Marxists

"God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed."

"Thank God I'm an atheist."

"Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese you dingus"

"Frankly, despite my distaste of the press, I'd love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers."

"If someone were to prove to me- right this minute- that God, in all his luminescence, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior."

"If you were to ask me if I'd ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I'd have to say that I doubt it; where certain things are concerned, I plan ahead."

"In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival."

"Salvador Dali seduced many ladies, particularly American ladies, but these seductions usually consisted of stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the woman's shoulders and, without a word, showing them the door."

"Like the majority of deaf people, I don't like blind people much."

"I like go to bed and get up early; in that, I am anti-Spanish."

"A paranoiac is like a poet, born, not made. (Un paranoico como un poeta, nace, no se hace)"

"The story is also a sequence of moral and surrealist aesthetic. The sexual instinct and the sense of death form its substance. (The golden age)"

"Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams."

"I find it [science] analytical, pretentious and superficial—largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox—in other words,—all the things I love the most."

"For I am of the opinion... that the reconquest of the German speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?"

"Today I have shaved my moustache off again and buried the youthful corpse with much wailing. I look like a woman; it is shameful; and if I had known that without a moustache I should look such a sight I would not have hacked it off. As I stood before the mirror, scissors in hand, and had shorn off the right side, the Old Man came into the office and had to laugh out loud, when he saw me with half a moustache. But now I shall let it grow again, for I cannot show myself anywhere. In the Academy of Singing I was the only one with a moustache and always used to laugh at the philistines who could not marvel enough that I had the audacity to go so unshaven into decent society. The ladies, incidentally, liked it very much, and so did the Old Man. Only last night at the concert six young dandies stood around me, all in tail-coats and kid-gloves, and I stood among them in an ordinary coat and without gloves. The fellows made remarks all evening about me and my bristling upper lip. The best of it is that three months ago nobody knew me here and now all the world does, just because of the moustache! Oh, the philistines!"

"How do you think the transition from the present situation to community of Property is to be effected? The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution."

"For the first time in the revolutionary movement of 1848, for the first time since 1793, a nation surrounded by superior forces dares to counter the cowardly counter-revolutionary fury by revolutionary passion, the terreur blanche by the terreur rouge. For the first time after a long period we meet with a truly revolutionary figure, a man who in the name of his people dares to accept the challenge of a desperate struggle, who for his nation is Danton and Carnot in one person — Lajos Kossuth."

"There is no country in Europe which does not have in some corner or other one or several ruined fragments of peoples (Völkerruinen), the remnant of a former population that was suppressed and held in bondage by the nation which later became the main vehicle of historical development. These relics of a nation mercilessly trampled under foot in the course of history, as Hegel says, these residual fragments of peoples (') always become fanatical s of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution."

"How did this division of the nations come about, what was its basis? The division is in accordance with all the previous history of the in question. It is the beginning of the decision on the life or death of all these nations, large and small. All the earlier up to the present day is proof of this and 1848 confirmed it. Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality — the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. (Weltsturm). For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary."

"The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav ' and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward."

"It is clear even from the English press that Girardin doesn't support Cavaignac. But the very fact that he remarked on the brightness of Cavaignac's prospects is enough to characterise the situation. You mentioned the possibility that the majority [in the Legislative Assembly] might conclude an agreement with Bonaparte and endeavour to carry out an illegal revision; if they do so, I think it will go awry. They'll never succeed so long as it's opposed by Thiers, Changarnier and the Débats and their respective adherents. It would be too fine an opportunity for Cavaignac; and in that case he could, I believe, count on the army. If there's a fracas next year, Germany will be in the devil of a position. France, Italy and Poland all have an interest in her dismemberment. As you'll have seen, Mazzini has even promised the Czechs rehabilitation. Apart from Hungary, Germany would have only one possible ally, Russia — provided that a peasants' revolution had taken place there. Otherwise we shall have a guerre à mort with our noble friends from all points of the compass, and it's very questionable how the business will end."

"The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes to me that the Poles are une nation foutue [a finished nation] who can only continue to serve a purpose until such time as Russia herself becomes caught up into the agrarian revolution. From that moment Poland will have absolutely no raison d'étre any more. The Poles' sole contribution to history has been to indulge in foolish pranks at once valiant and provocative. Nor can a single moment be cited when Poland, even if only by comparison with Russia, has successfully represented progress or done anything of historical significance."

"Conclusion: To take as much as possible away from the Poles in the West, to man their fortresses, especially Posen, with Germans on the pretext of defence, to let them stew in their own juice, send them into battle, gobble bare their land, fob them off with promises of Riga and Odessa and, should it be possible to get the Russians moving, to ally oneself with the latter and compel the Poles to give way. Every inch of the frontier between Memel and Cracow we cede to the Poles will, militarily speaking, be utterly ruinous to this already wretchedly weak frontier, and will leave exposed the whole of the Baltic coast as far as Stettin. Besides, I am convinced that, come the next fracas, the entire Polish insurrection will be confined to Poseners and Galician nobility together with a few who have come over from the Kingdom, this having been bled so white that it's capable of nothing more, and that the pretensions of these knights, unless supported by French, Italians and Scandinavians, etc., and bolstered up by rumpuses on the part of the Czechs, will founder on the wretchedness of their performance. A nation which can muster 20,000 to 30,000 men at most, is not entitled to a voice. And Poland certainly could not muster very much more."

"Lassalle. It would be a pity about the fellow because of his great ability, but these goings-on are really too bad. He was always a man one had to keep a devilish sharp eye on and as a real Jew from the Slav border was always to exploit anyone for his own private ends on party pretexts. And then his urge to push his way into polite society, de parvenir, if only for appearance's sake, to disguise the greasy Breslau Jew with all kinds of pomade and paint was always repulsive."

"What do you say to the elections in the factory districts? Once again the proletariat has discredited itself terribly... [I]t cannot be denied that the increase of working-class voters has brought the Tories more than their mere additional percentage and has improved their relative position."

"Ireland still remains the Holy Isle whose aspirations must on no account be mixed with the profane class-struggles of the rest of the sinful world ... the Irish peasant must not on any account know that the Socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe."

"La Terreur, das sind großenteils nutzlose Grausamkeiten, begangen von Leuten, die selbst Angst haben, zu ihrer Selbstberuhigung."

"Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source -- next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself."

"Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research."

"Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends."

"Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity."

"Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science, without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, also no modern Europe. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism."

"The state is not "abolished," it withers away."

"The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the of the state. But after its victory the sole organisation which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the state. This state may require very considerable alterations before it can fulfil its new functions. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the ."

"We are now approaching a , in which the old economic foundations of monogamy will disappear just as surely as those of its complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose through the concentration of considerable wealth in one hand — a man's hand — and from the endeavor to bequeath this wealth to the children of this man to the exclusion of all others. This necessitated monogamy on the woman's, but not on the man's part. Hence this monogamy of women in no way hindered open or secret polygamy of men. Now, the impending social revolution will reduce this whole care of inheritance to a minimum by changing at least the overwhelming part of permanent and inheritable wealth—the means of production—into social property. Since monogamy was caused by economic conditions, will it disappear when these causes are abolished? One might reply, not without reason: not only will it not disappear, but it will rather be perfectly realized. For with the transformation of the means of production into collective property, wagelabor will also disappear, and with it the proletariat and the necessity for a certain, statistically ascertainable number of women to surrender for money. Prostitution disappears and monogamy, instead of going out of existence, at last becomes a reality—for men also. At all events, the situation will be very much changed for men. But also that of women, and of all women, will be considerably altered. With the transformation of the means of production into collective property the monogamous family ceases to be the of society. The private household changes to a social industry. The care and education of children become? a public matter. Society cares equally well for all children, legal or illegal. This removes the care about the "consequences" which now forms the essential social factor—moral and economic—hindering a girl to surrender unconditionally to the beloved man. Will not this be sufficient cause for a gradual rise of a more unconventional intercourse of the sexes and a more lenient public opinion regarding virgin honor and female shame? And finally, did we not see that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution, though antitheses, are inseparable and poles of the same social condition? Can prostitution disappear without engulfing at the same time monogamy?"

"With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it achieved them by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the expense of all his other abilities. From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy individual–here was its one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its achievements."

"It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts."

"My dear Laura. My congratulations to Paul le candidat du Jardin des Plantes—et des animaux. Being, in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district. Let us hope the animaux will have the best of it in this struggle against the bêtes.—I am rather surprised at Basly's holding back, but if a set of men succeeds in being excluded from the press altogether, what can they expect? From Mesa's letter in the Spanish Socialista I See that the Blanquists too are making volte-face and approaching the Possibilists—another bad sign. A little success—even relative—at the elections would therefore be very welcome when our people are under such a momentary cloud. I know very well that that cloud will pass, that Parisian party life is a continual change of ups and downs, but at the same time I cannot but wish that next time they will cherish their own little weekly paper a little more than those disreputable dailies to which they work hard to give a reputation in order to be kicked out as soon as they have succeeded."

"By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live."

"Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late ’seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist."

"What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed."

"People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in and swear by the . In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy."

"The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society—this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not “abolished.” It dies out."

"History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time [1848] was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production."

"The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the "revolutionaries," the "rebels"—we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolt. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They cry despairingly with Odilon Barrot: la légalité notes tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like eternal life."

"Die Nationalökonomie entstand als eine natürliche Folge der Ausdehnung des Handels, und mit ihr trat an die Stelle des einfachen, unwissenschaftlichen Schachers ein ausgebildetes System des erlaubten Betrugs, eine komplette Bereicherungswissenschaft."

"Diese aus dem gegenseitigen Neid und der Habgier der Kaufleute entstandene Nationalökonomie oder Bereicherungswissenschaft trägt das Gepräge der ekelhaftesten Selbstsucht auf der Stirne."

"Das Merkantilsystem hatte noch eine gewisse unbefangene, katholische Geradheit und verdeckte das unsittliche Wesen des Handels nicht im mindesten. ... Als aber der ökonomische Luther, Adam Smith, die bisherige Ökonomie kritisierte, hatten sich die Sachen sehr geändert. ... An die Stelle der katholischen Geradheit trat protestantische Gleisnerei."

"Natürlich ist es im Interesse des Handelnden, mit dem einen, von welchem er wohlfeil kauft, wie mit dem andern, an welchen er teuer verkauft, sich in gutem Vernehmen zu halten. Es ist also sehr unklug von einer Nation gehandelt, wenn sie bei ihren Versorgern und Kunden eine feindselige Stimmung nährt. Je freundschaftlicher, desto vorteilhafter. Dies ist die Humanität des Handels, und diese gleisnerische Art, die Sittlichkeit zu unsittlichen Zwecken zu mißbrauchen, ist der Stolz des Systems der Handelsfreiheit."

"Ihr habt die kleinen Monopole vernichtet, um das EINE große Grundmonopol, das Eigentum, desto freier und schrankenloser wirken zu lassen; ihr habt die Enden der Erde zivilisiert, um neues Terrain für die Entfaltung eurer niedrigen Habsucht zu gewinnen, ihr habt die Völker verbrüdert, aber zu einer Brüderschaft von Dieben."

"Ihr habt ... die Kriege vermindert, um im Frieden desto mehr zu verdienen, um die Feindschaft der einzelnen, den ehrlosen Krieg der Konkurrenz, auf die höchste Spitze zu treiben! - Wo habt ihr etwas aus reiner Humanität, aus dem Bewußtsein der Nichtigkeit des Gegensatzes zwischen dem allgemeinen und individuellen Interesse getan? Wo seid ihr sittlich gewesen, ohne interessiert zu sein, ohne unsittliche, egoistische Motive im Hintergrund zu hegen?"

"Nachdem die liberale Ökonomie ihr Bestes getan hatte, um durch die Auflösung der Nationalitäten die Feindschaft zu verallgemeinern, die Menschheit in eine Horde reißender Tiere - und was sind Konkurrenten anders? - zu verwandeln, die einander ebendeshalb auffressen, WEIL jeder mit allen andern gleiches Interesse hat, nach dieser Vorarbeit blieb ihr nur noch ein Schritt zum Ziele übrig, die Auflösung der Familie. Um diese durchzusetzen, kam ihr eine eigene schöne Erfindung, das Fabriksystem, zu Hülfe."

"Die Nachfrage des Ökonomen ist nicht die wirkliche Nachfrage, seine Konsumtion ist eine künstliche. Dem Ökonomen ist nur der ein wirklich Fragender, ein wirklicher Konsument, der für das, was er empfängt, ein Äquivalent zu bieten hat."

"I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the , and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life—many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of every one but an English money-monger."

"The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word. What the proletarian needs, he can obtain only from this bourgeoisie, which is protected in its monopoly by the power of the state. The proletarian is, therefore, in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death."

"The bourgeoisie ... lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority. Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts of the forests!"

"Der ganze Unterschied gegen die alte, offenherzige Sklaverei ist nur der, dass der heutige Arbeiter frei zu sein scheint, weil er nicht auf einmal verkauft wird, sondern stückweise, pro Tag, pro Woche, pro Jahr, und weil nicht ein Eigenthümer ihn dem andern verkauft, sondern er sich selbst auf diese Weise verkaufen muss, da er ja nicht der Sklave eines Einzelnen, sondern der ganzen besitzenden Klasse ist."

"I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the Liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted."

"The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left."

"How is it possible that the poorer classes can remain healthy and have a reasonable expectation of life under such conditions? What can one expect but that they should suffer from continual outbreaks of epidemics and an excessively low expectation of life? The physical condition of the workers shows a progressive deterioration."

"The bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen.""

"True, the law is sacred to the bourgeois, for it is his own composition, enacted with his consent, and for his benefit and protection. He knows that, even if an individual law should injure him, the whole fabric protects his interests; and more than all, the sanctity of the law, the sacredness of order as established by the active will of one part of society, and the passive acceptance of the other, is the strongest support of his social position. Because the English bourgeois finds himself reproduced in his law, as he does in his God, the policeman's truncheon which, in a certain measure, is his own club, has for him a wonderfully soothing power. But for the working-man quite otherwise! The working-man knows too well, has learned from too oft-repeated experience, that the law is a rod which the bourgeois has prepared for him; and when he is not compelled to do so, he never appeals to the law."

"Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat."

"The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition."

"There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today."

"The capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers."

"The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistance and of the instruments (machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie."

"The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat."

"Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as we shall see, the two come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life."

"The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole."

"The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries."

"The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general."

"The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. ... The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences."

"The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian."

"Big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries. It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries – revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class."

"Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the , and their representative, the . The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition – that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital."

"The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society. Free competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the only condition of society in which big industry can make its way."

"Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois and the recognition of free competition, and in European countries takes the form of . In these constitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters – that is to say, only members of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the , and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government."

"Everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the bourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers. For, since the proletarians can be employed only by capital, and since capital extends only through employing labor, it follows that the growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital. Simultaneously, this process draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into the great cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing great masses in one spot it gives to the proletarians a consciousness of their own strength. Moreover, the further this process advances, the more new labor-saving machines are invented, the greater is the pressure exercised by big industry on wages, which, as we have seen, sink to their minimum and therewith render the condition of the proletariat increasingly unbearable. The growing dissatisfaction of the proletariat thus joins with its rising power to prepare a proletarian social revolution."

"Big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter."

"It makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organization of society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competing individual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to a definite plan and taking account of the needs of all."

"Big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom. It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions. We see with the greatest clarity: (i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and (ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils altogether."

"Abolish competition and replace it with association."

"Since the by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the of goods."

"The abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand."

"Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations. Private property has not always existed. When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order."

"So long as it is not possible to produce so much that there is enough for all, with more left over for expanding the and extending the forces of production – so long as this is not possible, there must always be a ruling class directing the use of society's productive forces, and a poor, oppressed class. How these classes are constituted depends on the stage of development."

"The abolition of private property has become not only possible but absolutely necessary. ... The outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat."

"In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity. What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat."

"Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat."

"Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country's productive forces."

"When all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain."

"By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries."

"It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range."

"What will be the consequences of the ultimate disappearance of private property? Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished. There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past."

"Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of everyone. The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers from the pressure of private property and is held back by the division of privately owned land into small parcels. Here, existing improvements and scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forward which will assure to society all the products it needs. In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members."

"Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety."

"Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other."

"The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country – these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property."

"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."

"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."

"What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities? The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property."

"All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance."

"Some propose mere welfare measures – while others come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society. Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow."

"Democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about the conditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat. It follows that, in moments of action, the communists will have to come to an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them – provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the communists. It is clear that this form of co-operation in action does not exclude the discussion of differences."

"Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it."

"From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes."

"Comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning."

"The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherrie Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free.""

"That the Materialistic Socialists will improve H. [History] for the poor. Their best writer, Engels, made known the errors and the horrors of our Factory System."

"Engels always considered himself a junior partner, and so, without doubt, he was. But that does not lessen his role. Had he not been the junior partner, much for which his senior partner is known would not have been done."

"Friedrich Engels once said: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” What does “regression into barbarism” mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization."

