possible solution to the problem of why God would allow so much suffering in the world. To the degree that we are where God was, the affirmation of our need to suffer is a function of God’s own self-affirmation; If Christianity has had to declare the very heart of Christianity heretical, it is presumably because its truth is too heavy to bear; Eighteen-eleven was the year of his solitude, when, still in mourning after the death of his Caroline; an exploration of his primordial past, the disclosure of the hell that God had to climb out of in order first to become God, a hell that those any less than divine still have to struggle with” - Karl Marx

“If we find that even in the country of complete political emancipation, religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality, that is proof that the existence of religion is not in contradiction to the perfection of the state” - Karl Marx

“On the contrary, the perfect Christian state is the atheistic state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion to a place among the other elements of civil society” - Karl Marx

“Everyone should be able to relieve religious and bodily nature without the police sticking their noses in” - Karl Marx

“Political democracy is Christian since in it man, not merely one man but everyman, ranks as sovereign, as the highest being” - Karl Marx

“That which is a creation of fantasy, a dream, a postulate of Christianity, i.e., the sovereignty of man - but man as an alien being different from the real man - becomes, in democracy, tangible reality, present existence, and secular principle” - Karl Marx

“Christianity attains, here, the practical expression of its universal-religious significance” - Karl Marx

“The consummation of the Christian state is the state which acknowledges itself as a state and disregards the religion of its members. The emancipation of the state from religion is not the emancipation of the real man from religion” - Karl Marx

“Political emancipation is, at the same time, the dissolution of the old society on which the state alienated from the people, the sovereign power, is based. What was the character of the old society? It can be described in one word - feudalism” - Karl Marx

“Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, is the real, conscious standpoint and the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade!” - Karl Marx

“In America, which was the ‘vanguard’ of the age; the absolute separation of church and state had brought a religious renaissance in the great awakenings” - Karl Marx

“You can start a Communist revolution with the four gospels and revelation” - Friedrich Engels

“Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognised state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain” - Friedrich Engels

“If [one] wonders […] why, with the enormous concentration of landownership under the Roman emperors and the boundless sufferings of the working class of the time, which was composed almost exclusively of slaves, ‘socialism did not follow the overthrow of the Roman Empire in the West,’ it is because he cannot see that this ‘socialism’ did in fact, as far as it was possible at the time, exist and even became dominant - in Christianity” - Friedrich Engels

“The only service which one can still render to God is to declare atheism a compulsory article of faith” - Friedrich Engels

“If [a person] works honestly, takes part in our events, stands by our side in everything and expresses the wish to become a Communist - they must be admitted into the Party, whether they believe in Allah with his Muhammad or any other Totemic animal; this does us no harm” - J.V. Stalin

“The Soviet Government considers that the Sharia, as common law, is as fully authorised as that of any other of the peoples inhabiting Russia” - J.V. Stalin

“One should not close off people’s worship. In any case, the people worship and pray. One should even open temples. But the books they read should be in Mongolian. And the monks should be in your hands” - J.V. Stalin

“The Soviet people, as Bolsheviks, have the following principle of building the leading organs of the state: if the Muslims prevail in the country, then the majority of government members should also be Muslim. You cannot violate people’s religion. People will not understand, why the state is not led by the Muslims, while the majority of the country’s population is Muslim. These are elementary things, but they did not understand that in Yugoslavia. It does not mean that only Muslims should be in the government. We should select capable people from among the national minorities in order to keep the unity of the people intact. Participation in the government of the representatives of ethnic and religious minorities will ensure the stability of the government” - (J.V. Stalin, speaking with Enver Hoxha)

“Regarding the three largest religious faiths of the world (Christianity, Islam and Buddhism), even up until now it exerts an enormous influence over the peoples of the world. Admittedly, our knowledge of these religions is small as currently our country does not have a proper research institution that uses a Marxist lens to analyse, research and study them, for example, right now there is not a single scholarly work that of which we can read and study this topic” - Mao Zedong

[In which moment did you become Communist?] “I became Communist because I was Catholic. I did not change religion, but I remained profoundly Catholic. I don’t go to church but this doesn’t matter; you don’t ask people to go to church. I remained a Catholic, that is, an internationalist universalist” - Louis Althusser

