Communism

🔴 Lenin on Gorky’s Idealization of Lenin Maxim Gorky portrayed Lenin in highly personal and heroic terms. Lenin himself rejected this approach. In 1920, Lenin wrote: “Gorky gave extremely subjective and virtually idealist appraisals of the role of Lenin…” He criticized Gorky for overlooking: “the leading role of the Communist Party, the decisive role of the working class and the peasantry in the revolution.” For Lenin, the Revolution was not the product of a “great man,” but of class struggle, material conditions, and the political organization of the proletariat. Source: V. I. Lenin, 31 July 1920 @Communism

Man lives from nature -- i.e., nature is his body -- and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it is he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts @Communism

What a torch of reason ceased to burn, What a heart has ceased to beat! On August 5 (new style), 1895, Frederick Engels died in London. After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world. From the time that fate brought Karl Marx and Frederick Engels together, the two friends devoted their life’s work to a common cause. And so to understand what Frederick Engels has done for the proletariat, one must have a clear idea of the significance of Marx’s teaching and work for the development of the contemporary working-class movement. Marx and Engels were the first to show that the working class and its demands are a necessary outcome of the present economic system, which together with the bourgeoisie inevitably creates and organises the proletariat. They showed that it is not the well-meaning efforts of noble-minded individuals, but the class struggle of the organised proletariat that will deliver humanity from the evils which now oppress it. In their scientific works, Marx and Engels were the first to explain that socialism is not the invention of dreamers, but the final aim and necessary result of the development of the productive forces in modern society. All recorded history hitherto has been a history of class struggle, of the succession of the rule and victory of certain social classes over others. And this will continue until the foundations of class struggle and of class domination—private property and anarchic social production—disappear. The interests of the proletariat demand the destruction of these foundations, and therefore the conscious class struggle of the organised workers must be directed against them. And every class struggle is a political struggle. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Frederick Engels @Communism

Cientos de miles de obreros son trasladados de este modo a centenares y millares de verstas. El capitalismo avanzado los absorbe a la fuerza en su vorágine, les arranca de sus comarcas atrasadas, hace de ellos participantes del movimiento histórico-universal y les pone frente a frente de la poderosa, unida e internacional clase de los industriales. No cabe duda de que sólo la extrema miseria obliga a la gente a abandonar su patria y de que los capitalistas explotan con la mayor desvergüenza a los obreros inmigrantes. Sin embargo, sólo los reaccionarios pueden cerrar los ojos ante la significación progresista de esta migración moderna de los pueblos V. I. Lenin El capitalismo y la inmigración de los obreros @Communism

What is good for the ruling class, is alleged to be good for the whole of society with which the ruling class identifies itself. Frederick Engels Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State @Communism

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence. When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge. Manifesto of the Communist Party | Marx-Engels @Communism

Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested. Lenin The State and Revolution @Communism

People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, how ever barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism @Communism

V. I. Lenin - Painting by Vladimir Tsyplakov (1960) All bourgeois parties, all parties except the working-class revolutionary Party, are liars & hypocrites when they speak about reforms. Vladimir Lenin Letter to the Secretary of the Socialist Propaganda League @Communism

the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases Karl Marx Capital: Volume 3 @Communism

There's no one more alive than Lenin in the world, our strength, our wisdom, surest of our weapons. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1924) By VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY @Communism

It must never for a moment lose sight of our ultimate goal, but always carry on propaganda for the proletarian ideology —the theory of scientific socialism, viz., Marxism—guard it against distortion, and develop it further. We must untiringly combat any and every bourgeois ideology, regardless of the fashionable and striking garb in which it may drape itself. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Political Agitation and “The Class Point of View” @Communism