"Engels's analysis has faced criticism in the twentieth century, both for its anthropological inaccuracy and for its theoretical confusion. Simone de Beauvoir found the materialist position inadequate to describe the nature of female subordination. "Historical materialism takes for granted facts that call for explanations.... It cannot provide solutions for the problems we have raised, because these concern the whole man and not that abstraction: Homo economicus." Simone de Beauvoir argued that woman's oppression is at bottom not based on economic factors, for "if the human consciousness had not included the original category of the Other and an original aspiration to dominate the Other, the invention of the bronze tool could not have caused the oppression of woman." More recently Ann Lane has attacked not materialism but Engels's inconsistency in applying it. She has argued that Engels mistakenly believed "that the responsibilities of home and family, and the economic ties that bind them together, are not an important part of what establishes their cohesion, that society can remove a vital function of an institution in order to perfect it. Socialist society will strip the family of most of its traditional jobs, but the family itself, in its pristine state, untouched by history or reality, shall remain.""

"Today in Korea—in Southeast Asia—in Latin America and the West Indies, in the Middle East—in Africa, one sees tens of millions of long oppressed colonial peoples surging toward freedom. What courage—what sacrifice—what determination never to rest until victory!...And arrayed against them, the combined powers of the so-called Free West, headed by the greedy, profit-hungry, war-minded industrialists and financial barons of our America. The illusion of an “American Century” blinds them for the immediate present to the clear fact that civilization has passed them by—that we now live in a people’s century—that the star shines brightly in the East of Europe and of the world. Colonial peoples today look to the Soviet Socialist Republics...One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin—the shapers of humanity’s richest present and future."

"You cannot conquer an awakened people. You cannot Prussianize Belgium and France. You cannot eradicate the teachings of Marx and Engels from the minds of hundreds of thousands of German Socialists. Surely they would find some way of uniting in spirit and in deed with the comrades of other nations in case of such an invasion on the part of a government which they had always understood and denounced."

"Yes, he does indeed and again this is very positive. Our movement has defended this thesis for 55 years and was therefore labelled as . Today people, both in the Soviet Union and in a large part of the international communist movement, understand better where the real counterrevolutionaries were."

"The reformer Yeltsin represents the tendency which wants to reduce the gigantic state apparatus. Consequently he follows in Trotsky's footsteps."

"In fact, it would be very easy to ‘prove’ Marx’s analysis to have been wrong, if experience had shown, for example, that the more capitalist industry develops, the smaller and smaller the average factory becomes, the less it depends upon new technology, the more its capital is supplied by the workers themselves, the more workers become owners of their factories, the less the part of wages taken by becomes (and the greater becomes the part of wages used for buying the workers’ own means of production). If, in addition, there had been decades without economic fluctuations and a full-scale disappearance of trade unions and employers’ associations (all flowing from the disappearance of contradictions between Capital and Labour, inasmuch as workers increasingly become the controllers of their own means and conditions of production), then one could indeed say that Capital was so much rubbish and had dismally failed to predict what would happen in the real capitalist world a century after its publication."

"Not only have material wealth and the possibilities for freeing mankind definitively from the burden of meaningless, repetitive and mechanical work increased, but so too has the polarization of society between fewer and fewer owners of capital and more and more workers of hand and brain, forced to sell their labour-power to these owners. The concentration of wealth and power in a small number of giant industrial and financial corporations has brought with it an increasingly universal struggle between Capital and Labour."

"For Marx, ‘pure’ economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific , is impossible."

"Capital, explaining the origins of the capitalist mode of production, points towards the inevitable historical decline and fall of this same social system. An economic theory based upon the historical relativity of every economic system, its strict limitation in time, tactlessly reminds Messrs the capitalists, their hangers-on and their apologists that capitalism itself is a product of history. It will perish in due course as it once was born. A new social form of economic organization will then take the place of the capitalist one: it will function according to other laws than those which govern the capitalist economy."

"By stating that the analysis of the laws of motion governing the capitalist mode of production necessarily includes at least some essential elements of an analysis of economic phenomena valid for the whole historical epoch encompassing economic organizations in which commodity production exists, one extends the validity of parts of Marx’s Capital not only into the past but also into the future."

"Precisely because Marx was convinced that the cause of the proletariat was of decisive importance for the whole future of mankind, he wanted to create for that cause not a flimsy platform of rhetorical invective or wishful thinking, but the rock-like foundation of scientific truth."

"When the dialectical method is applied to the study of economic problems, economic phenomena are not viewed separately from each other, by bits and pieces, but in their inner connection as an integrated totality, structured around, and by, a basic predominant mode of production. This totality is analysed in all its aspects and manifestations, as determined by certain given laws of motion, which relate also to its origins and its inevitable disappearance. These laws of motion of the given mode of production are discovered to be nothing but the unfolding of the inner contradictions of that structure, which define its very nature. The given economic structure is seen to be characterized at one and the same time by the unity of these contradictions and by their struggle, both of which determine the constant changes which it undergoes."

"Capitalism subordinates men to machines instead of using machines to liberate men from the burden of mechanical and repetitive work. it subordinates all to the imperatives of an incessant drive for individual enrichment in terms of money, instead of gearing social life to the development of rich individualities and their social relations. The contradiction between use-value and , inherent in every commodity, fully unfolds itself in this contradictory nature of capitalist machinery. When capitalism is not overthrown once it has created the material and social preconditions for a classless society of associated producers, this contradiction implies the possibility of a steadily increasing transformation of the forces of production into forces of destruction, in the most literal sense of the word: not only forces of destruction of wealth (crises and wars), of human wealth and human happiness, but also forces of destruction of life tout court."

"The love affair between intellectuals and Marxism which is so characteristic of our age developed relatively late in western Europe, though in Russia itself it began in Marx's own lifetime."

"First, utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved."

"[H]istorians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to the heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it. So my profession, which has always been mixed up in politics, becomes an essential component of nationalism."

"Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed."

"Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle."

"Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners."

"As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports."

"Though the web of history cannot be unravelled into separate threads without destroying it, a certain amount of subdivision of the subject is, for practical purposes, essential."

"Words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents. Let us consider a few English words, which were invented or gained their modern meanings, substantially in the period of sixty years with which this volume deals. They are such words as 'industry', 'industrialist', 'factory,' middle class,' 'working class,' and 'socialism.' They include 'aristocracy,' as well as 'railway,' 'liberal' and 'conservative' as political terms, 'nationality,' 'scientist,' and 'engineer,' 'proletariat,' and (economic) 'crisis'."

"It is not strictly accurate to call the ‘enlightenment’ a middle class ideology, though there were many enlighteners—and politically they were the decisive ones—who assumed as a matter of course that the free society would be a capitalist society. In theory its object was to set all human beings free. All progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies are implicit in it, and indeed came out of it. Yet in practice the leaders of the emancipation for which the enlightenment called were likely to be the middle ranks of society, the new, rational men of ability and merit rather than birth, and the social order which would emerge from their activities would be a ‘bourgeois’ and capitalist one."

"The fundamental fact about Britain in the first two generations of the Industrial Revolution was, that the comfortable and rich classes accumulated income so fast and in such vast quantities as to exceed all available possibilities of spending and investment."

"France provided the codes of law, the model of scientific and technical organization, the metric system of measurement for most countries. The ideology of the modern world first penetrated the ancient civilizations which had hitherto resisted European ideas through French influence. This was the work of the French Revolution."

"For the Napoleonic myth is based less on Napoleon’s merits than on the facts, then unique, of his career. The great known world-shakers of the past had begun as kings like Alexander or patricians like Julius Caesar; but Napoleon was the ‘little corporal’ who rose to rule a continent by sheer personal talent. (This was not strictly true, but his rise was sufficiently meteoric and high to make the description reasonable.) Every young intellectual who devoured books, as the young Bonaparte had done, wrote bad poems and novels, and adored Rousseau could henceforth see the sky as his limit, laurels surrounding his monogram. Every businessman henceforth had a name for his ambition: to be—the clichés themselves say so—a ‘Napoleon of finance’ or industry. All common men were thrilled by the sight, then unique, of a common man who became greater than those born to wear crowns. Napoleon gave ambition a personal name at the moment when the double revolution had opened the world to men of ambition. Yet he was more. He was the civilized man of the eighteenth century, rationalist, inquisitive, enlightened, but with sufficient of the disciple of Rousseau about him to be also the romantic man of the nineteenth. He was the man of the Revolution, and the man who brought stability. In a word, he was the figure every man who broke with tradition could identify himself with in his dreams. For the French he was also something much simpler: the most successful ruler in their long history. He triumphed gloriously abroad; but at home he also established or re-established the apparatus of French institutions as they exist to this day. Admittedly most—perhaps all—his ideas were anticipated by Revolution and Directory; his personal contribution was to make them rather more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian. But his predecessors anticipated: he carried out. The great lucid monuments of French law, the Codes which became models for the entire non-Anglo-Saxon bourgeois world, were Napoleonic. The hierarchy of officials, from the prefects down, of courts, of university and schools, was his. The great ‘careers’ of French public life, army, civil service, education, law still have their Napoleonic shapes. He brought stability and prosperity to all except the quarter-of-a-million Frenchmen who did not return from his wars; and even to their relatives he brought glory. No doubt the British saw themselves fighting for liberty against tyranny; but in 1815 most Englishmen were probably poorer and worse off than they had been in 1800, while most Frenchmen were almost certainly better off; nor had any except the still negligible wage-labourers lost the substantial economic benefits of the Revolution. There is little mystery about the persistence of Bonapartism as an ideology of non-political Frenchmen, especially the richer peasantry, after his fall. It took a second and smaller Napoleon to dissipate it between 1851 and 1870. He had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country."

"In terms of political geography, The French Revolution ended the European Middle Ages."

"The really frightening risk of war was neglect, filth, poor organization, defective medical services, and hygenic ignorance, which conditions (as in the troops) practically everybody."

"One provision of the international peace settlement must, however, be mentioned separately: the abolition of the international slave-trade. The reasons for this were both humanitarian and economic: slavery was horrifying, and extremely inefficient. Moreover, from the point of view of the British who were the chief international champions of this admirable movement among the powers, the economy of 1815–48 no longer rested, like that of the eighteenth century, on the sale of men and of sugar, but on that of cotton goods. The actual abolition of slavery came more slowly (except, of course, where the French Revolution had already swept it away)."

"Rarely has the incapacity of governments to hold up the course of history been more conclusively demonstrated than in the generation after 1815. To prevent a second French Revolution, or the even worse catastrophe of a general European revolution on the French model, was the supreme object of all the powers which had just spent more than twenty years in defeating the first; even of the British, who were not in sympathy with the reactionary absolutism which re-established themselves all over Europe and knew quite well that reforms neither could nor ought to be avoided, but who feared a new Franco-Jacobin expansion more than any other international contingency. And yet, never in European history and rarely anywhere else has revolutionarism been so endemic, so general, so likely to spread by spontaneous contagion as well as by deliberate propaganda."

"Nothing like nationalism is discoverable elsewhere, for the social conditions for it did not exist. In fact, if anything the forces which were later to produce nationalism were at this stage opposed to the alliance of tradition, religion and mass poverty which produced the most powerful resistance to the encroachment of western conquerors and exploiters."

"These three factors—the influence of the French Revolution, the rational economic argument of civil servants, and the greed of the nobility, determined the emancipation of the peasants in Prussia between 1807 and 1816."

"Of all the economic consequences of the age of dual revolution this division between the ‘advanced’ and the ‘underdeveloped’ countries proved to be the most profound and the most lasting."

"No groups of the population welcomed the opening of the career to talent to whatever kind more passionately than those minorities who had hitherto been debarred from eminence not merely because they were not well-born, but because they suffered official and collective discrimination."

"The alternative to escape or defeat was rebellion. And such was the situation of the labouring poor, and especially the industrial proletariat which became their nucleus, that rebellion was not merely possible, but virtually compulsory. Nothing was more inevitable in the first half of the nineteenth century than the appearance of labour and socialist movements, and indeed of mass social revolutionary unrest."

"For most of history and over most of the world (China being perhaps the main exception) the terms in which all but a handful of educated and emancipated men thought about the world were those of traditional religion, so much so that there are countries in which the word ‘Christian’ is simply a synonym for ‘peasant’ or even ‘man’."

"Religion, from being something like the sky, from which no man can escape and which contains all that is above the earth, became something like a bank of clouds, a large but limited and changing feature of the human firmament. Of all the ideological changes this is by far the most profound, though its practical consequences were more ambiguous and undetermined than was then supposed. At all events, it is the most unprecedented."

"Bourgeois triumph thus imbued the French Revolution with the agnostic or secular-moral ideology of the eighteenth century enlightenment, and since the idiom of that revolution became the general language of all subsequent social revolutionary movements, it transmitted this secularism..."

"Except perhaps for such irreducible sexual groups as parents and their children, the ‘man’ of classical liberalism (whose literary symbol was Robinson Crusoe) was a social animal only insofar as he co-existed in large numbers. Social aims were therefore the arithmetical sum of individual aims. Happiness (a term which caused its definers almost as much trouble as its pursuers) was each individual’s supreme object; the greatest happiness of the greatest number, was plainly the aim of society."

"But even the arts of a small minority in society can still echo the thunder of the earthquakes which shake all humanity. The literature and arts of our period did so, and the result was ‘Romanticism’. As a style, a school, an era in the arts, nothing is harder to define or even to describe in terms of formal analysis; not even ‘classicism’ against which ‘romanticism’ claimed to raise the banner of revolt. The romantics themselves hardly help us, for though their own descriptions of what they were after were firm and decided, they were also often quite devoid of rational content."

"To draw a parallelism between the arts and the sciences is always dangerous, for the relationships between either and the society in which they flourish is quite different. Yet the sciences too in their way reflected the dual revolution, partly because it made specific new demands on them, partly because it opened new possibilities for them and faced them with new problems, partly because its very existence suggested new patterns of thought."

"The progress of science is not a simple linear advance, each stage marking the solution of posing of problems previously implicit or explicit in it, and in turn posing new problems."

"In 1831 Victor Hugo had written that he already heard 'the full sound of revolution, still deep down in the earth, pushing out under the kingdom in Europe to its subterranean galleries from the central shaft of the mine which is Paris. 1847 the sound was loud and close. In 1848 the explosion burst."

"People may not like to meet bandits, especially on a dark night, but a taste for reading about them seems to be universal."

"The point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported. This relation between the ordinary peasant and the rebel, outlaw and robber is what makes social banditry interesting and significant."

"'Crocco' (Carmine Donatelli), A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side."

"Banditry is freedom, but in a peasant society few can be free. most are shackled by double chains of lordship and labour, one reinforcing the other. For what makes peasants the victim of authority is not as much their economic vulnerability - indeed they are as often as not virtually self sufficient - as their mobility."

"Still the dualism of the revolution of 1789 to 1848 gives the history of that period both unity and symmetry. It is in a sense easy to write and read about, because it appears to possess a clear theme and a clear shape, and its chronological limits are as clearly defined as we have any right to expect in human affairs."

"Above all, history – social and economic structure – and politics divided the revolutionary zone into two parts, whose extremes appeared to have little in common. Their social structure differed fundamentally, except for the substantial and pretty universal prevalence of countrymen over townsmen, of small towns over big cities; a fact easily overlooked, because the urban population and especially the large cities were disproportionately prominent in politics."

"The defenders of the social order had to learn the politics of the people. This was the major innovation brought about by the 1848 revolutions. Even the most arch-reactionary Prussian junkers discovered during that year that they required a newspaper capable of influencing ‘public opinion’ – in itself a concept linked with liberalism and incompatible with traditional hierarchy."

"When we write the ‘world history’ of earlier periods, we are in fact making an addition of the histories of the various parts of the globe, but which, in so far as they had knowledge of one another, had only marginal and superficial contacts, unless the inhabitants of some region had conquered or colonized another, as the west Europeans did the Americas."

"We are today more familiar than the men of the mid-nineteenth century with this drawing together of all parts of the globe into a single world. Yet there is a substantial difference between the process as we experience it today and that in the period of this book. What is most striking about it in the later twentieth century is an international standardization which goes far beyond the purely economic and technological. In this respect our world is more massively standardized than Phileas Fogg’s, but only because there are more machines, productive installations and businesses."

"Increasingly, therefore, the formal international structure came to diverge from the real one. International politics became global politics, in which at least two non-European powers were to intervene effectively, though this was not evident until the twentieth century. Furthermore, it became a sort of oligopoly of capitalist-industrial powers, jointly exercising a monopoly over the world, but competing among themselves; though this did not become evident until the era of ‘imperialism’ after the end of our period."

"If nationalism was one historic force recognized by governments, ‘democracy’, or the growing role of the common man in the affairs of state, was the other. The two were the same, in so far as nationalist movements in this period became mass movements, and certainly at this point pretty well all radical nationalist leaders supposed them to be identical. However, as we have seen, in practice large bodies of common people, such as peasants, still remained unaffected by nationalism even in the countries in which their participation in politics was seriously considered, while others, notably the new working classes, were being urged to follow movements which, at least in theory, put a common international class interest above national affiliations."