[What role does Catholic culture have today?] “Oh… it has a giant role. In my view, today social revolution or a profound social change depends on the alliance between Catholics (I am not saying the church, though the church can also be part of it), the Catholics of the world, all religions of the world, and Communists” - Louis Althusser

“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 So it was a rabbit hole before reddit

“Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritcally concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private” - Karl Marx

“Just as woman passes from marriage to general prostitution, [Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes - and by the latter’s abomination is still greater - the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head] so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s objective substance) passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community” - Karl Marx

“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation” - Karl Marx

“The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour” - Karl Marx

“Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital” - Karl Marx

“…It is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private” - Karl Marx

“We have begun to learn and are rapidly learning to fight - and to fight not as individuals, as the best of our fathers fought, not for the slogans of bourgeois speechifiers that are alien to us in spirit, but for our slogans, the slogans of our class. We are fighting better than our fathers did. Our children will fight better than we do, and they will be victorious. The working class is not perishing, it is growing, becoming stronger, gaining courage, consolidating itself, educating itself and becoming steeled in battle. We are pessimists as far as serfdom, capitalism and petty, production are concerned, but we are ardent optimists in what concerns the working-class movement and its aims. We are already laying the foundation of a new edifice and our children will complete its construction. That is the reason - the only reason - why we are unconditionally the enemies of neomalthusianism, suited only to unfeeling and egotistic petty-bourgeois couples, who whisper in scared voices: ‘God grant we manage somehow by ourselves. So much the better if we have no children.’ It goes without saying that this does not by any means prevent us from demanding the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures, etc. Such laws are nothing but the hypocrisy of the ruling classes. These laws do not heal the ulcers of capitalism, they merely turn them into malignant ulcers that are especially painful for the oppressed masses. Freedom for medical propaganda and the protection of the elementary democratic rights of citizens, men and women, are one thing. The social theory of neomalthusianism is quite another. Class-conscious workers will always conduct the most ruthless struggle against attempts to impose that reactionary and cowardly theory on the most progressive and strongest class in modern society, the class that is the best prepared for great changes” - V.I. Lenin

“The capitalist exploitation of the proletarian work force through its starvation wages, sees to it that there is a large supply of prostitutes which corresponds to the demand by the men” - Clara Zetkin

“Bourgeois professors are not ashamed to declare in print that prostitutes are not slaves, that they voluntarily chose this road! This is disgusting hypocrisy, which claims that nothing prevents a worker from leaving a factory where it is impossible to breathe from dust, poisonous fumes, and the heat. He ‘voluntarily’ stays to work on it, ‘voluntarily’ works for 16-18 hours” (- Nadezhda Krupskaya, ‘The female worker’, 1899)

“But the red flag, the horrible red flag, what does that mean? Not that the streets should run with gore, but that the same red blood courses through the veins of the whole human race. It meant the brotherhood of man. When the red flag floats over the world the idle shall be called to work. There will be an end of prostitution for women, of slavery for man, of hunger for children” - Lucy Parsons

“Prostitution destroys the equality, solidarity and comradeship of the two halves of the working class. A man who buys the favours of a woman does not see her as a comrade or as a person with equal rights… The contempt he has for the prostitute, whose favour he has bought, affects his attitude to all women” - Alexandra Kollontai

“While for the feminists the achievement of equal rights with men in the framework of the contemporary capitalist world represents a sufficiently concrete end in itself, equal rights at the present time are, for the proletarian women, only a means of advancing the struggle against the economic slavery of the working class” - Alexandra Kollontai

“However apparently radical the demands of the feminists, one must not lose sight of the fact that the feminists cannot, on account of their class position, fight for the fundamental transformation of the contemporary economic and social structure of society without which the liberation of women cannot be complete; The feminists see men as the main enemy, for men have unjustly seized all rights and privelages for themselves, leaving women only chains and duties. For them a victory is won when a prerogative previously enjoyed exclusively by the male sex is conceded to the ‘fair sex’. Proletarian women have a different attitude. They do not see men as the enemy and the oppressor; on the contrary, they think of men as their comrades, who share with them the drudgery of the daily round and fight with them for a better future. The woman and her male comrade are enslaved by the same social conditions; the same hated chains of capitalism oppress their will and deprive them of the joys and charms of life. It is true that several aspects of the contemporary system lie with double weight upon women, as it is also true that the conditions of hired labour sometimes turn working women into competitors and rivals to men. But in these unfavourable situations, the working class knows who is guilty” - Alexandra Kollontai

