Lenin: There are reformists in all countries, for everywhere the bourgeoisie seek, in one way or another, to corrupt the workers and turn them into contented slaves who have given up all thought of doing away with slavery. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9410
Malcolm X: The Democrats who are conservative, vote with the Republicans who are conservative. The Democrats who are liberal vote with the Republicans that are liberal. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9411
Felix Dzerzhinsky: One has to have the inner consciousness of the need to go to one’s death for the sake of life, to go to prison for the sake of freedom and to have the strength to go through all the hell of life with open eyes, feeling in one’s heart the great and exalted, paean of beauty, truth and happiness derived from that life. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9412
Lenin: The feudal organisation of social labour rested on the discipline of the bludgeon, while the working people, robbed and tyrannised by a handful of landowners, were utterly ignorant and downtrodden. The capitalist organisation of social labour rested on the discipline of hunger, and, notwithstanding all the progress of bourgeois culture and bourgeois democracy, the vast mass of the working people in the most advanced, civilised and democratic republics remained an ignorant and downtrodden mass of wage-slaves or oppressed peasants, robbed and tyrannised by a handful of capitalists. The communist organisation of social labour, the first step towards which is socialism, rests, and will do so more and more as time goes on, on the free and conscious discipline of the working people themselves who have thrown off the yoke both of the landowners and capitalists. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9413
Lenin: If we translate the Latin, scientific, historico-philosophical term "dictatorship of the proletariat” into simpler language, it means just the following: Only a definite class, namely, the urban workers and the factory, industrial workers in general, is able to lead the whole mass of the working and exploited people in the struggle to throw off the yoke of capital, in actually carrying it out, in the struggle to maintain and consolidate the victory, in the work of creating the new, socialist social system and in the entire struggle for the complete abolition of classes. (Let us observe in parenthesis that the only scientific distinction between socialism-and communism is that the first term implies the first stage of the new society arising out of capitalism, while the second implies the next and higher stage.) https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9414
Lenin: The proletariat does not cease the class struggle after it has captured political power, but continues it until classes are abolished -- of course, under different circumstances, in different form and by different means. And what does the "abolition of classes” mean? All those who call themselves socialists recognise this as the ultimate goal of socialism, but by no means all give thought to its significance. Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy. Clearly, in order to abolish classes completely, it is not enough to overthrow the exploiters, the landowners and capitalists, not enough to abolish their rights of ownership; it is necessary also to abolish all private ownership of the means of production, it is necessary to abolish the distinction between town and country, as well as the distinction between manual workers and brain workers. This requires a very long period of time. In order to achieve this an enormous step forward must be taken in developing the productive forces; it is necessary to overcome the resistance (frequently passive, which is particularly stubborn and particularly difficult to overcome) of the numerous survivals of small-scale production; it is necessary to overcome the enormous force of habit and conservatism which are connected with these survivals. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9415