"As capitalism and bourgeois society triumphed, the prospects of alternatives to it receded, in spite of the emergence of popular politics and labour movements. These prospects could hardly have seemed less promising in, say 1872–3. And yet within a very few years the future of the society that had triumphed so spectacularly once again seemed uncertain and obscure, and movements to replace it or to overthrow it had once again to be taken seriously. We must therefore consider these movements for radical social and political change as they existed in the third quarter of the nineteenth century."

"The era of liberal triumph began with a defeated revolution and ended in a prolonged depression. The first forms a more convenient signpost for marking the beginning or end of a historical period than the second, but history does not consult the convenience of historians, though some of them are not always aware of it."

"Where historians try to come to grips with a period which has left surviving eyewitnesses, two quite different concepts of history clash, or, in the best of cases, supplement each other: the scholarly and the existential, archive and personal memory. For everyone is a historian of his or her own consciously lived lifetime inasmuch as he or she comes to terms with it in the mind – an unreliable historian from most points of view, as anyone knows who has ventured into ‘oral history’, but one whose contribution is essential. Scholars who interview old soldiers or politicians will have already acquired more, and more reliable, information about what happened from print and paper, than their source has in his or her memory, but may nevertheless misunderstand it. And, unlike, say, the historian of the crusades, the historian of the Second World War can be corrected by those who, remembering, shake their head and tell him or her: ‘But it was not like that at all.’ Nevertheless, both the versions of history which thus confront one another are, in different senses, coherent constructions of the past, consciously held as such and at least potentially capable of definition."

"Most observers in the 1870s would have been far more impressed by its linearity. In material terms, in terms of knowledge and the capacity to transform nature it seemed so patent that change meant advance that history – at all events modern history – seemed to equal progress. Progress was measured by the ever rising curve of whatever could be measured, or what men chose to measure. Continuous improvement, even of those things which clearly still required it, was guaranteed by historical experience. It seemed hardly credible that little more than three centuries ago intelligent Europeans had regarded the agriculture, military techniques and even the medicine of the ancient Romans as the model for their own, that a bare two centuries ago there could be a serious debate about whether the moderns could ever surpass the achievement of the ancients, and that at the end of the eighteenth century experts could have doubted whether the population of Britain was increasing."

"A world economy whose pace was set by its developed or developing capitalist core was extremely likely to turn into a world in which the ‘advanced’ dominated the ‘backward’; in short into a world of empire. But, paradoxically, the era from 1875 to 1914 may be called the Age of Empire not only because it developed a new kind of imperialism, but also for a much more old-fashioned reason. It was probably the period of modern world history in which the number of rulers officially calling themselves, or regarded by western diplomats as deserving the title of, ‘emperors’ was at its maximum."

"[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so."

"Nevertheless it is evident — if only from the Greek example just cited — that proto-nationalism, where it existed, made the task of nationalism easier, however great the differences between the two, insofar as existing symbols and sentiments of proto-national community could he mobilized behind a modern cause or a modern state. But this is far from saying that the two were the same, or even that one must logically or inevitably lead into the other. For it is evident that proto-nationalism alone is clearly not enough to form nationalities, nations, let alone states."

"However, mass expulsion and even genocide began to make their appearance on the southern margins of Europe during and after World War I, as the Turks set about the mass extirpation of the Armenians in 1915 and, after the Greco Turkish war of 1911, expelled between 1.3 and 1.5 millions of Greeks from Asia Minor, where they had lived since the days of Homer. Subsequently Adolph Hitler, who was in this respect a logical Wilsonian nationalist, arranged to transfer Germans not living on the territory of the fatherland, such as those of Italian South Tyrol, to Germany itself, as he also arranged for the permanent elimination of the Jews."

"My object is to understand ad explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together. For anyone of my age-group who has lived through all or most of the Short Twentieth Century this is inevitably also a autobiographical endeavor. We are talking about, amplifying (and correcting) our own memories. And we are talking as men and women of a particular time and place, involved, in various ways,in its history as actors in its dramas - however insignificant our parts - as observers of our times and, not least, as people whose views of the century have been formed by what we have come to see as its crucial events."

"The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century."

"The world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980's was the world shaped by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917."

"In the simplest terms the question who or what caused the Second World War can be answered in two words: Adolf Hitler."

"Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production."

"The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative."

"Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed,sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central."

"The best approach to this cultural revolution is therefore through family and household, i.e. through the structure of relations between the secondhand generations. In most societies this had been impressively resistant to sudden change, though this does not mean that such structures were static."

"The cultural revolution of the later twentieth century can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures. For such textures had consisted not only of the actual relations between human beings and their forms of organization but also of the general models of such relations and the texted patterns of people's behaviour towards each other; their roles were prescribed, though not always written. Hence the often traumatic insecurity when older conventions of behaviour were either overturned or lost their rationale, or the incomprehension between those who felt this loss and those too young to have known anything but anomic society."

"The old moral vocabulary of rights and duties, mutual obligations, sin and virtue, sacrifice, conscience, rewards, and penalties, could no longer be translated into the new language of desired gratification. Once such practices and institutions were no longer accepted as part of a way of ordering society that linked people to each other and ensured social cooperation and reproduction, most of their capacity to structure human social life vanished. They were reduced simply expressions of individuals' preferences, and claims that the law should recognize the supremacy of these preferences. Uncertainty and unpredictability impended. Compass needles no longer had a North, maps became useless."

"The tragedy of the October revolution was precisely that it could only produce its kind of ruthless, brutal, command socialism."

"As I think back, I ask myself, again and again: was there an alternative to the indiscriminate , brutal, basically unplanned rush forward of the Five-Year Plan? I wish I could say there was, but I cannot. I cannot find a answer."

"Communism as an ideology had been passionately committed to women's equality and liberation, in every sense including the erotic, in spite of Lenin's own dislike of casual sexual promiscuity. (However, both Krupskaya and Lenin were among the rare revolutionaries who specifically favored the sharing of housework between the sexes)...Yet, with rather rare exceptions...they were not prominent in the first political ranks of their parties, or indeed at all, and in the new communist-governed states they became even less visible. Indeed, women in leading political functions virtually disappeared...When women streamed into a profession opened to them, as in the U.S.S.R., where the medical profession became largely feminized in consequence, it lost status and income. As against Western feminists, most married Soviet women, long used to a lifetime of paid work, dreamed of the luxury of staying at home and doing only one job...whatever the achievements and failures of the socialist world, it did not generate specifically feminist movements,and could indeed hardly have done so, given the virtual impossibility of any political initiatives not sponsored by state and party before the mid-1980s"

"The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity."

"Surrealism was a genuine addition to the repertoire of avant-garde arts, its novelty attested by the ability to produce shock, incomprehension, or what amounted to the same thing, a sometimes, embarrassed laughter, even among the older avant-garde."

"The art most significantly affected by radio was music, since it was abolished the acoustic or mechanical limitations on the range of sounds. Music, the last of the arts to break out of the bodily prison that confines oral communication, had already entered the era of mechanical production before 1914 with the gramophone, although this was hardly yet within reach of the masses"

"It was the tragedy of modernist artists, Left or Right, that the much more effective political commitment of their own mass movements and politicians - not to mention their adversaries - rejected them. With the partial exception of Futurist-influenced Italian fascism, the new authoritarian regimes of both Right and Left preferred old-fashioned and gigantic monumental buildings and vistas in architecture, inspirational representations in both painting and sculpture, elaborate performances of the classics on stage, and ideological acceptability in literature."

"These and many other attempts to replace history by myth and invention are not merely bad intellectual jokes. After all, they can determine what goes into schoolbooks, as the Japanese authorities knew, when they insisted on a sanitized version of the Japanese war in China for use in Japanese classrooms. Myth and invention are essential to the politics of identity by which groups of people today, defining themselves by ethnicity, religion or the past or present borders of states, try to find some certainty in an uncertain and shaking world by saying, 'We are different from and better than the Others.'"

"The past is therefore a permanent dimension of the human consciousness, an inevitable component of the institutions, values and other patterns of human society. The problem for historians is to analyse the nature of this 'sense of the past' in society and to trace its changes and transformations."

"It is easier to formulate questions than answers, and this paper has taken the easier way rather than the more difficult. And yet, perhaps to ask questions, especially about the experiences we tend to take for granted, is not a valueless occupation. We swim in the past as fish do in water, and cannot escape from it. But our modes of living and moving in this medium require analysis and discussion. My object has been to stimulate both."

"For where we stand in regard to the past, what the relations are between past, present and future are not only matters of vital interest to all: they are quite indispensable. We cannot help situating ourselves in the continuum of our own life, of the family and group to which we belong. We cannot help comparing past and present: that is what family photo albums or home movies are there for. We cannot help learning from it, for that is what experience means. We may learn the wrong things - and plainly we often do - but if we don't learn, or have had no chance of learning, or refuse to learn from whatever past is relevant for our purpose, we are, in the extreme case, mentally abnormal."

"History as inspiration and ideology has a built-in tendency to become self-justifying myth. Nothing is a more dangerous blindfold than this, as the history of modern nations and nationalisms demonstrates."

"Let me put it in paradoxical form. It is equally unhelpful to dismiss Marx because we dislike his demonstration that capitalism and bourgeois society are temporary historical phenomena, and to embrace him simply because we are for socialism, which he thought would succeed them. I believe Marx discerned some basic tendencies with profound insight; but we do not know actually what they will bring. Like so much of the future predicted in the past, when it comes it may be unrecognizable, not because the predictions were wrong but because we were wrong to put a particular face and costume to the interesting stranger whose arrival we were told to expect."

"So let me conclude. History has made progress this century, in a lumbering and zig-zag manner, but genuine progress. In saying this I am implying that it belongs to the disciplines to which the word 'progress' can properly apply, that it is possible to arrive at a better understanding of a process which is objective and real, namely the complex, contradictory, but not adventitious, historical development of human societies in the world. I know that there are people who deny this."

"The history of society is still being constructed. I have in this essay tried to suggest some of its problems, to assess some of its practice, and incidentally to hint at certain problems which might benefit from more concentrated exploration. But it would be wrong to conclude without noting, and welcoming, the remarkably flourishing state of the field. It is a good moment to be a social historian. Even those of us who never set out to call ourselves by this name will not want to disclaim it today."

"History, whose subject is the past, is not in a position to be an applied discipline in this sense, if only because no way has yet been discovered to change what has already happened. At most we can make counterfactual speculations about hypothetical alternatives. Of course past, present and future are part of one continuum, and what historians have to say could therefore permit both forecasts and recommendations for the future."

"My argument implies that, divorced from history, economics is a rudderless ship and economists without history have not much idea of where it is sailing to. But I am not suggesting that these defects can be remedied simply be getting some charts, that is by paying more attention to concrete economic realities and historical experience. As a matter of fact, there have always been plenty of economists ready and anxious to keep their eyes open. The trouble is that, if in the mainstream tradition, their theory and method as such has not helped them to know where to look and what to look for."

"If economics is not to remain the victim of history, constantly attempting to apply its tool-kit, generally with a time-lag, to yesterday's developments which have become sufficiently visible to dominate the scene today, it must develop or rediscover this historical perspective. For this may have a bearing not only on tomorrow's problems, about which we ought, if possible, to think before we get swamped by them, but also on tomorrow's theory."

"Economists might conceivably agree on the value of history for their discipline, but not historians about the value of economics for theirs. This is partly because history covers a much wider field. As we have seen, it is an obvious drawback of economics as a subject dealing with the real world that it selects out some and only some aspects of human behaviour as 'economic' and leaves the rest to someone else."

"From the historians' point of view these assumptions must be realistic or they are junk. If we use the assumption of perfect foresight by businessmen to construct data, the question of its empirical validity is crucial. Altering the assumptions, whether about the model or about the data, can make a substantial difference to both the data and the answers."

"In analysing both agricultural change and economic growth in general, non-economic factors cannot be divorced from economic ones - certainly not in the short run. To separate them is to abandon the historical, that is the dynamic, analysis of the economy."

"In short, for everyone engaged in scientific discourse, statements must be subject to validation by methods and criteria which are, in principle, not subject to partisanship, whatever their ideological consequences, and however motivated. Statements not subject to such validation may nevertheless be important and valuable, but belong to a different order of discourse. They pose extremely interesting and difficult philosophical problems, especially when they are clearly in some sense descriptive (for example, in representative art or criticism 'about' some specific creative work or artist), but cannot be considered here. Nor can we here consider statements of the logico-mathematical type, insofar as they are not (as in theoretical physics) linked to validation by evidence."

"Having established the limits beyond which partisanship ceases to be scientifically legitimate, let me argue the case in favour of legitimate partisanship, both from the point of view of the scientific or scholarly discipline and from that of the cause to which the scholar feels committed."

"It is in this situation that political partisanship can serve to counteract the increasing tendency to look inwards, in extreme instances the scholiasm, the tendency to develop intellectual ingenuity for its own sake, the self-insulation of the academy. It may indeed fall victim to the same dangers itself, if a sufficiently large 'field' of a self-insulated partisan scholarship develops."

"The fundamental question in history implies the discovery of a mechanism for both the differentiation of various human social groups and the transformation of one kind of society into another, or the failure to do so. In certain respects, which Marxists and common sense regard as crucial, such as the control of man over nature, it certainly implies unidirectional change or progress, at least over a sufficiently long time-span. So long as we do not suppose that the mechanisms of such social development are the same as or similar to those of biological evolution, there seems to be no good reason for not using the term 'evolution' for it."

"In short, the analysis of modes of production must be based on study of the available material forces of production: study, that is, both of technology and its organization, and of economics. For let us not forget that in the same Preface whose later passage is so often quoted, Marx argued that political economy was the anatomy of civil society. Nevertheless, in one respect the traditional analysis of mops and their transformation must be developed - and recent Marxist work has, in fact, done so. The actual transformation of one mode into another has often been seen in causal and unilinear terms: within each mode, it is argued, there is a 'basic contradiction' which generates the dynamic and the forces that will lead to its transformation. It is far from clear that this is Marx's own view - except for capitalism - and it certainly leads to great difficulties and endless debates, particularly in connection with the passage from Western feudalism to capitalism."

"The major strength of Wolf's book - his concentration on interaction, intermingling and mutual modification - is at the same time its major weakness, since it tends to take for granted the nature of the dynamism which has brought the world from pre-history to the late twentieth century. This is a book about connections rather than causes. Or rather, the author has re-thought the problems of the genesis and development of capitalism less fundamentally than those of the interconnections essential to it."

"Much less useful, I think however, is the search for deep structures and particularly the search for la conscience. I may be entirely heterodox, but I don't think historians have an awful lot to learn from Freud, who was a bad historian, whenever he actually wrote anything about history. I have no opinions about Freud's psychology, but I regard the belated discovery of Freud in France some forty years after the rest of the world as by no means an unqualified plus. It seems to me it is a minus, insofar as it diverts attention into the unconscious or deep structures from, I won't say conscious, but anyway logical cohesion. It neglects system. It seems to me the problem of mentalities is not simply that of discovering that people are different, and how they are different, and making readers feel the difference, as Richard Cobb does so well. It is to find a logical connection between various forms of behaviour, of thinking and feeling, to see them as being mutually consistent. It is, if you like, to see why it makes sense, let us say, for people to believe about famous robbers that they are invisible and invulnerable, even though they obviously are not. We must see such beliefs not purely as an emotional reaction but as part of a coherent system of beliefs about society, about the role of those who believe, and the role of those about whom the beliefs are held."

"I think the programme, for the history of mentalities, is not so much discovery as analysis. What I would like to do is not simply, like Edward Thompson, to save the stockinger and the peasant, but also the nobleman and the king of the past, from the condescension of modern historians who think they know better, who think they know what is logical and theoretical argument."

"Clearly some historians have shifted from 'circumstances' to 'men' (including women), or have discovered that a simple base-superstructure model and economic history are not enough, or - since the pay-off from such approaches has been very substantial - are no longer enough. Some may well have convinced themselves that there is an incompatibility between their 'scientific' and 'literary' functions. But it is not necessary to analyse the present fashions in history entirely as a rejection of the past, and insofar as they cannot be entirely analysed in such terms, it will not do."

"Let us, however, spare a final thought for those whose strange 'lived reality' is evoked successfully by Price's technique: the Moravians. They came to the benighted heathen in conditions which often seemed 'a foretaste of what hell must be like'. Unprepared for the forest, inexperienced, they suffered and died like flies - honest, uncomprehending German tailors, shoemakers or linen weavers in unsuitable European costumes, who could be expected to last a few months or weeks, preaching Jesus the Crucified with Blood and Wounds, among the scorpions and jaguars, before contentedly going home to Him. They were entirely dependent on the maroons, who did not like them as whites, made fun of them and occasionally persecuted them. They played music, and were uncomfortable when the blacks danced to it. They failed in all their endeavours except the heroic task of compiling Brother Schumann's Saramaka-German dictionary in nine pain-wracked months. Their successors are still there and still the Saramakas' only road to reading and writing."

