Giving you all the quotations that Marxists hope you never hear about

HOME

 
ANOTHER COLLECTION OF QUOTES FROM MARX AND HIS EARLY FOLLOWERS

Note the open avowal of terrorism

"As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. … Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance."
- Karl Marx
(Letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, December 28, 1846)

"… the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."
- Karl Marx
("The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, November 7, 1848)

"All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm… these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character… [A general war will] wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward."
- Friedrich Engels
("The Magyar Struggle," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, January 13, 1849)

"… only by the most determined use of terror against these Slav peoples can we [Germans], jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard the revolution… there will be a struggle, an ‘inexorable life-and-death struggle,’ against those Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilating fight and ruthless terror - not in the interests of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution!"
- Friedrich Engels
("Democratic Pan-Slavism, Cont.," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, February 16, 1849)

"We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror."
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
("Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May 19, 1849)

"Psychologically, this talk of feeding the starving is nothing but an expression of the saccharine-sweet sentimentality so characteristic of our intelligentsia."
- V. I. Lenin
(Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow [London: Arrow Books, 1988], p234)

"... whoever recognizes class war must recognize civil wars, which in any class society represent the natural and, in certain circumstances, inevitable continuation, development and sharpening of class war."
- V. I. Lenin
(Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy [London: HarperCollins, 1994], p196)

"Until we apply terror to speculators - shooting on the spot - we won’t get anywhere."
- V. I. Lenin
(George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], p55)

"Let them shoot on the spot every tenth man guilty of idleness."
- V. I. Lenin
(George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], p55)

"Surely you do not imagine that we shall be victorious without applying the most cruel revolutionary terror?"
- V. I. Lenin
(George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], p57)

"You can tell Ter [a local Cheka commander] that if there is an offensive, he must make all preparations to burn Baku down totally, and this should be announced in print in Baku."
- V. I. Lenin
(Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy [London: HarperCollins, 1994], p202)

"Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them!"
- V. I. Lenin
(Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy [London: HarperCollins, 1994], p197)

"... carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards; unreliable elements to be locked up in a concentration camp outside the town."
- V. I. Lenin
(George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], p103)

"I am confident that the suppression of the Kazan Czechs and White Guards, and likewise of the bloodsucking kulaks who support them, will be a model of mercilessness."
- V. I. Lenin
(George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], p119)

"When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism."
- V. I. Lenin
(Robert Conquest, The Human Cost of Soviet Communism [Washington: Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate, 91st Congress, 2nd Session, 1970], p10)

"... catch and shoot the Astrakhan speculators and bribe-takers. These swine have to be dealt [with] so that everyone will remember it for years."
- V. I. Lenin
(Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy [London: HarperCollins, 1994], p201)

"Russians are too kind, they lack the ability to apply determined methods of revolutionary terror."
- V. I. Lenin
(Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy [London: HarperCollins, 1994], p203)

"Dictatorship is rule based directly on force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained through the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws."
- V. I. Lenin
(Stephan Courtois, "Conclusion," in The Black Book of Communism, ed. Stephane Courtois [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999], p741)

"I come to the inescapable conclusion that we must now launch the most decisive and merciless battle against the Black Hundreds clergy and crush their resistance with such ferocity that they will not forget it for several decades... The bigger the number of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeois we manage to shoot in the process, the better."
- V. I. Lenin
(Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary [London: HarperCollins, 1996], p227)

"But couldn’t this correlation [of political and social forces] be altered? Say, through the subjection or extermination of some classes of society?"
- Feliks Dzerzhinsky
(George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], p252)

"Do not believe that I seek revolutionary forms of justice. We don’t need justice at this point... I propose, I demand, the organization of revolutionary annihilation against all active counterrevolutionaries."
- Feliks Dzerzhinsky
(Michel Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: A History of the USSR From 1917 to the Present [London: Hutchinson, 1986], p54)

"[The Red Terror involves] the extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles."
- Feliks Dzerzhinsky
(George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], p114)

"In not more than a month’s time terror will assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution; the guillotine... will be ready for our enemies... that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which makes man shorter by a head."
- Leon Trotsky
(George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], p54)

"Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service..."
- Leon Trotsky
(Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary [London: HarperCollins, 1996], p213)

"We have to run a hot iron down the spine of the Ukrainian kulaks - that will create a good working environment."
- Leon Trotsky
(Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary [London: HarperCollins, 1996], p183)

"As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the ‘sacredness of human life.’"
- Leon Trotsky
(Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky [London: New Park Publications, 1975], p82)

"The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish... the Red Terror hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie."
- Leon Trotsky
(Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky [London: New Park Publications, 1975], p83)

"... the road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state… Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction..."
- Leon Trotsky
(Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky [London: New Park Publications, 1975], p177)

"... the very principle of labour conscription has replaced the principle of free labour as radically and irreversibly as socialization of the means of production has replaced capitalist ownership."
- Leon Trotsky
(Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary [London: HarperCollins, 1996], pp216-7)


Source



posted by JR at 5:19 PM