“Besides the large-scale development of motherhood protection, the task of labour [in] Russia is to strengthen in women the healthy instinct of motherhood, to make motherhood and labour for the collective compatible and thus do away with the need for abortion. This is the approach of the labour republic to the question of abortion, which still faces women in the bourgeois countries in all its magnitude; Abortion exists and flourishes everywhere, and no laws or punitive measures have succeeded in rooting it out. A way round the law is always found. But ‘secret help’ only cripples women; they become a burden on the labour government, and the size of the labour force is reduced. Abortion when carried out under proper medical conditions, is less harmful and dangerous, and the woman can get back to work quicker. Soviet power realises that the need for abortion will disappear on the one hand when Russia has a broad and developed network of institutions protecting motherhood and providing social education, and on the other hand when women understand that childbirth is a social obligation; Soviet power has therefore allowed abortion to be performed openly and in clinical conditions” - Alexandra Kollontai

“Women hold up half the sky” - Mao Zedong

“Thus, someone who owns property and has a secure job cannot actually experience what it means to be a sex-worker because her prime vocation is not one where she is forced to sell her body as an economic necessity. Sex labour in a context of class privilege is an activity, a game, where one’s material reality produces a different set of options: you can always stop, you have a far greater margin of choice (your clientelle are more like dating options on Craigslist but with reimbursement attached), and by-and-large you are not a sex-worker because this is simply compensated dating - it is not the material institution of prostitution defined by labourers who have no other choice but to sell their labour in this institution. You are not part of this institution’s army of labour; you are not part of its reserve army of labour when you aren’t working” - J. Moufawad-Paul

– Quotes -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7

“The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades” - Karl Marx

“So the phraseology, [Marx distanced himself from what he defined as the ‘vulgar-democratic phraseology’ of Atlantic liberalism: the Manchester School of free trade and Laissez-faire and Henry Carey’s American school of Political Economoy. According to Marx, Atlantic liberalism raised the abolitionist flag of free labour against slavery only under the pressure of the ‘slave movement’ and the workers’ struggle] to which such scribbling is restricted at least distinguishes itself from the vulgar, democratic phraseology; Victoria Woodhull, who for years has had an eye on the presidency; she is president of the spiritists, preaches free love, has a banking business etc.; agitated especially for the women’s franchise; [Section 12’s ‘Appeal’] Among other things in it there was talk of personal liberty, social liberty (free love), dress regulation, women’s franchise, universal language, etc.; [should be expelled from the International Workingmen’s Association because] they give precedence to the women’s question over the question of labour and take exception to the assumption that the I.W.A. is a workingmen’s organisation.Both these sisters, millionairesses, advocates of women’s emanipation and especially ‘free love’, resolutely joined the International. Section No. 9 was set up under the leadership of Miss Claflin, Section No. 12 under that of Mrs. Woodhull; new sections soon followed in the most diverse parts of America, all set up by adherents of the two sisters. According to the currently valid arrangements, every section had the right to send a delegate to the Central Committee, which met in New York. The consequence was that, very soon, this federal council, which had originally been made up of German, Irish and French workers, was swamped by a whole host of bourgeois American adventurers of all sorts and of both sexes. The workers were pushed into the background; victory for the two speculating sisters seemed assured. Then section No. 12 took central stage and explained to the founders of the American International what it was really all about” - Karl Marx

“We therefore see that the Christianity of that time, which was still unaware of itself, was as different as heaven from earth from the later dogmatically fixed universal religion of the Nicene Council; one cannot be recognised in the other. Here we have neither the dogma nor the morals of later Christianity but instead a feeling that one is struggling against the whole world and that the struggle will be a victorious one; an eagerness for the struggle and a certainty of victory which are totally lacking in Christians of today and which are to be found in our time only at the other pole of society, among the socialists. In fact, the struggle against a world that at the beginning was superior in force, and at the same time against the novators themselves, is common to the early Christians and the socialists. Neither of these two great movements were made by leaders or prophets – although there are prophets enough among both of them - they are mass movements. And mass movements are bound to be confused at the beginning; confused because the thinking of the masses at first moves among contradictions, lack of clarity and lack of cohesion, and also because of the role that prophets still play in them at the beginning. This confusion is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight against one another with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy. So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist movement, no matter how much that worried the well-meaning worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible” - Friedrich Engels