"Grassroots historians spend much of their time finding out how societies work and when they do not work, as well as how they change. They cannot help doing this, since their subject, ordinary people, make up the bulk of any society. They start out with the enormous advantage of knowing that they are largely ignorant of either the facts or the answers to their problems. They also have the substantial advantage of historians over social scientists who turn to history, of knowing how little we know of the past, how important it is to find out, and what hard work in a specialized discipline is needed for the purpose. They also have a third advantage. They know that what people wanted and needed was not always what their betters, or those who were cleverer and more influential, thought they ought to have. These are modest enough claims for our trade. But modesty is not a negligible virtue. It is important to remind ourselves from time to time that we don't know all the answers about society and that the process of discovering them is not simple. Those who plan and manage society now are perhaps unlikely to listen. Those who want to change society and eventually to plan its development ought also to listen. If some of them will, it will be due partly to the work of historians like George Rude."

"'Europe' had been on the defensive for a millennium. Now, for half a millennium, it conquered the world. Both observations make it impossible to sever European history from world history."

"There is no historically homogeneous Europe, and those who look for it are on the wrong track. However we define 'Europe', its diversity, the rise and fall, the coexistence, the dialectical interaction of its components, is fundamental to its existence. Without it, it is impossible to understand and explain the developments which led to the creation and control of the modern world by processes which came to maturity in Europe and nowhere else."

"There are cases - perhaps mine is among them - where this discovery can be particularly helpful. Much of my life, probably most of my conscious life, was devoted to a hope which has been plainly disappointed, and to a cause which has plainly failed: the communism initiated by the October Revolution. But there is nothing which can sharpen the historian's mind like defeat."

"The Russian Revolution really has two interwoven histories: its impact on Russia and its impact on the world. We must not confuse the two. Without the second, few except a handful of specialist historians would ever have been concerned with it. Outside the USA not many people know more about the American Civil War than that it is the setting of Gone with the Wind. And yet it was both the greatest war between 1815 and 1914 and by far the greatest in American history, and can also claim to have been something like a second American revolution. It meant and means much inside the USA but very little outside, for it had very little obvious effect on what happened in other countries, other than those beyond its southern borders. On the other hand, both in Russian history and in twentieth-century world history the Russian Revolution is a towering phenomenon - but not the same kind of phenomenon. What has it meant for the Russian peoples? It brought Russia to the peak of its international power and prestige - far beyond anything achieved under the Tsars. Stalin is as certain of a major permanent place in Russian history as Peter the Great. It modernized much of a backward country, but although its achievements were titanic - not least the ability to defeat Germany in the Second World War - their human cost was enormous, its dead-end economy was destined to run down and its political system broke down. Admittedly, for most of its inhabitants who can remember, the old Soviet era certainly looks far better than what the former Soviet peoples are going through now, and will go on doing so for a good long while. But it is too early to draw up a historical balance-sheet."

"Under these circumstances of social and political disintegration, we should expect a decline in civility in any case, and a growth in barbarism. And yet what has made things worse, what will undoubtedly make them worse in future, is that steady dismantling of the defences which the civilization of the Enlightenment had erected against barbarism, and which I have tried to sketch in this lecture. For the worst of it is that we have got used to the inhuman. We have learned to tolerate the intolerable. Total war and cold war have brainwashed us into accepting barbarity. Even worse: they have made barbarity seem unimportant, compared to more important matters like making money."

"In short, on the questions with which historical research and theoretical reaction can deal, there was and could be no difference in substance between scholars for whom the identity problems of Civitella were insignificant or uninteresting and a historian for whom they were existentially central. All historians present hoped to agree about the formulation of the questions about the Nazi atrocities, though one would not necessarily expect them to agree about them. All agreed about the procedures for answering these questions, the nature of the possible evidence which would allow them to be answered - insofar as the answers depended on evidence - and about the comparability of events which were experienced by the participants as unique and incommunicable. Conversely, those who were unwilling to submit their, or their community's, experience to these procedures, or who refused to accept the results of such tests, were outside the discipline of history, however much historians respected their motives and feelings. In fact, among the historians present there was an impressive consensus on matters of substance. It contrasted strikingly with the chaos of varied and conflicting emotions which agitated the participants."

"The internal and external pressures to do so may be great. Our passions and interests may urge us in this direction. Every Jew, for instance, whatever his or her occupation, instinctively accepts the force of the question with which, during many threatening centuries, members of our minority community confronted any and every event in the wider world: Is it good for the Jews? Is it bad for the Jews?' In times of discrimination or persecution it provided guidance - though not necessarily the best guidance - for private and public behaviour, a strategy at all levels for a scattered people. Yet it cannot and should not guide a Jewish historian, even one who writes the history of his own people. Historians, however microcosmic, must be for universalism, not out of loyalty to an ideal to which many of us remain attached but because it is the necessary condition for understanding the history of humanity, including that of any special section of humanity. For all human collectivities necessarily are and have been part of a larger and more complex world. A history which is designed only for Jews (or African-Americans, or Greeks, or women, or proletarians, or homosexuals) cannot be good history, though it may be comforting history to those who practise it."

"Nothing is easier than to see the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount as 'the first socialist' or communist, and though the majority of early socialist theorists were not Christians, many later members of socialists movements have found this reflection useful."

"Unlike the word 'communist', which always signified a programme, the word 'socialist' was primarily analytical and critical."

"Marx's ideas became the doctrines inspiring the labour and socialist movements of most of Europe. Mainly via Lenin and the Russian Revolution they became the quintessential international doctrine of twentieth-century social revolution, equally welcomes as such from China to Peru. Through the triumph of parties identified with these doctrines, versions of these ideas became the official ideology of the states in which, at their peak, something like a third of the human race lived, not to mention political movements of varying size an importance in the rest of the world. The only individually identifiable thinkers who have achieved comparable status are the founders of the great religions in the past, and with the possible exception of Muhammad none have triumphed on a comparable scale with such rapidity. No secular thinker can be named beside him in this respect."

"Presented as a pendant to Age of Extremes, a personal portrait hung opposite the historical landscape, what light does Interesting Times throw on Hobsbawm’s vision of the twentieth century, and overall narrative of modernity? In overarching conception, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and Age of Extremes can be regarded as single enterprise – a tetralogy which has no equal as a systematic account of how the contemporary world was made. All display the same astonishing fusion of gifts: economy of synthesis; vividness of detail; global scope, yet acute sense of regional difference; polymathic fluency, at ease with crops and stock markets, nations and classes, statesmen and peasants, sciences and arts; breadth of sympathies for disparate social agents; power of analytic narrative; and not least a style of remarkable clarity and energy, whose signature is the sudden bolt of metaphoric electricity across the even surface of cool, pungent argument."

"In a comparative European perspective, these workers carrying national flags seem exotic and are poorly understood. Well-known treatments, even of authors from Central Europe—like Ernst Gellner or Eric Hobsbawm—whittle down the specificity of the region’s nationalism beyond recognition as they shave off edges to fit it into a global definition of the term. Hobsbawm’s idea of the nation was to apply to every corner of the earth, but in this book, we have paid attention to what people in one corner meant by this word. In that corner, the coordinates of the global story as told in Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism are either irrelevant or secondary: for example, John Stuart Mills’s idea that a national state had to be “feasible,” or that nationalism required a particular threshold of size before it could be properly launched. Czechs or Slovenes knew nothing of such parameters and made their history without and against them. Hobsbawm’s idea that language and history were not decisive criteria would have struck virtually everyone in East Central Europe as nonsensical—though it may well apply to the phenomenon of nationalism as observed from a satellite high above the earth."

"Eric Hobsbawm might complain that I have been unfair: that my real gripe is that I wish that he had written another, different book. He might say that I want a Book Written for the Ages, that reflects what historians in future centuries will find of greatest interest. And he is right, I do. By contrast, he might say, his book is "written by a twentieth-century writer for late-twentieth-century readers," to whom "the history of the confrontation between capitalism' andsocialism'...[s]ocial revolutions, the Cold War, the nature, limits, and fatal flaws of `really existing socialism' and its breakdown" are worth discussing at length. He is writing for readers who take the central theme of twentieth century history to be the tragical-heroic course of World Communism. But the tragical-heroic course of World Communism is simply not the central theme of twentieth century history. For what audience is Hobsbawm writing his book? To what "late twentieth century readers" can we recommend The Age of Extremes as covering the pieces of twentieth century history they want and need to learn?"

"In 1968 I was a member of an attentive and admiring student audience whom Eric Hobsbawm was addressing on the theme, as I recall, of the limits of student radicalism. I remember very well his conclusion, since it ran so counter to the mood of the hour. Sometimes, he reminded us, the point is not to change the world but to interpret it. But in order to interpret the world one has also to have a certain empathy with the ways in which it has changed. His latest book is a challenging, often brilliant, and always cool and intelligent account of the world we have now inherited. If it is not up to his very best work it should be recalled just how demanding a standard he has set. But there are one or two crucial changes that have taken place in the world—the death of Communism, for instance, or the related loss of faith in history and the therapeutic functions of the state about which the author is not always well pleased. That is a pity, since it shapes and sometimes misshapes his account in ways that may lessen its impact upon those who most need to read and learn from it. And I missed, in his version of the twentieth century, the ruthlessly questioning eye which has made him so indispensable a guide to the nineteenth. In a striking apologia pro vita sua, Eric Hobsbawm reminds us that historians are “the professional remembrancers of what their fellow-citizens wish to forget.” It is a demanding and unforgiving injunction."

"Hobsbawm closes his memoirs with a rousing coda: “Let us not disarm, even in unsatisfactory times. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.” He is right, on every count. But to do any good in the new century we must start by telling the truth about the old. Hobsbawm refuses to stare evil in the face and call it by its name; he never engages the moral as well as the political heritage of Stalin and his works. If he seriously wishes to pass a radical baton to future generations, this is no way to proceed."

"Hobsbawm was, as he said in The Age of Empire, writing out ‘the unfolding of an argument’, and that argument takes as given that, when it comes to historical significance, economics matters more than culture, men more than women, the West more than the Rest. His omissions were constitutive, not lapses. Redoing Hobsbawm, in other words, would involve taking on those core assumptions."

"Hobsbawm, was once asked how he justified living, ostentatiously well-off, in a Hampstead mansion. If one's sailing on the Titanic, he replied, one might as well go under the waves in first class. Witty, yes. But what if all the icebergs melted in 1989?"

"The chief problem for all of Hobsbawm’s history was that his primary aim was to verify the theories of Karl Marx. Despite claims by his obituary writers that he was never a slave to Marxist doctrine, or that his work was "always nuanced" and "elegant", the opposite was true."

"Faith in a distant, ephemeral God, solver of problems by house call, has also been left behind. Increasingly I come to understand my religion and priesthood as a committment to the society in which I live. A committment to men and women who struggle for a new social order where slavery has no place, that prepares people to fully realize themselves, in which injustice and exploitation cease to be our daily bread. I understand Jesus Christ as very related to this matter. I understand Jesus Christ as each one of my brothers and sisters. I understand that in uniting with them in this struggle, perhaps I will be capable of overcoming the small and large personal needs that are only relevant because they impede me from fully giving myself to this task."

"I do not wish to be melodramatic, but at some point I have to say it. If something bad should happen to me, I want you to know that my commitment to what I am doing has been freely contracted, with the joy of knowing that this is precisely what I should be doing at this moment. Fear is constantly present in each one of us, because none of us are movie heroes. But we refuse to accept that fear must condition our actions and prevent us from doing what with a cool head and fervent heart we understand should be done."

"Between September 26 and September 30 of 1974 Fr. Antonio Llidó Mengual was placed in our cell. Over the course of two or three days, Fr. Llidó was taken from the cell many times for interrogation. Each time he returned in worse physical condition. After three days he moved with great difficulty due to the pain inflicted in torture. His shirt was stained in blood and he apparently had internal hemorrhages and torn muscles. On one occasion a doctor who worked for the DINA examined his vital signs and recommended immediate hospitalization. In response to the doctor's urgent recommendation, the official whose last name was Morel [Marcelo Moren Brito] responded that this was impossible, as the interrogations had not finished. The doctor insisted in vain, expressing his sense of powerlessness and indignation."

"Despite his physical state and the abuse inflicted by DINA agents, who grossly mocked his condition as priest, he found strength to console his cellmates, sharing his crusts of bread or fruit peels to help us survive."

"There I also met the Spanish priest Antonio Llidó. He was accused of having hidden and protected people of the MIR who were persecuted. Antonio Llidó never denied this, saying that he could not lie to them. The guards would laugh at him, and commented that when Antonio Llidó was being tortured he was asked to name people, and he would say that he could not give them the names. 'And why not?' the guards asked. 'Because of my principles,' Antonio replied in his Spanish accent, which the guards mockingly imitated."

"From the moment he arrived in Chile, the poverty, misery, and the anguish of the poor deeply affected him. Such was the situation he observed throughout the Valparaíso area. He lived very modestly, eating what the poor ate, living from his earnings as a French teacher. During the harvest season, he joined the humble farm workers working with them, and worked as an unskilled laborer."

"Chile was highly politicized in those years. Working classes had a great yearning for justice. And with reason, because many social abuses existed. Antonio Llidó's life was closely tied to groups of the poorest workers. Within that world of working people, various political groups advocated changes for a new society. He associated with many of them and had good relations with these groups that had such a strong yearning for justice."

"After the military coup, he was advised to return to his native land. He responded that he would not leave. In the hour of such hardship, he would not abandon the modest people with whom he had lived. He wished to share their lot. Still, shortly after the coup he was forced to leave the area because the military were looking for him, to kill him just as they looked for so many people. All of us who lived in Chile in those years bear witness of that fact. He went to Santiago, where he continued helping people who were fleeing. He fled with those who were fleeing. Even though he himself was in danger, he continued helping others who were persecuted. Once more, he was counseled to leave Chile, and once more he chose to stay and run the same fate shared by the poor and persecuted."

"He [Brendan Bracken] had been upset by my observation that a wartime Minister of Information was compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig."

"A devout and serious Christian, she was often bothered by what she read of socialists because she could not, instantly and absolutely, see where they were so wrong. To her horrified ear, they kept sounding as though they had ideas rather like Christ's."

"There is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep."

"Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.""

"Since becoming a journalist I had often heard the advice to "believe nothing until it has been officially denied"."

"A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody's hands."

"The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business – advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise."

"Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separated, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce."

"If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment."

"Generally speaking, changes in the prices of finished goods are "cost determined" while changes in the prices of raw materials inclusive of primary foodstuffs are "demand determined"."

"It should be noticed that the whole approach is in contradiction to generally accepted views."

"We have found that the degree of monopoly is likely to increase somewhat during depressions."

"The capitalists of a country which manages to capture foreign markets from other countries are able to increase their profits at the expense of the capitalists of the other countries. Similarly, a colonial metropolis may achieve an export surplus through investment in its dependencies."

"In a sense the budget deficit can be considered as an artificial export surplus."

"In any case of the budget deficit the private sector of the economy receives more from government expenditure than it pays in taxes."

"It is the export surplus and the budget deficit which enable the capitalists to make profits over and above their own purchases of goods and services. The connection between 'external' profits and imperialism is obvious."

"Armaments and wars, usually financed by budget deficits, are also a source of this kind of profits."

"[C]apitalist savings 'lead' profits. This result may appear paradoxical. 'Common sense' would suggest the opposite sequence—namely, that savings are determined by profits. This, how ever is not the case."

"It is indeed paradoxical that, while the apologists of capitalism usually consider the 'price mechanism' to be the great advantage of the capitalist system, price flexibility proves to be a characteristic feature of the socialist economy."

"It has been frequently assumed that V is constant; and this indeed is the cornerstone of the quantity theory of money. But it seems fairly obvious that the velocity of circulation in fact depends on the short-term rate of interest."

"It should first be stated that a joint-stock company is not a 'brotherhood of shareholders' but is managed by a controlling group of big shareholders while the rest of the shareholders do not differ from holders of bonds with a flexible rate of interest."

"The most important prerequisite for becoming an entrepreneur is the ownership of capital."

"Thus, even with relatively heavy damping such shocks generate fairly regular cycles. The result is of considerable importance."

"It may thus be concluded that in the absence of 'development factors' the system lapses into a stationary state. These factors thus appear to be a prerequisite of a steady growth."

"An increase in the number of paupers does not broaden the market."

"Keynes accepted capitalism, but without zeal or sanctimony. He was mainly concerned with assuring its immediate stability, not justifying it sub specie aeternitatis. This prevented him both from ever becoming an official ideologue of the status quo like so many economists, and from developing a deeper and longer dynamic perspective. His contemporary Kalecki, who unlike Keynes was familiar with the work of Marx, achieved some of the same countercyclical insights, albeit in fragmentary form, but saw the ulterior implications of them. By reinserting Keynesian categories into a rudimentary political economy, he was able to predict what he called the 'political trede-cycle', which has since become the principal economic contradiction of advanced capitalism: the conflict between full employment and stable prices."

"The dominant notion of rationality is a capitalist notion of rationality, that is, whatever is profitable, whatever can be organised in terms of social control of labour-power and control of natural resources."

"Any sensible person right now would join an organisation."