Petty-bourgeois socialism expresses the dream of the small proprietor of how to abolish the distinction between rich and poor. Petty-bourgeois socialism assumes that it is possible for all to become “equalised” proprietors, neither poor nor rich; and so the petty-bourgeois socialists draft Bills providing for universal and equalised land tenure. But in reality, poverty and want cannot be abolished in the way the small proprietor wants to do it. Equalised use of the land is impossible so long as the rule of money, the rule of capital, exists. No laws on earth can abolish inequality and exploitation so long as production for the market continues, and so long as there is the rule of money and the power of capital. Exploitation can be completely abolished only when all the land, factories and tools are transferred to the working class, and when large-scale socialised and planned production is organised. That is why proletarian socialism (Marxism) shows that all the hopes of petty-bourgeois social ism of the possibility of “equalised” small-scale production, or even of the possibility of preserving small-scale production at all under capitalism, are groundless. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin The Land Question and the Fight for Freedom @Communism

Capital is an international force. To vanquish it, an international workers’ alliance, an international workers’ brotherhood, is needed. We are opposed to national enmity and discord, to national exclusiveness. We are internationalists. We stand for the close union and the complete amalgamation of the workers and peasants of all nations in a single world Soviet republic. V. I. Lenin Letter to the Workers and Peasants of the Ukraine @Communism

Not only people who are directly dependent on the bourgeoisie, not only those who live under the yoke of capital or who have been bribed by capital (there are a large number of all sorts of scientists, artists, priests, etc. , in the service of capital), but even people who are simply under the sway of the prejudice of bourgeois liberty, have taken up arms against Bolshevism all over the world because when the Soviet Republic was founded it rejected these bourgeois lies and openly declared: you say your state is free, whereas in reality, as long as there is private property, your state, even if it is a democratic republic, is nothing but a machine used by the capitalists to suppress the workers, and the freer the state, the more clearly is this expressed. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University July 11, 1919 @Communism

Spartacus was one of the most prominent heroes of one of the greatest revolts of slaves, which took place about two thousand years ago. For many years the seemingly omnipotent Roman Empire, which rested entirely on slavery, experienced the shocks and blows of a widespread uprising of slaves who armed and united to form a vast army under the leadership of Spartacus. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University July 11, 1919 @Communism

Love is not in the least a “private” matter concerning only the two loving persons: love possesses a uniting element which is valuable to the collective. This is clear from the fact that at all stages of historical development society has established norms defining when and under what conditions love is “legal” (i.e. corresponds to the interests of the given social collective), and when and under what conditions love is sinful and criminal (i.e. contradicts the tasks of the given society). Make way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth Alexandra Kollontai @Communism

Lastly, only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is nobody to be suppressed–“nobody” in the sense of a class, of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the population. We are not utopians, and do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, or the need to stop such excesses. In the first place, however, no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression, is needed for this: this will be done by the armed people themselves, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people, their want and their poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to “wither away". We do not know how quickly and in what succession, but we do know they will wither away. With their withering away the state will also wither away. Without building utopias, Marx defined more fully what can be defined now regarding this future, namely, the differences between the lower and higher phases (levels, stages) of communist society. The State and Revolution Lenin @Communism

🔴 The Transition from Capitalism to Communism ✍🏻 Lenin Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then “the state... ceases to exist", and “it becomes possible to speak of freedom". Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state. The expression “the state withers away” is very well-chosen, for it indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process. Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect; for we see around us on millions of occassions how readily people become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation, when there is nothing that arouses indignation, evokes protest and revolt, and creates the need for suppression. And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord. In other words, under capitalism we have the state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another, and, what is more, of the majority by the minority. Naturally, to be successful, such an undertaking as the systematic suppression of the exploited majority by the exploiting minority calls for the utmost ferocity and savagery in the matter of suppressing, it calls for seas of blood, through which mankind is actually wading its way in slavery, serfdom and wage labor. Furthermore, during the transition from capitalism to communism suppression is still necessary, but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority. A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the “state”, is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state. It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-laborers, and it will cost mankind far less. And it is compatible with the extension of democracy to such an overwhelming majority of the population that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear. Naturally, the exploiters are unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this task, but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple “machine”, almost without a “machine”, without a special apparatus, by the simple organization of the armed people (such as the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, we would remark, running ahead).

The socialist revolution is not one single act, not one single battle on a single front; but a whole epoch of intensified class conflicts, a long series of battles on all fronts, i.e., battles around all the problems of economics and politics, which can culminate only in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination @Communism