“Volume One of Marx’s Capital gives a detailed description of the condition of the British working class for about 1865, i.e. the time when Britain’s industrial prosperity had reached its peak. I would therefore have had to repeat what Marx says. It will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical standpoint of this book - philosophical, economical, political, - does not exactly coincide with my standpoint of today” - Friedrich Engels

“…They themselves do not for the most part understand the theory and treat it in doctrinaire and dogmatic fashion as something which, having once been learnt by rote, is sufficient as it stands for any and every need. To them it is a credo, not a guide to action. Besides which, they refuse to learn English on principle” - Friedrich Engels

“One must not fear criticism, or gloss over shortcomings; on the contrary, it is necessary to help to make them known and to see nothing discreditable in doing so. Only he can be discredited who conceals his shortcomings, who is unwilling to fight against evils, that is, precisely the man who ought to be discredited. It is necessary to be able to see the truth and to imbibe it from the masses and from all who are taking part in production. There is nothing worse than self-praise and self-satisfaction. It is possible to go forward only when, step by step, evils are sought out and overcome. At the same time, an end must be put to our established practice of humouring the masses – the workers. It should be remembered that in our country the workers, like ourselves, are not yet cultured, that often their group interests outweigh the interests of the working class as a whole; often they do not sufficiently realise that only their own useful labour, the productivity of their labour, can create the communist state, maintain their Soviet power. Every economic manager should wage a struggle to win prestige, to win the confidence of the working masses, but the struggle for this confidence should on no account employ the instrument of demagogy, of humouring the masses, satisfying them to the detriment and at the expense of the state, of the interests of the alliance with the peasants, of parochial requirements. The path of demagogy is perhaps the most harmful path, lulling the masses, deflecting them from the main tasks of the working class in production, diminishing the sacrifices the working class has made and, in the final analysis, one which is harmful for our industry…” - Felix E. Dzerzhinsky

“[What must every working woman do?] How are all these demands to be won? What action must be taken? Every working-class woman, every woman who reads this pamphlet, must throw off her indifference and begin to support the working-class movement, which is fighting for these demands and is shaping the old world into a better future where mothers will no longer weep bitter tears and where the cross of maternity will become a great joy and a great pride. We must say to ourselves, ‘There is strength in unity’; the more of us working women join the working-class movement, the greater will be our strength and the quicker we will get what we want. Our happiness and the life and future of our children are at stake” - Alexandra Kollontai

“Marxism is the sharpest weapon of the proletariat” - William Z. Foster

“A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect” - W.E.B. Du Bois

“The Communist Party does not fear criticism because we are Marxists, the truth is on our side, and the basic masses, the workers and peasants, are on our side” - Mao Zedong

“We’re taught from an early age to be against Communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what Communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is” - Assata Shakur

“[Reactionary] A political position that maintains a conservative response to change, including threats to social institutions and technological advances. Reaction is the reciprocal action to revolutionary movement. Reactionaries clamp down on differences of the emerging productive forces in society, and attempt to remove those differences, silence them, or segregate them in order to keep the stability of the established order” - (Encyclopedia of Marxism)

“Something is aufheben when it is superseded by something else. ‘Supersede’ and ‘transcend’ do not carry the same connotation however as ‘abolish,’ in which the old is actually terminated and got rid of by that which supersedes it; ‘sublation’ carries the connotation of ‘including’ the old in the new, but is altogether too platonic and misses the sense of ‘abolish.’ Engels authorised the use of ‘abolish’ in the English translation of The Communist Manifesto where it talks of the aufheben of the family; this however gives leeway to those who would simply ban the institutions of religion, or dismiss the very existence of spiritual needs. The translators of the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right variously used ‘abolish’ and ‘supersede’ according to context. Generally speaking, when reading English translations of Marx and Engels, the words ‘abolish,’ ‘supersede’ and ‘sublate’ are most likely translations of aufheben, and should be understood in that sense, as something being made obsolete by means of resolving the problems that gave rise to it in some new way” - (Encyclopedia of Marxism)