"It’s important to recognize the class origins of this project, which occurred in the 1970s when the capitalist class was in a great deal of difficulty, workers were well organized and were beginning to push back. Like any ruling class, they needed ruling ideas. So, the ruling ideas were that freedom of the market, privatization, entrepreneurialism of the self, individual liberty and all the rest of it should be the ruling ideas of a new social order, and that was the order that got implemented in the 1980s and 1990s."

"The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be 'equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population - 2.3 billion people.'"

"Capital creates space-time."

"Massive concentration of financial power, accompanied by the machinations of finance capital, can as easily de-stabilize as stabilize capitalism."

"The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx's critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism."

"Marx set out to resolve the contradictions and to correct the errors in classical political economy. In this he thought he had succeeded very well. Judging by the sound and the fury of the controversy surrounding his interpretations, he either succeeded too well or deluded himself to the success of his enterprise."

"Skills that are monopolizable are anathema to capital."

"The equilibrium between supply and demand is achieved only through a reaction against the upsetting of the equilibrium."

"Money must exist before it can be turned into capital."

"Technological change can become 'fetishized' as a 'thing in itself', as an exogenous guiding force in the history of capitalism."

"Individual capitalists, in short, behave in such a way as to threaten the conditions that permit the reproduction of the capitalist class."

"But the net effect of increasing scale, centralization of capital, vertical integration and diversification within the corporate form of enterprise has been to replace the 'invisible hand' of the market by the 'visible hand' of the managers."

"The social relations of capitalism have penetrated slowly into all spheres of life to make wage labour the general condition of existence only in fairly recent times."

"Individual capitalists, in short, necessarily act in such a way as to de-stabilize capitalism."

"The inner logic that governs the laws of motion of capitalism is cold, ruthless and inexorable, responsive only to the law of value. Yet value is a social relation, a product of a particular historical process. Human beings were organizers, creators and participants in that history. We have, Marx asserts, built a vast social enterprise which dominates us, delimits our freedoms and ultimately visits upon us the worst forms of degradation."

"Perpetual revolutions in technology can mean the devaluation of fixed capital on an extensive scale."

"But planned obsolescence is possible only if the rate of technological change is contained."

"Money could not be converted into capital if wage labour did not exist."

"workers then have a strong stake in the preservation of the very system that exploits them because the destruction of that system entails the destruction of their savings."

"If all money capital invests in appropriation and none in actual production, than capitalism is not long for this world."

"When money functions as measure of value it must truly represent the values it helps to circulate."

"Rampant inflation is just as hard to live with as the devaluation of commodities."

"The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital."

"If, for example, a conspiratorially minded elite is so powerful, has at its fingertips such multiple and delicate instruments with which to fine-tune accumulation, then how can the periodic headlong slides into crisis be explained?"

"The capacity to transform itself from the inside makes capitalism a somewhat peculiar beast - chameleon-like, it perpetually changes it colour; snake-like, it periodically sheds its skin."

"The accumulation of capital involves the the expansion of value over time."

"Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value."

"All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of the globe."

"Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself."

"Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life."

"The geographical movement of money and commodities as capital is not the same as the movements of products and of precious metals. Capital is, after all, money used in a certain way, and is by no means identical with all money uses."

"The only solution to the contradictions of capitalism entails the abolition of wage labour."

"The accumulation of capital and misery go hand in hand, concentrated in space."

"Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences."

"There is, in short, no 'spatial fix' that can contain the contradictions of capitalism in the long run."

"Not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the level of devaluation now required. The idea is dreadful in its implications. What better reason could there be to declare that it is time for capitalism to be gone, to give way to some saner mode of production?"

"A work of this sort admits no conclusion."

"The ultimate Form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war."

"Los intelectuales son rebeldes, pero no revolucionarios."

"El puro y desadaptado que choca con el mundo de las farsas y de las apañucias."

"Aviation in air, in water and in spirit. Its laws are different in all three cases. The spirit soars the more it weighs and sinks into itself. The heavier the spirit, the higher and farther it flies."

"La mecánica es un medio o disciplina para pealizar la vida, pero no es la vida misma. Esa debe llevarnos a la vida misma, que está en el juego de sentimentos o sea en la sensibilidad."

"Las artes (pintura, poesía, etc.) no son solo éstas. Artes son también comer, beber, caminar: todo acto es un arte."

"I love César Vallejo. When I read his poems, I feel so sad. [laughter]"

"The poet that fully realizes the creative potential of conflict is César Vallejo. Poor, illegitimate, and shamed since childhood for his mestizo origin, he wrote from his experience as Garcilaso had done four hundred years before. But his orientation was radically different. Vallejo searched for unity, the connectedness of all peoples: "Oh exalted unity! Oh that which is one/for all!/Love against space and time!" and he found it in sound, in the intonation of his mother's voice. She held to the indigenous music while speaking Spanish. In "Trilce XXIII" the poet speaks of his mother, then he speaks to her. By the end we hear her voice as his when he says, "dí, mamá"...Poe, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire had already disrupted poetic diction by incorporating silence and the dark side of the soul. José María Eguren understood it as a philosophical and formal lesson. But Vallejo added two more elements: the Andean aesthetics of dissonance, which had been invisible in writing until then, and the ethical dimension of compassion. This was a monumental achievement. In a single poetic line, his verbs and nouns fight each other as people do in Andean ritual festivals, where dissonance operates through a clash perceived as unity (solidarity). In these festivals, dissonant sounds are experienced as "a single heartbeat"....Today, despite the onslaught of globalization, mestizo poetry continues to thrive. José Lezama Lima wrote that "a secret pulsation of the invisible moves towards the image, and the image desires to know and be known." The reciprocal exchange within the image is thus transformed into a new understanding of life force. A few decades before, Vallejo wrote that artists engender revolutions by creating "a cosmic hunger for human justice." The poet's work is to give shape to "the new chords that will produce those tones." Placing poetry in the vibratory field where perception participates in the co-creation of the world, Vallejo reclaims poetry's full potential, echoing the early vision of Huidobro: "Poetry is the life of life.""

"American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema."

"“This is Paul Robeson, the greatest American singer!” declared the famous film director, Eisenstein, introducing Robeson to a reception in his honor, attended by nearly all the celebrities in Moscow’s theatre and art world."

"Marx argued that all human history was dominated by a tussle for the wealth between classes, one of which took the wealth, and used it to exploit the others. As science and technology developed, so one exploiting class was replaced by another that used the resources of society more efficiently. The necessity for exploitation, he observed, had ended with capitalism. If the working class, the masses who cooperate to produce the wealth, could seize the means of production from the capitalist class, they could put an end to exploitation forever and run society on the lines of the famous slogan: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’"

"Socialist society can only come about by a revolution; if the masses, through general strikes and mass agitation, seize the means of production from their present owners.‘But doesn’t that involve violence? Surely you’re not prepared to use violence to achieve your political ends?’This cry is always flung in the face of revolutionaries, usually by people who are only too prepared to accept without complaint the recurring and brutalising violence of the class society in which we live. It comes from people who ignored or supported the orgy of destruction which the government of America launched for more than a full decade against the people of Vietnam; from people who offer sympathy and succour to the regime of the Shah of Persia, which is founded on the torture of dissenters; of from people who hardly raise a word of protest about the deep violence of tyrannical governments all over the world – from Thailand, to South Africa to South Korea; or from people who never turn a hair at the institutionalised violence of everyday life – of people being maimed and battered in factories and building sites through negligence and greed of employers; of old people tormented by hunger and cold."

"Only the working masses can change society; but they will not do that spontaneously, on their own. They can rock capitalism back onto its heels but they will only knock it out if they have the organisation, the socialist party, which can show the way to a new, socialist order of society. Such a party does not just emerge. It can only be built out of the day-to-day struggles of working people."

"[On Foot's housemaster at Shrewsbury School (1952–1955)] Trench made his name as a great innovator, especially in corporal punishment. He would select certain younger boys for special tuition in Greek prose, in which he was a recognised scholar. Less than three mistakes and a bar of chocolate; more than three a beating. But Trench was no ordinary flogger. He would offer his culprit an alternative: four strokes with the cane, which hurt; or six with the strap, with trousers down, which didn't. Sensible boys always chose the strap, despite the humiliation, and Trench, quite unable to control his glee, led the way to an upstairs room, which he locked, before hauling down the miscreant's trousers, lying him face down on a couch and lashing out with a belt. He achieved the rare distinction of being hated and despised by every boy who came in contact with him, and was therefore an obvious choice to be the youngest ever headmaster of Bradfield, and then of Eton. At Eton he made the mistake of whipping the heirs of earls as though they were run-of-the-mill manufacturers' sons at Shrewsbury or Bradfield. One sensitive young viscount limped home and bared his tattered bum to his outraged father. Trench was sacked. He was appointed headmaster of Fettes."

"I'd been impressed, too, more than I dared admit at the campaign by Tony Benn and his supporters. Why, I wonder? I'd never been an admirer of him personally. I suppose I've bashed him in print just as much as anyone else in the country, even the Daily Mirror leader writers. It wasn't even that I was specially keen on the specific policies he was advocating. As you know, I don't much go for a 'siege economy' and import controls, which I regard as a lot of nationalist claptrap. And I certainly didn't like all those eulogies about Russia which were starting to creep into Tony Benn's speeches, and which reminded me of the sort of windy fellow-travelling which polluted the Left in the 1940s and 1950s. I suppose what I liked was the straight appeal to socialist solutions – the open attack on capitalism and all its works."

"Change does not just happen, and it certainly doesn't just come because one day Tony Benn might be prime minister at the head of a left-wing Labour government. It comes when people fight for it. And that is why we, with our four thousand members and a fighting newspaper, are more optimistic and confident than you with your quarter of a million paper members, with your resolutions, intrigues, doubts and dilemmas. How much more confident and optimistic we would both be if we were members of the same organisation. And remember, it is no good appealing to me to join the Labour Party. I would not be let in. My application alone would probably cost you a dozen more defections from the Parliamentary Labour Party to the SDP and another couple of points drop in the opinion polls. No, I'm afraid there is only one possible way in which we can now come together: for you to come to us."

"There appears to be a link between the enormity of a crime and the ignominy which attaches to any journalist or investigator who publicly questions the guilt of those convicted for it. This has been especially true in the case of Irish people convicted of bombings in Britain. Anyone who questions the verdict against an Irish bomber is assumed to be a bomber himself. As a result of this extraordinary logic, the authorities have been able to get away with mistakes, inconsistencies and far worse."

"I am sorry to read in this book that Ian Botham is an 'independent Tory' and (worse) that he admires Mrs Thatcher. But I am not inclined to mix politics with sport. Indeed, the worst damage done to cricket since the war has been that mixing of politics with sport which knocked South Africa out of international cricket. The supporters of apartheid mixed politics with sport so shamefully that they banned people from playing cricket with one another because of the colour of their skin. This outrage, which brought the entire sport into disrepute, was greeted with unconcern by the same MCC gentlemen who have apoplexy when cricketers say they smoked pot when they were kids. Racialism is a million times more damaging to cricket than cannabis. Where does Ian Botham stand on that? He was offered, literally, a million pounds if he and his friend Viv Richards went to South Africa as part of the public relations circus for that country’s racialist politics. He refused point blank."

"Which is the more subversive: a group of senior people in the security services who are giving secrets to the enemy, or a group of senior people in the security services who are working systematically to bring down the elected government here? The question would worry most democrats, but for the authors of books about the security services it is no worry at all. To a man, they are absorbed with the first danger. The second danger, they protest, does not exist. Or rather, if it does exist, it is best not to mention it."

"It is not Neil Kinnock's fault that he is unconvincing. He is unconvincing because he represents a formula for changing society which has been proved, over sixty years more, to have failed in its central purpose. Compare Kinnock in any age to [[Clement Attlee|[Clement] Attlee]] in any age, and on every conceivable count Kinnock is the more impressive. Attlee, for all the ridiculous hero-worship of history, was really a mean-minded bore, whose only political quality was cunning. He had none of Kinnock’s passion, none of his oratory, none of his charisma. But Attlee (and Wilson, in the same sort of way, with the same sort of qualities) won elections while Kinnock loses them. The difference is not in the quality of the men, but in the huge history of failure with which Kinnock – but not Attlee, and Wilson rather less – has had to wrestle."

"[On George Kennedy Young, a former deputy head of MI6, and (later a) merchant banker] The intellectual integrity which he guarded most assiduously was that of the Far Right. He was a racialist to his very core. He detested black people, whose immigration into this country in the Fifties and Sixties drove him into paroxysms of fury. He took the side of the Arabs in the Middle East for the only reason which has never been justified: their antagonists were Jews. He believed that the postwar Tory Party was riddled with treacherous moderates, crypto-Communists and homosexuals. He spent many years fighting in the Tory Party for a leadership which stood up for the Old Order he believed in. He was chairman of Tory Action, which campaigned so successfully in 1974 and 1975 to remove Edward Heath as Tory leader and replace him with Thatcher. He even stood for Parliament himself. But he was, as the [previously cited] memo makes clear, deeply suspicious of anything which smacked of democracy."

"[[w:Michael Crick|[Michael] Crick]] cannot discover whether Archer really believes in God. The evidence of his book, however, is heavily weighted against God's existence. Any omnipotent deity with a grain of mercy would surely have preserved us from Jeffrey Archer."

"Add to these anecdotes and quotations [[Andrew Neil|[Andrew] Neil]]'s writing style, which is dour and monotonous, that in all its 481 pages there is not the slightest trace of a joke nor a sign that the greatest young journalist of his generation ever enjoyed a single book he didn't serialise, and you might conclude that Full Disclosure should be consigned to everlasting fire. You would be quite wrong. The book is thoroughly absorbing. It is a dark tragedy the chief fascination of which is that its author does not realise he is in a tragedy at all."

"All the gifts which providence had showered on Jonathan Aitken were devoted to pimping for the billionaires from Riyadh."

"The first I heard of Tony Cliff, who has died aged 82, was from Gus Macdonald, now Lord Macdonald, Minister of Transport. ... In late 1961, he reckoned it was time the Young Socialists took some serious lessons in Marxist theory, and arranged a weekend school to be addressed by two leaders of an obscure Trotskyist sect called the International Socialists. Gus and I met the couple in an airport lounge. I can still see them coming in: Mikhael Kidron, smart, suave, urbane, and Tony Cliff, short and scruffy, looking and sounding like a rag doll. As we mumbled through the niceties of introductions, the rag doll looked irritated and shy. We climbed into a taxi. As we did so, I saw a newspaper poster about events in the Congo, and remarked, partly to break the silence, that I'd never really understood the Congo. Quick as a flash, the rag doll came to life, and started jabbering with amazing speed and energy. I can't remember exactly what he said, but I do remember my clouds of doubt and misunderstanding suddenly disappearing and the role of the contestants in the Congo, including the United Nations, becoming brutally clear."

"Shelley wrote that some atrocity on the part of the wealthy set "the blood boiling in indignation in my veins". Ever since I first read that, I've subjected any new political analysis to a BBIV (blood boiling in veins) test. Do these two books pass? The unequivocal answer in both cases is 'yes'. The blood boils all right, both at the corporate exploiters and the politicians who dance to their tune."

"Who says history doesn't repeat itself? Twenty-seven years ago, in 1977, a Birmingham Labour MP, Roy Jenkins, scuttled off to a well-paid job in Europe, and resigned his seat. The Labour candidate who lost the subsequent byelection was Terry Davies. He later won the seat but is now scuttling off to a well-paid job in Europe, causing another byelection. And there the historical repetition ends. I was the Socialist Workers party candidate in that 1977 byelection, and came bottom of the poll with 0.8 per cent of the vote. My friend John Rees, who is standing there now for the Respect coalition, promises me he will do better."

"Socialism, when it attempts to predict or imagine the future (which Marx refused to do, since he conceived of a path, not a model), provides us merely with an improved form of labor (salaries and material conditions on the job)."

"Just as economic pressure from the base … is able to modify the production of surplus value, so pressure grounded in spatial practice is alone capable of modifying the apportionment of that surplus value — i.e. the distribution of the portion of social surplus production allotted to society's collective 'interests', to so-called social services. Such grass-roots pressure, if it is to be effective in this regard, cannot be confined to attacking the state qua guardian of the 'general interest'. For this state, born of the hegemony of a class, has as one of its functions — and a more and more significant function — the organization of space, the regularization of its flows, the control of its networks. It devotes to these purposes a considerable part of global surplus value, of the surplus production assigned to the running of society."

"Pressure from below must therefore also confront the state in its role as organiser of space, as the power that controls urbanization, the construction of buildings and spatial planning in general. The state defends class interests while simultaneously setting itself above society as a whole, and its ability to intervene in space can and must be turned back against it, by grass-roots opposition, in the form of counter-plans and counter-projects designed to thwart strategies, plans and programmes imposed from above."

"'Change life! 'Change society!' These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. … new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa."

"The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labour to leisure"

"It is through knowledge that the proletarian liberates himself and begins actively superseding his condition. Moreover in this effort to attain knowledge and awareness, he is forced to assimilate complex theories (economic, social, political...), i.e. to integrate the loftiest findings of science and culture into his own consciousness. On the other hand the petty bourgeois and bourgeois, as such, are barred access to the human. For them to become humanized, they must break with themselves, reject themselves, an endeavor which on an individual level is frequently real and pathetic … We should understand men in a human way, even if they are incomplete; conditions are not confined within precise, geometrically defined boundaries, but are the result of a multitude of obstinate and ever-repeated (everyday) causes. Attempts to escape from the bourgeois condition are not particularly rare; on the other hand, the failure of such attempts are virtually inevitable, precisely because it is not so much a question of suppression but of a complete break. (Among intellectuals, this notion of super session is frequently false and harmful; when they supersede themselves as petty-bourgeois or bourgeois intellectuals, they are often merely continuing in the same direction and following their own inclinations in the belief that they are 'superseding themselves'. So far from gaining a new consciousness, they are merely making the old one worse. There is nothing more unbearable than the intellectual who believes himself to be free and human, while in every action, gesture, word and thought he shows that he has never stepped beyond bourgeois consciousness.)"

"The 'meaning' of life is not to be found in anything other than that life itself. It is within it, and there is nothing beyond that. 'Meaning' cannot spill over from being; it is the direction, the movement of being, and nothing more. The 'meaning' of a proletarian's life is to be found in that life itself: in its despair, or conversely in its movement towards freedom, if the proletarian participates in the life of the proletariat, and if that life involves continuous, day-to-day action (trade-union, political...)."

"The method of Marx and Engels consists precisely in a search for the link which exists between what men think, desire, say and believe for themselves and what they are, what they do. This link always exists. It can be explored in two directions. On the one hand, the historian or the man of action can proceed from ideas to men, from consciousness to being - i.e. towards practical, everyday reality - bringing the two into confrontation and thereby achieving archieving criticism of ideas by action and realities. That is the direction which Marx and Engels nearly always followed in everything they wrote; and it is the direction which critical and constructive method must follow initially if it is to take a demonstrable shape and achieve results. But it is equally possible to follow this link in another direction, taking real life as the point of departure in an investigation of how the ideas which express it and the forms of consciousness which reflect it emerge. The link, or rather the network of links between the two poles will prove to be complex. It must be unravelled, the thread must be carefully followed. In this way we can arrive at a criticism of life by ideas which in a sense extends and completes the first procedure."

"Appearance and reality [...] are not separated like oil and water in a vessel, but rather amalgamated like water and wine. To separate them, we must analyse them in the most 'classic' sense of the word: the elements of the mixture must be isolated."

"Only a vast inventory of the elements of our culture - in other words of our consciousness of life - will enable us to see clearly."

"[U]p until now 'progress' has affected existing social realities only secondarily, modifying them as little as possible, according to the strict dictates of capitalist profitability. The important thing is that human beings are profitable, not that their lives be changed. As far as is possible, capitalism respects the pre-existing shape and contours of people's lives. Only grudgingly, so to speak, does it bring about any change. Criticism of capitalism as a contradictory 'mode of production' which is dying as a result of its contradictions is strengthened by criticism of capitalism as the distributor of the wealth and 'progress' it has produced. And so, constantly staring us in the face, mundane and therefore generally unnoticed - whereas in the future it will be seen as a characteristic and scandalous trait of our era, the era of the decadent bourgeoisie - is this fact: that life is lagging behind what is possible, that it is retarded. What incredible backwardness. This has up until now been constantly increasing; it parallels the growing disparity between the knowledge of the contemporary physicist and that of the 'average' man, or between that of the Marxist sociologist and that of the bourgeois politician. Once pointed out, the contrast becomes staggeringly obvious, blinding; it is to be found everywhere, whichever way we turn, and never ceases to amaze."

"Everything great and splendid is founded on power and wealth. They are the basis of beauty. This is why the rebel and the anarchic protester who decries all of history and all the works of past centuries because he sees in them only the skills and the threat of domination is making a mistake. He sees alienated forms, but not the greatness within. The rebel can only see to the end of his own ‘private’ consciousness, which he levels against everything human, confusing the oppressors with the oppressed masses, who were nevertheless the basis and the meaning of history and past works. Castles, palaces, cathedrals, fortresses, all speak in their various ways of the greatness and the strength of the people who built them and against whom they were built. This real greatness shines through the fake grandeur of rulers and endows these buildings with a lasting ‘beauty’. The bourgeoisie is alone in having given its buildings a single, over-obvious meaning, impoverished, deprived of reality: that meaning is abstract wealth and brutal domination; that is why it has succeeded in producing perfect ugliness and perfect vulgarity. The man who denigrates the past, and who nearly always denigrates the present and the future as well, cannot understand this dialectic of art, this dual character of works and of history. He does not even sense it. Protesting against bourgeois stupidity and oppression, the anarchic individualist is enclosed in ‘private’ consciousness, itself a product of the bourgeois era, and no longer understands human power and the community upon which that power is founded. The historical forms of this community, from the village to the nation, escape him. He is, and only wants to be, a human atom (in the scientifically archaic sense of the word, where ‘atom’ meant the lowest isolatable reality). By following alienation to its very extremes he is merely playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Embryonic and unconscious, this kind of anarchism is very widespread. There is a kind of revolt, a kind of criticism of life, that implies and results in the acceptance of this life as the only one possible. As a direct consequence this attitude precludes any understanding of what is humanly possible."

"To see things properly, it is not enough simply to look. People who look at life - purely as witnesses, spectators - are not rare; and one of the strangest lessons to be learnt from our literature is that professional spectators, judges by vocation and witnesses by predestination, contemplate life with less understanding and grasp of its rich content than anyone else. There really is no substitution for participation!"

"There is no historical fact that did not owe its origin to social economics; but it is no less true to say that there is no historical fact that was not preceded, not accompanied, and not succeeded by a definite state of consciousness."

"Children like to work, and are always eager to imitate the work of adults."

"People [who belong in this environment] look for a path in the heavens for the simple reason that they have lost their way on earth."

"Bourgeois scientists make sure that their theories are not dangerous to God or Capital."

"He (Lenin) had a habit of becoming passionately attached to people. His attachment to Plekhanov from whom he got so much, was typical in this respect, but it never prevented him from fighting hard against Plekhanov when he saw that Plekhanov was wrong, that his point of view harmed the cause; it did not prevent him from breaking completely with him when Plekhanov became a defencist."

"We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression."

"Development in human society is a many-sided process. At the level of the individual, it implies increased skill and capacity, greater freedom, creativity, self-discipline, responsibility, and material well-being. Some of these are virtually moral categories and are difficult to evaluate—depending as they do on the age in which one lives, one’s class origins, and one’s personal code of what is wrong. However, what is indisputable is that the achievement of any of those aspects of personal development is very much tied in with the state of the society as a whole. From earliest times, man found it convenient and necessary to come together in groups to hunt and for the sake of survival. The relations which develop within any given social group are crucial to an understanding of the society as a whole. Freedom, responsibility, skill, have real meaning only in terms of the relations of men in society."

"Development cannot be seen purely as an economic affair, but rather as an overall social process which is dependent upon the outcome of man’s efforts to deal with his natural environment."

"However, the peasants and workers of Europe (and eventually the inhabitants of the whole world) paid a huge price so that the capitalists could make their profits from the human labor that always lies behind the machines. That contradicts other facets of development, especially viewed from the standpoint of those who suffered and still suffer to make capitalist achievements possible. This latter group are the majority of mankind. To advance, they must overthrow capitalism; and that is why at the moment capitalism stands in the path of further human social development. To put it another way, the social (class) relations of capitalism are now outmoded, just as slave and feudal relations became outmoded in their time."

"Capitalism has proved incapable of transcending fundamental weaknesses such as underutilization of productive capacity, the persistence of a permanent sector of unemployed, and periodic related to the concept of “market”—which is concerned with people’s ability to pay rather than their need for commodities. Capitalism has created its own irrationalities such as a vicious white racism, the tremendous waste associated with advertising, and the irrationality of incredible poverty in the midst of wealth and wastage even inside the biggest capitalist economies, such as that of the United States of America. Above all, capitalism has intensified its own political contradictions in trying to subjugate nations and continents outside of Europe, so that workers and peasants in every part of the globe have become self-conscious and are determined to take their destiny into their own hands."

"All of the countries named as “underdeveloped” in the world are exploited by others; and the underdevelopment with which the world is now preoccupied is a product of capitalist, imperialist, and colonialist exploitation. African and Asian societies were developing independently until they were taken over directly or indirectly by the capitalist powers. When that happened, exploitation increased and the export of surplus ensued, depriving the societies of the benefit of their and labor. That is an integral part of underdevelopment in the contemporary sense."

"In some quarters it has often been thought wise to substitute the term "developing" for "underdeveloped". One of the reasons for so doing is to avoid any unpleasantness which may be attached to the second term, which might be interpreted as meaning underdeveloped mentally, physically, morally, or in any other respect. Actually, if “underdevelopment” were related to anything other than comparing economies, then the most underdeveloped country in the world would be the U.S.A., which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality, and psychiatric disorder."

"It has been noted with irony that the principal “industry” of many underdeveloped countries is administration. Not long ago, 60 per cent of the internal revenue of Dahomey went into paying salaries of civil servants and government leaders. The salaries given to the elected politicians are higher than those given to a British Member of Parliament, and the number of parliamentarians in the underdeveloped African countries is also relatively high. In , there is one parliamentary representative for every six thousand inhabitants, compared to one French parliamentary representative for every hundred thousand Frenchmen. Many more figures of that sort indicate that in describing a typical underdeveloped economy it is essential to point out the high disproportion of the locally distributed wealth that goes into the pockets of a privileged few."

"Members of the privileged groups inside Africa always defend themselves by saying that they pay the taxes which keep the government going. At face value this statement sounds reasonable, but on close examination it is really the most absurd argument and shows total ignorance of how the economy functions. Taxes do not produce national wealth and development. Wealth has to be produced out of nature—from tilling the land or mining metals or felling trees or turning raw materials into finished products for human consumption. These things are done by the vast majority of the population who are peasants and workers. There would be no incomes to tax if the laboring population did not work. The incomes given to civil servants, professionals, merchants, come from the store of wealth produced by the community. Quite apart from the injustices in the distribution of wealth, one has to dismiss the argument that “the taxpayers’” money is what develops a country. In pursuing the goal of development, one must start with the producers and move on from there to see whether the products of their labor are being rationally utilized to bring greater independence and well-being to the nation."

"By paying attention to the wealth created by human labor out of nature, one can immediately appreciate that very few underdeveloped countries are lacking in the natural resources which could go into making a better life, and in those cases it is usually possible for two or three territories to combine together for their mutual benefit. In fact, it can be shown that the underdeveloped countries are the ones with the greatest wealth of natural resources and yet the poorest in terms of goods and services presently provided by and for their citizens."

"In a way, underdevelopment is a paradox. Many parts of the world that are naturally rich are actually poor and parts that are not so well off in wealth of soil and sub-soil are enjoying the highest standards of living. When the capitalists from the developed parts of the world try to explain this paradox, they often make it sound as though there is something “God given” about the situation."

"The interpretation that underdevelopment is somehow ordained by God is emphasized because of the racist trend in European scholarship. It is in line with racist prejudice to say openly or to imply that their countries are more developed because their people are innately superior, and that the responsibility for the economic backwardness of Africa lies in the generic backwardness of the race of black Africans. An even bigger problem is that the people of Africa and other parts of the colonized world have gone through a cultural and psychological crisis and have accepted, at least partially, the European version of things. That means that the African himself has doubts about his capacity to transform and develop his natural environment. With such doubts, he even challenges those of his brothers who say that Africa can and will develop through the efforts of its own people. If we can determine when underdevelopment came about, it would dismiss the lingering suspicion that it is racially or otherwise predetermined and that we can do little about it."

"When the “experts” from capitalist countries do not give a racist explanation, they nevertheless confuse the issue by giving as causes of underdevelopment the things which really are consequences. For example, they would argue that Africa is in a state of backwardness as a result of lacking skilled personnel to develop. It is true that because of lack of engineers Africa cannot on its own build more roads, bridges, and hydroelectric stations. But that is not a cause of underdevelopment, except in the sense that causes and effects come together and reinforce each other. The fact of the matter is that the most profound reasons for the economic backwardness of a given African nation are not to be found inside that nation. All that we can find inside are the symptoms of underdevelopment and the secondary factors that make for poverty. Mistaken interpretations of the causes of underdevelopment usually stem either from prejudiced thinking or from the error of believing that one can learn the answers by looking inside the underdeveloped economy. The true explanation lies in seeking out the relationship between Africa and certain developed countries and in recognizing that it is a relationship of exploitation."

"One of the common means by which one nation exploits another and one that is relevant to Africa’s external relations is exploitation through trade. When the terms of trade are set by one country in a manner entirely advantageous to itself, then the trade is usually detrimental to the trading partner. To be specific, one can take the export of agricultural produce from Africa and the import of manufactured goods into Africa from Europe, North America, and Japan. The big nations establish the price of the agricultural products and subject these prices to frequent reductions. At the same time the price of manufactured goods is also set by them, along with the s necessary for trade in the ships of those nations. The minerals of Africa also fall into the same category as agricultural produce as far as pricing is concerned. The whole import-export relationship between Africa and its trading partners is one of unequal exchange and of exploitation."

"More far-reaching than just trade is the actual ownership of the means of production in one country by the citizens of another. When citizens of Europe own the land and the mines of Africa, this is the most direct way of sucking the African continent. Under colonialism the ownership was complete and backed by military domination. Today, in many African countries the foreign ownership is still present, although the armies and flags of foreign powers have been removed. So long as foreigners own land, mines, factories, banks, insurance companies, means of transportation, newspapers, power stations, then for so long will the wealth of Africa flow outwards into the hands of those elements. In other words, in the absence of direct political control, foreign investment insures that the natural resources and the labor of Africa produce economic value which is lost to the continent."

"Africa trades mainly with the countries of Western Europe, North America, and Japan. Africa is also diversifying its trade by dealing with socialist countries, and if that trade proves disadvantageous to the African economy, then the developed socialist countries will also have joined the ranks of the exploiters of Africa."

"Most of the people who write about underdevelopment and who are read in the continents of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are spokesmen for the capitalist or bourgeois world. They seek to justify capitalist exploitation both inside and outside their own countries. One of the things which they do to confuse the issue is to place all underdeveloped countries in one camp and all developed countries in another camp irrespective of different social systems; so that the terms capitalist and socialist never enter the discussion. Instead, one is faced with a simple division between the industrialized nations and those that are not industrialized. It is true that both the United States and the Soviet Union are industrialized and it is true that when one looks at the statistics, countries such as France, Norway, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania are much closer together than any one of them is to an African country. But it is absolutely necessary to determine whether the standard of living in a given industrialized country is a product of its own internal resources or whether it stems from exploiting other countries. The United States has a small proportion of the world’s population and exploitable natural wealth but it enjoys a huge percentage of the wealth which comes from exploiting the labor and natural resources of the whole world."

"African economies are integrated into the very structure of the developed capitalist economies; and they are integrated in a manner that is unfavorable to Africa and insures that Africa is dependent on the big capitalist countries. Indeed, structural dependence is one of the characteristics of underdevelopment."

"Dependent nations can never be considered developed. It is true that modern conditions force all countries to be mutually interdependent in order to satisfy the needs of their citizens; but that is not incompatible with economic independence because economic independence does not mean isolation. It does, however, require a capacity to exercise choice in external relations, and above all it requires that a nation’s growth at some point must become self-reliant and self-sustaining. Such things are obviously in direct contradiction to the economic dependence of numerous countries on the metropoles of Western Europe, North America, and Japan."

"There is a substantial difference between the dependence of the s on the and the subjugation of the colonies under a foreign capitalist yoke. The capitalist countries are technologically more advanced and are therefore the sector of the imperialist system which determined the direction of change. [...] A formerly colonized nation has no hope of developing until it breaks effectively with the vicious circle of dependence and exploitation which characterizes imperialism."

"At the social and cultural level, there are many features which aid in keeping underdeveloped countries integrated into the capitalist system and at the same time hanging on to the apron strings of the metropoles. The Christian church has always been a major instrument for cultural penetration and cultural dominance, in spite of the fact that in many instances Africans sought to set up independent churches. Equally important has been the role of education in producing Africans to service the capitalist system and to subscribe to its values. Recently, the imperialists have been using new universities in Africa to keep themselves entrenched at the highest academic level."

"During the colonial period, the forms of political subordination in Africa were obvious. There were governors, colonial officials, and police. In politically independent African states, the metropolitan capitalists have to insure favorable political decisions by remote control. So they set up their political puppets in many parts of Africa, who shamelessly agree to compromise with the vicious apartheid regime of South Africa when their masters tell them to do so. [...] The presence of a group of African sell-outs is part of the definition of underdevelopment. Any diagnosis of underdevelopment in Africa will reveal not just low per capita income and protein deficiencies, but also the gentlemen who dance in , , and when music is played in Paris, London, and New York."

"The question as to who, and what, is responsible for African underdevelopment can be answered at two levels. First, the answer is that the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent. Second, one has to deal with those who manipulate the system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system. The capitalists of Western Europe were the ones who actively extended their exploitation from inside Europe to cover the whole of Africa. In recent times, they were joined, and to some extent replaced, by capitalists from the United States; and for many years now even the workers of those metropolitan countries have benefited from the exploitation and underdevelopment of Africa. None of these remarks are intended to remove the ultimate responsibility for development from the shoulders of Africans. Not only are there African accomplices inside the imperialist system, but every African has a responsibility to understand the system and work for its overthrow."

"Science and technology derive from the effort to understand and control the natural environment. Familiarity with the history of science is essential to an awareness of the development of society."

"The moment that the topic of the pre-European African past is raised, many individuals are concerned for various reasons to know about the existence of African “civilizations.” Mainly, this stems from a desire to make comparisons with European “civilizations.” This is not the context in which to evaluate the so-called civilizations of Europe. It is enough to note the behavior of European capitalists from the epoch of slavery through colonialism, fascism, and genocidal wars in Asia and Africa. Such barbarism causes suspicion to attach to the use of the word “civilization” to describe Western Europe and North America."

"A culture is a total way of life. It embraces what people ate and what they wore; the way they walked and the way they talked; the manner in which they treated death and greeted the newborn. Obviously, unique features came into existence in virtually every locality with regard to all social details. In addition, the continent of Africa south of the great Sahara desert formed a broad community where resemblances were clearly discernible. For example, music and dance had key roles in “uncontaminated” African society. They were ever present at birth, initiation, marriage, death, as well as at times of recreation. Africa is the continent of drums and percussion. African peoples reached the pinnacle of achievement in that sphere."

"Religion is an aspect of the superstructure of a society, deriving ultimately from the degree of control and understanding of the material world. However, when man thinks in religious terms, he starts from the ideal rather than with the material world (which is beyond his comprehension). This creates a non-scientific and metaphysical way of viewing the world, which often conflicts with the scientific materialist outlook and with the development of society."

"Communalism is one phase through which all human society passed."

"The first prerequisite for mastery of the environment is knowledge of that environment."

"Even the widespread resort to shifting cultivation with burning and light hoeing was not as childish as the first European colonialists supposed. That simple form of agriculture was based on a correct evaluation of the soil potential, which was not as great as initially appears from the heavy vegetation; and when the colonialists started upsetting the thin topsoil the result was disastrous. The above remarks show that when an outsider comes into a new ecological system, even if he is more skilled he does not necessarily function as effectively as those who have familiarized themselves with the environment over centuries; and the newcomer is likely to look more ridiculous if he is too arrogant to realize that he has something to learn from the “natives.”"

"If there is no class stratification in a society, it follows that there is no state, because the state arose as an instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its own interests."

"It is said that Ghana obtained its gold by “silent” or “dumb” barter which was described as follows:"

"When sent in his agents to rob and steal in Zimbabwe, they and other Europeans marveled at the surviving ruins of the Zimbabwe culture, and automatically assumed that it had been built by white people. Even today there is still a tendency to consider the achievements with a sense of wonder rather than with the calm acceptance that it was a perfectly logical outgrowth of human social development within Africa, as part of the universal process by which man’s labor opened up new horizons. The sense of reality can only be restored by making it clear that the architecture rested on a foundation of advanced agriculture and mining, which had come into existence over centuries of evolution."

"Gold is required in large quantities only in a society which produces a very large economic surplus and can afford to transform part of that surplus into gold for prestige purposes (as in India) or into coinage and money to promote capitalism (as in Western Europe)."

"Africa in the fifteenth century was not just a jumble of different “tribes.” There was a pattern and there was historical movement. Societies such as feudal Ethiopia and Egypt were at the furthest point of the process of evolutionary development. Zimbabwe and the Bachwezi states were also clearly on the ascendant away from communalism, but at a lower level than the feudal states and a few others that were not yet feudal such as those in the Western Sudan."

"Development and underdevelopment are not only comparative terms, but that they also have a dialectical relationship one to the other: that is to say, the two help produce each other by interaction. Western Europe and Africa had a relationship which insured the transfer of wealth from Africa to Europe. The transfer was possible only after trade became truly international; and that takes one back to the late fifteenth century when Africa and Europe were drawn into common relations for the first time—along with Asia and the Americas. The developed and underdeveloped parts of the present capitalist section of the world have been in continuous contact for four and a half centuries. The contention here is that over that period Africa helped to develop Western Europe in the same proportion as Western Europe helped to underdevelop Africa."

"What was called was nothing but the extension overseas of European interests. The strategy behind international trade and the production that supported it was firmly in European hands, and specifically in the hands of the sea-going nations from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. They owned and directed the great majority of the world’s sea-going vessels, and they controlled the financing of the trade between four continents. Africans had little clue as to the tri-continental links between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Europe had a monopoly of knowledge about the international exchange system seen as a whole, for was the only sector capable of viewing the system as a whole. Europeans used the superiority of their ships and cannon to gain control of all the world’s waterways, starting with the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of North Africa. [...] Therefore, by control of the seas, Europe took the first steps towards transforming the several parts of Africa and Asia into economic satellites."

"When the Portuguese and the Spanish were still in command of a major sector of world trade in the first half of the seventeenth century, they engaged in buying cotton cloth in India to exchange for slaves in Africa to mine gold in Central and South America. Part of the gold in the Americas would then be used to purchase spices and silks from the Far East. The concept of metropole and dependency automatically came into existence when parts of Africa were caught up in the web of international commerce. On the one hand, there were the European countries who decided on the role to be played by the African economy; and on the other hand, Africa formed an extension to the European capitalist market. As far as foreign trade was concerned, Africa was dependent on what Europeans were prepared to buy and sell."

"The overall range of trade goods which left the European ports of , , and was determined almost exclusively by the pattern of production and consumption within Europe. From the beginning, Europe assumed the power to make decisions within the international trading system. An excellent illustration of that is the fact that the so-called international law which governed the conduct of nations on the high seas was nothing else but European law. Africans did not participate in its making, and in many instances, African people were simply the victims, for the law recognized them only as transportable merchandise. If the African slave was thrown overboard at sea, the only legal problem that arose was whether or not the slave ship could claim compensation from the insurers! Above all, European decision-making power was exercised in selecting what Africa should export—in accordance with European needs."

"Europeans were anxious to acquire gold in Africa because there was a pressing need for gold coin within the growing capitalist money economy."

"One can say that Europe allocated to Africa the role of supplier of human captives to be used as slaves in various parts of the world. When Europeans reached the Americas, they recognized its enormous potential in gold and silver and tropical produce. But that potential could not be made a reality without adequate labor supplies. The indigenous Indian population could not withstand new European diseases such as smallpox, nor could they bear the organized toil of slave plantations and slave mines, having barely emerged from the hunting stage. That is why in islands like Cuba and , the local Indian population was virtually wiped out by the white invaders. At the same time, Europe itself had a very small population and could not afford to release the labor required to tap the wealth of the Americas. Therefore, they turned to the nearest continent, Africa, which incidentally had a population accustomed to settled agriculture and disciplined labor in many spheres. Those were the objective conditions lying behind the start of the European slave trade, and those are the reasons why the capitalist class in Europe used their control of international trade to insure that Africa specialized in exporting captives."

"West Africans had developed metal casting to a fine artistic perfection in many parts of Nigeria, but when it came to the meeting with Europe, beautiful bronzes were far less relevant than the crudest cannon."

"African rulers found European goods sufficiently desirable to hand over captives which they had taken in warfare. Soon, war began to be fought between one community and another for the sole purpose of getting prisoners for sale to Europeans, and even inside a given community a ruler might be tempted to exploit his own subjects and capture them for sale. A chain reaction was started by European demand for slaves (and only slaves) and by their offer of consumer goods—this process being connected with divisions within African society."

"The trade in human beings from Africa was a response to externa factors. At first, the labor was needed in Portugal, Spain, and in Atlantic islands such as , , and the Canaries; then came the period when the and the Spanish-American mainland needed replacements for the Indians who were victims of genocide; and then the demands of Caribbean and mainland plantation societies had to be met. The records show direct connections between levels of exports from Africa and European demand for slave labor in some part of the American . When the Dutch took in Brazil in 1634, the director of the Dutch West Indian Company immediately informed their agents on the Gold Coast that they were to take the necessary steps to pursue the trade in slaves on the adjacent coast east of the Volta—thus creating for that area the infamous name of the “Slave Coast.” When the British West Indian islands took to growing sugar cane, Gambia was one of the first places to respond. Examples of this kind of external control can be cited right up to the end of the trade, and this embraces also, since European markets in the islands became important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and since demand in places like Brazil caused Mozambicans to be shipped around the ."

"John Hawkins made three trips to West Africa in the 1560s, and stole Africans whom he sold to the Spanish in America. On returning to England after the first trip, his profit was so handsome that Queen Elizabeth I became interested in directly participating in his next venture; and she provided for that purpose a ship named the Jesus. Hawkins left with the Jesus to steal some more Africans, and he returned to England with such dividends that Queen Elizabeth made him a knight. Hawkins chose as his coat of arms the representation of an African in chains."

"In speaking of the European slave trade, mention must be made of the U.S.A., not only because its dominant population was European but also because Europe transferred its capitalist institutions more completely to North America than to any other part of the globe, and established a powerful form of capitalism—after eliminating the indigenous inhabitants and exploiting the labor of millions of Africans."

"Slavery is useful for early accumulation of capital, but it is too rigid for industrial development. Slaves had to be given crude non-breakable tools which held back the capitalist development of agriculture and industry. That explains the fact that the northern portions of the U.S.A. gained far more industrial benefits from slavery than the South, which actually had slave institutions on its soil; and ultimately the stage was reached during the American Civil War when the Northern capitalists fought to end slavery within the boundaries of the U.S.A. so that the country as a whole could advance to a higher level of capitalism."

"The simple fact is that no people can enslave another for centuries without coming out with a notion of superiority, and when the color and other physical traits of those peoples were quite different it was inevitable that the prejudice should take a racist form."

"European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited. Indeed, it would have been impossible to open up the and to use it as a constant generator of wealth, had it not been for African labor. There were no other alternatives: the American (Indian) population was virtually wiped out and Europe’s population was too small for settlement overseas at that time. Then, having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latter. Oppression of African people on purely racial grounds accompanied, strengthened, and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons."

"When Europeans put millions of their brothers (Jews) into ovens under the Nazis, the chickens were coming home to roost. Such behavior inside of “democratic” Europe was not as strange as it is sometimes made out to be. There was always a contradiction between the elaboration of democratic ideas inside Europe and the elaboration of authoritarian and thuggish practices by Europeans with respect to Africans."

"The first martyr in the American national war of liberation against the British colonialists in the eighteenth century was an African descendant, ; and both slave and free Africans played a key role in Washington’s armies. And yet, the American Constitution sanctioned the continued enslavement of Africans. In recent times, it has become an object of concern to some liberals that the U.S.A. is capable of war crimes of the order of My Lai in Vietnam. But the fact of the matter is that the My Lais began with the enslavement of Africans and American Indians. Racism, violence, and brutality were the concomitants of the capitalist system when it extended itself abroad in the early centuries of international trade."

"On the whole, the process by which captives were obtained on African soil was not trade at all. It was through warfare, trickery, banditry, and kidnapping. When one tries to measure the effect of European slave trading on the African continent, it is essential to realize that one is measuring the effect of social violence rather than trade in any normal sense of the word. Many things remain uncertain about the slave trade and its consequences for Africa, but the general picture of destructiveness is clear, and that destructiveness can be shown to be the logical consequence of the manner of recruitment of captives in Africa."

"The opportunity presented by European slave dealers became the major (though not the only) stimulus for a great deal of social violence between different African communities and within any given community. It took the form more of raiding and kidnapping than of regular warfare, and that fact increased the element of fear and uncertainty."

"During the colonial epoch, the British forced Africans to sing,"

"Today, the Italians have (hard) wheat foods like spaghetti and macaroni as their staple, while most Europeans use the potato. The Italians took the idea of the spaghetti-type foods from the Chinese noodle after Marco Polo returned from travels there, while Europe adopted the potato from American Indians. In neither case were Europeans enslaved before they could receive a benefit that was the logical heritage of all mankind, but Africans are to be told that the European slave trade developed us by bringing us maize and cassava."

"The abandonment of traditional iron smelting in most parts of Africa is probably the most important instance of technological regression."

"Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress. The loss of industry and skill in Africa was extremely small, if we measure it from the viewpoint of modern scientific achievements or even by standards of England in the late eighteenth century. However, it must be borne in mind that to be held back at one stage means that it is impossible to go on to a further stage. When a person was forced to leave school after only two years of primary school education, it is no reflection on him that he is academically and intellectually less developed than someone who had the opportunity to be schooled right through to university level. What Africa experienced in the early centuries of trade was precisely a loss of development opportunity, and this is of the greatest importance."

"He who makes the powder wins the war."

"The circumstances of African trade with Europe were unfavorable to creating a consistent African demand for technology relevant to development; and when that demand was raised it was ignored or rejected by the capitalists. After all, it would not have been in the interests of capitalism to develop Africa. In more recent times, Western capitalists had refused to build the Volta River Dam for Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah, until they realized that the Czechoslovakians would do the job; they refused to build the for Egypt, and the Soviet Union had to come to the rescue; and in a similar situation they placed obstacles in the way of the building of a railway from Tanzania to Zambia, and it was the of China that stepped in to express solidarity with African peasants and workers in a practical way. Placing the whole question in historical perspective allows us to see that capitalism has always discouraged technological evolution in Africa, and blocks Africa’s access to its own technology. [...] Capitalism introduced into Africa only such limited aspects of its material culture as were essential to more efficient exploitation, but the general tendency has been for capitalism to underdevelop Africa in technology."

"So long as there is political power, so long as a people can be mobilized to use weapons, and so long as a society has the opportunity to define its own ideology and culture, then the people of that society have some control over their own destinies, in spite of constraints such as those imposed as the African continent slipped into orbit as a satellite of capitalist Europe. After all, although historical development is inseparable from material conditions and the state of technology, it is also partially controlled by a people’s consciousness at various stages."

"Revolution is the most dramatic appearance of a conscious people or class on the stage of history; but, to greater or lesser extent, the ruling class in any society is always engaged in the developmental process as conscious instruments of change or conservatism."

"One biographer (a European) had this to say of Shaka"

"Warfare comprises not just the encounter of individual soldiers, but (more importantly) a pattern of tactics and strategy in relationship to the opposing forces taken as a whole."

"An army has to be trained, disciplined, and organized so that it is a meaningful unit in peace and in war."

"But what is relevant here is to understand why a Shaka was possible in Africa in the nineteenth century, before the coming of colonial rule. Had Shaka been a slave to some cotton planter in Mississippi or some sugar planter in Jamaica, he might have had an ear or a hand chopped off for being a “recalcitrant nigger,” or at best he might have distinguished himself in leading a slave revolt. For the only great men among the unfree and the oppressed are those who struggle to destroy the oppressor. On a slave plantation, Shaka would not have built a Zulu army and a Zulu state—that much is certain. Nor could any African build anything during the colonial period, however much a genius he may have been. As it was, Shaka was a herdsman and a warrior. As a youth, he tended cattle on the open plains—free to develop his own potential and apply it to his environment."

"Shaka was able to invest his talents and creative energies in a worthwhile endeavor of construction. He was not concerned with fighting for or against slave traders; he was not concerned with the problem of how to resell goods made in Sweden and France. He was concerned with how to develop the Zulu area within the limits imposed by his people’s resources. It must be recognized that things such as military techniques were responses to real needs, that the work of the individual originates in and is backed by the action of society as a whole, and that whatever was achieved by any one leader must have been bounded by historical circumstances and the level of development, which determine the extent to which an individual can first discover, then augment, and then display his potential."

"It must be recognized that things such as military techniques were responses to real needs, that the work of the individual originates in and is backed by the action of society as a whole, and that whatever was achieved by any one leader must have been bounded by historical circumstances and the level of development, which determine the extent to which an individual can first discover, then augment, and then display his potential."

"It can be noted that Shaka was challenged to create the heavy stabbing when he realized that the throwing spear broke when used as a stabbing weapon. More important still, what Shaka came up with depended upon the collective effort of the Ama-Zulu. Shaka could ask that a better assegai be forged, because the Ama-Ngoni had been working iron for a long time, and specialist black-smiths had arisen within certain clans. It was a tribute to the organizational and agricultural capacity of the society as a whole that it could feed and maintain a standing army of thirty thousand men, re-equip them with iron weapons, and issue each soldier with the full-length Zulu shield made from cattle hide. Because the scientific basis and experimental preconditions were lacking in Zulu society, Shaka could not have devised a firearm—no matter how much genius he possessed. But, he could get his people to forge better weapons, as explained above; and he found them receptive to better selective breeding practices when he set up special royal herds, because the people already had a vast fund of empirical knowledge about cattle and a love of the cattle-herding profession."

"Shaka took up many of the military and political techniques of and greatly improved them. That is development. It is a matter of building upon what is inherited and advancing slowly, provided that no one comes to “civilize” you."

"Samori Toure was a military genius and a political innovator, who went further than the others in setting up a political administration where a sense of loyalty could prevail over the above clans, localities, and ethnic groups."

"Imperialism is essentially an economic phenomenon, and it does not necessarily lead to direct political control or colonization. However, Africa was the victim of colonization. In the period of the notorious “Scramble for Africa,” Europeans made a grab for whatever they thought spelled profits in Africa, and they even consciously acquired many areas not for immediate exploitation but with an eye to the future. Each European nation that had these short-term and long-term economic interests ran up its own flag in different parts of Africa and established colonial rule. The gap that had arisen during the period of pre-colonial trade gave Europe the power to impose political domination on Africa."

"All Europeans had derived ideas of racial and cultural superiority between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, while engaged in genocide and the enslavement of non-white peoples."

"It is particularly instructive to turn to the example of Egypt under Mohammed Ali, who ruled from 1805 to 1849. [...] The ideals of Mohammed Ali could be related in the idiom of modern social science as being the creation of a viable, self-propelling economy to provide the basis for national independence. Such ideals were diametrically opposed to the needs of European capitalism. British and French industrialists wanted to see Egypt not as a textile manufacturer but as a producer of raw cotton for export, and an importer of European manufactures. European financiers wanted Egypt to be a source of investment, and in the second half of the eighteenth century they turned the sultan of Egypt into an international beggar, who mortgaged the whole of Egypt to international monopoly financiers. Finally, European statesmen wanted Egyptian soil to serve as a base for exploiting India and Arabia. Therefore, the was dug out of Egyptian soil by Egyptians, but it was owned by Britain and France, who then extended political domination over Egypt and Sudan."

"Europeans were also racially motivated to seek political domination over Africa. The nineteenth century was one in which white racism was most violently and openly expressed in capitalist societies, with the U.S.A. as a focal point, and with Britain taking the lead among the Western European capitalist nations. Britain accepted granting dominion status to its old colonies of white settlers in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; but it withdrew self-government from the West Indies when the white planters were ousted from the legislative assemblies by black (or brown) people. As far as Africa is concerned, Englishmen violently opposed black self-government such as the on the Gold Coast in the 1860s. They also tried to erode the authority of black Creoles in Sierra Leone. In 1874, when sought and obtained affiliation with , the Times newspaper declared that Durham should next affiliate with the ! Pervasive and vicious racism was present in imperialism as a variant independent of the economic rationality that initially gave birth to racism. It was economics that determined that Europe should invest in Africa and control the continent’s raw materials and labor. It was racism which confirmed the decision that the form of control should be direct colonial rule."

"For most European capitalist states, the enslavement of Africans had served its purpose by the middle of the nineteenth century; but for those Africans who dealt in captives the abrupt termination of the trade at any given point was a crisis of the greatest magnitude. In many areas, major social changes had taken place to bring the particular regions effectively into the service of the European slave trade—one of the most significant being the rise of “domestic slavery” and various forms of class and caste subjugation. African rulers and traders who found their social existence threatened by the earliest legal edicts such as the 1807 British act against the trade in slaves found ways of making contact with Europeans who still wanted slaves."

"The first four centuries of Afro-European trade in a very real sense represent the roots of African underdevelopment. Colonialism flourished rapidly from a European viewpoint, because several of its features were already rooted in Africa in the preceding period. One of the most decisive features of the colonial system was the presence of Africans serving as economic, political, and cultural agents of the European colonialists. Those agents, or “s,” were already serving European interests in the pre-colonial period. The impact of trade with Europe had reduced many African rulers to the status of middlemen for European trade; it had raised ordinary Africans to that same middleman commercial role; and it had created a new trading group of mixed blood—the children of European or Arab fathers. Those types can all be referred to as “compradors,” and they played a key role in extending European activity from the coast into the hinterland, as soon as Europeans thought of taking over political power."

"Africans conducting trade on behalf of Europeans were not merely commercial agents, but also cultural agents, since inevitably they were heavily influenced by European thought and values. [...] The mulatto sons of white traders and the sons of African rulers were the ones who made the greatest effort to learn the white man’s ways. This helped them to conduct business more efficiently. One Sierra Leone ruler in the eighteenth century explained that he wished “to learn book to be rogue as good as white man”; and there were many others who saw the practical advantages of literacy. However, the educational process also meant imbibing values which led to further African subjugation. One West African educated in this early period wrote a Ph.D. thesis in Latin justifying slavery. That was not surprising. The Reverend Thomas Thompson was the first European educator on the Gold Coast, and he wrote in 1778 a pamphlet entitled, The African Trade for Negro Slaves Shown to be Consistent with the Principles of Humanity and the Laws of Revealed Religion."

"It can be argued that the Arabs of and the n coast were also transformed into agents of European colonialism. At first, they resisted because European colonialism affected their own expansionist ambitions on the East African mainland, but they soon came to an arrangement which gave Europeans the ultimate powers. The Europeans reduced the small Arab clique into political and economic instruments of imperialism. European superiority over the Arabs in East and North Africa and in the Middle East demonstrates conclusively that modern imperialism is inseparable from capitalism, and underlines the role of slavery in the context of capitalism. The Arabs had acquired Africans as slaves for centuries, but they were exploited in a feudal context. African slaves in Arab hands became domestics, soldiers, and agricultural serfs. Whatever surplus they produced was not for reinvestment and multiplication of capital, as in the West Indian or North American slave systems but for consumption by the feudal elite. Indeed, slaves were often maintained more for social prestige than for economic benefit."

"The development of political unity in the form of large states was proceeding steadily in Africa. But even so, at the time of the Berlin Conference, Africa was still a continent of a large number of socio-political groupings who had not arrived at a common purpose. Therefore, it was easy for the European intruder to play the classic game of divide and conquer. In that way, certain Africans became unwitting allies of Europe. Many African rulers sought a European “alliance” to deal with their own African neighbor, with whom they were in conflict. Few of those rulers appreciated the implications of their actions. They could not know that Europeans had come to stay permanently; they could not know that Europeans were out to conquer not some but all Africans. This partial and inadequate view of the world was itself a testimony of African underdevelopment relative to Europe, which in the nineteenth century was self-confidently seeking dominion in every part of the globe."

"Political divisions in Africa were no evidence of innate inferiority or backwardness. That was the state in which the continent then found itself—a point along a long road that others had traversed and along which Africa was moving. Commercial impact of Europe slowed down the process of political amalgamation and expansion, in contrast to the way trade with Africa strengthened Europe’s nation-states. When European capitalism took the form of imperialism and started to subjugate Africa politically, the normal political conflicts of the pre-capitalist African situation were transformed into weakness which allowed the Europeans to set up their colonial domination."

"It is widely accepted that Africa was colonized because of its weakness. The concept of weakness should be understood to embrace military weakness and inadequate economic capacity, as well as certain political weaknesses: namely, the incompleteness of the establishment of nation-states, which left the continent divided, and the low level of consciousness concerning the world at large, which had already been transformed into a single system by the expansion of capitalist relations."

"Colonial Africa fell within that part of the international capitalist economy from which surplus was drawn to feed the metropolitan sector. As seen earlier, exploitation of land and labor is essential for human social advance, but only on the assumption that the product is made available within the area where the exploitation takes place. Colonialism was not merely a system of exploitation, but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the so-called mother country. From an African viewpoint, that amounted to consistent expatriation of surplus produced by African labor out of African resources. It meant the development of Europe as part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped."

"It is only the organization and resoluteness of the working class which protects it from the natural tendency of the capitalist to exploit to the utmost."

"The unequal nature of the trade between the metropole and the colonies was emphasized by the concept of the “protected market,” which meant even an inefficient metropolitan producer could find a guaranteed market in the colony where his class had political control. Furthermore, as in the preceding era of pre-colonial trade, European manufacturers built up useful sidelines of goods which would have been substandard in their own markets, especially in textiles. The European farmer also gained in the same way by selling cheap butter, while the Scandinavian fisherman came into his own through the export of salted cod. Africa was not a large market for European products, compared to other continents, but both buying-prices and selling-prices were set by European capitalists. That certainly allowed their manufacturers and traders more easy access to the surplus of wealth produced in Africa than they would have had if Africans were in a position to raise the price of their own exports."

"In the epoch of imperialism, the bankers became the aristocrats of the capitalist world."

"One of the main purposes of the colonial taxation system was to provide requisite funds for administering the colony as a field of exploitation. European colonizers insured that Africans paid for the upkeep of the governors and police who oppressed them and served as watchdogs for private capitalists. Indeed, taxes and customs duties were levied in the nineteenth century with the aim of allowing the colonial powers to recover the costs of the armed forces which they dispatched to conquer Africa. In effect, therefore, the colonial governments never put a penny into the colonies. All expenses were met by exploiting the labor and natural resources of the continent; and for all practical purposes the expense of maintaining the colonial government machinery was a form of alienation of the products of African labor."

"One major problem in Africa from a capitalist viewpoint was how to induce Africans to become laborers or cash-crop farmers. In some areas, such as West Africa, Africans had become so attached to European manufactures during the early period of trade that, on their own initiative, they were prepared to go to great lengths to participate in the colonial money economy. But that was not the universal response. In many instances, Africans did not consider the monetary incentives great enough to justify changing their way of life so as to become laborer or cash-crop farmers. In such cases, the colonial state intervened to use law, taxation, and outright force to make Africans pursue a line favorable to capitalist profits. When colonial governments seized African lands, they achieved two things simultaneously. They satisfied their own citizens (who wanted mining concessions or farming land) and they created the conditions whereby landless Africans had to work not just to pay taxes but also to survive. In settler areas such as Kenya and Rhodesia the colonial government also prevented Africans from growing cash crops so that their labor would be available directly for the whites. One of the Kenya white settlers, Colonel Grogan, put it bluntly when he said of the Kikuyu: “We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limbs. Compulsory labor is the corollary of our occupation of the country.”"

"In those parts of the continent where land was still in African hands, colonial governments forced Africans to produce cash crops no matter how low the prices were. The favorite technique was taxation. Money taxes were introduced on numerous items—cattle, land, houses, and the people themselves. Money to pay taxes was got by growing cash crops or working on European farms or in their mines. [...] Finally, when all else failed, colonial powers resorted widely to the physical coercion of labor—backed up of course by legal sanctions, since anything which the colonial government chose to do was “legal.”"

"The simplest form of forced labor was that which colonial governments exacted to carry out “public works.” Labor for a given number of days per year had to be given free for these “public works”—building castles for governors, prisons for Africans, barracks for troops, and bungalows for colonial officials. A great deal of this forced labor went into the construction of roads, railways, and ports to provide the infrastructure for private capitalist investment and to facilitate the export of cash crops."

"The Portuguese and Belgian colonial regimes were the most brazen in directly rounding up Africans to go and work for private capitalists under conditions equivalent to slavery. In Congo, brutal and extensive forced labor started under King Leopold II in the last century. So many Congolese were killed and maimed by Leopold’s officials and police that this earned European disapproval even in the midst of the general pattern of colonial outrages. When Leopold handed over the “Congo Free State” to the Belgian government in 1908, he had already made a huge fortune; and the Belgian government hardly relaxed the intensity of exploitation in Congo."

"The Portuguese have the worst record of engaging in slavery-like practices, and they too have been repeatedly condemned by international public opinion. One peculiar characteristic Portuguese colonialism was the provision of forced labor not only for its own citizens but also for capitalists outside the boundaries of Portuguese colonies. Angolans and Mozambicans were exported to the South African mines to work for subsistence, while the capitalists in South Africa paid the Portuguese government a certain sum for each laborer supplied."

"If one accepts that the government is always the servant of a particular class, it is perfectly understandable that the colonial governments should have been in collusion with capitalists to siphon off surplus from Africa to Europe. But even if one does not start from that (Marxist) premise, it would be impossible to ignore the evidence of how the colonial administrators worked as committees on behalf of the big capitalists. The governors in the colonies had to listen to the local representatives of the companies and to their principals. Indeed, there were company representatives who wielded influence in several colonies at the same time."

"The contribution to sterling reserves by any colony was a gift to the British treasury, for which the colony received little interest. [...] Men like Arthur Creech-Jones and Oliver Lyttleton, major figures in British colonial policy-making, admitted that in the early 1950s Britain was living on the dollar earnings of the colonies."

"Colonialism meant a great intensification of exploitation within Africa—to a level much higher than that previously in existence under communalism or feudal-type African societies. Simultaneously, it meant the export of that surplus in massive proportions, for that was the central purpose of colonialism."

"Africa’s contribution to European capitalism was far greater than mere monetary returns. The colonial system permitted the rapid development of technology and skills within the metropolitan sectors of imperialism. It also allowed for the elaboration of the modern organizational techniques of the capitalist firm and of imperialism as a whole. Indeed, colonialism gave capitalism an added lease of life and prolonged its existence in Western Europe, which had been the cradle of capitalism."

"It would be extremely simple-minded to say that colonialism in Africa or anywhere else caused Europe to develop its science and technology. The tendency towards technological innovation and renovation was inherent in capitalism itself, because of the drive for profits. However, it would be entirely accurate to say that the colonization of Africa and other parts of the world formed an indispensable link in a chain of events which made possible the technological transformation of the base of European capitalism. Without that link, European capitalism would not have been producing goods and services at the level attained in 1960. In other words, our very yardsticks for measuring developed and underdeveloped nations would have been different."

"Where connections were remote or even apparently non-existent, it can still be claimed that colonialism was a factor in the European technological revolution. As science blossomed in the present century, its interconnections became numerous and complex. It is impossible to trace the origin of every idea and every invention, but it is well understood by serious historians of science that the growth of the body of scientific knowledge and its application to everyday life is dependent upon a large number of forces operating within the society as a whole, and not just upon the ideas within given branches of science. With the rise of imperialism, one of the most potent forces within metropolitan capitalist societies was precisely that emanating from colonial or semi-colonial areas."

"It was in Southern Africa that there emerged the most carefully planned structures of interlocking directorates, holding companies, and giant corporations which were multinational both in their capital subscriptions and through the fact that their economic activities were dispersed in many lands. Individual entrepreneurs like Oppenheimer made huge fortunes from the Southern African soil, but Southern Africa was never really in the era of individual and family businesses, characteristic of Europe and America up to the early part of this century. The big mining companies were impersonal professional things. They were organized in terms of personnel, production, marketing, advertising, and they could undertake long-term commitments. At all times, inner productive forces gave capitalism its drive towards expansion and domination. It was the system which expanded. But in addition, one can see in Africa and in Southern Africa in particular the rise of a capitalist superstructure manned by individuals capable of consciously planning the exploitation of resources right into the next century, and aiming at racist domination of the black people of Africa until the end of time."

"As John Stuart Mill said, the trade between England and the in the eighteenth century was like the trade between town and country. In the present century, the links are even closer and it is more marked that the town (Europe) is living off the countryside (Africa, Asia, and Latin America). When it said that colonies should exist for the metropoles by producing raw materials and buying manufactured goods, the underlying theory was to introduce an international division of labor covering working people everywhere. That is to say, up to that point each society had allocated to its own members particular functions in production—some hunted, some made clothes, some built houses. But with colonialism, the capitalists determined what types of labor the workers should carry on in the world at large. Africans were to dig minerals out of the subsoil, grow agricultural crops, collect natural products, and perform a number of other odds and ends such as bicycle repairing. Inside Europe, North America, and Japan, workers would refine the minerals and the raw materials and make the bicycles."

"It was only after European firearms reached a certain stage of effectiveness in the nineteenth century that it became possible for whites to colonize and dominate the whole world. Similarly, the invention of a massive array of new instruments of destruction in the metropoles was both a psychological and a practical disincentive to colonized peoples seeking to regain power and independence. It will readily be recalled that a basic prop to colonialism in Africa and elsewhere was the “gunboat policy,” which was resorted to every time that the local police and armed forces seemed incapable of maintaining the metropolitan law and the colonial order of affairs. From the viewpoint of the colonized, the strengthening of the military apparatus of the European powers through colonial exploitation was doubly detrimental. Not only did it increase the overall technological gap between metropole and colony, but it immeasurably widened the gap in the most sensitive area, which had to do with concepts such as power and independence."

"The mining that went on in Africa left holes in the ground, and the pattern of agricultural production left African soils impoverished; but, in Europe, agricultural and mineral imports built a massive ."

"Undoubtedly, European capitalism achieved more and more a social character in its production. It integrated the whole world; and with colonial experience as an important stimulus, it integrated very closely every aspect of its own economy—from agriculture to banking. But distribution was not social in character. The fruits of human labor went to a given minority class, which was of the white race and resident in Europe and North America. This is the crux of the dialectical process of development and underdevelopment, as it evolved over the colonial period."

"Scientific advance is most generally a response to real need."

"It is the practice of monopoly concerns to move into new fields which supplement or even replace their old business. That is necessary to avoid their entire capital from being tied up in products that go out of fashion."

"Capital seeks domination. It grows and spreads and seeks to get hold of everything in sight. The exploitation of Africa gave European monopoly capital full opportunities to indulge in its tendencies for expansion and domination."

"The efficient accounting and business methods which are supposed to characterize capitalist firms did not drop from the sky. They are the result of historical evolution, and in that evolution the exploitation of Africa played a key role—from the era of the chartered companies right through the colonial period."

"Portugal was the lowliest of the colonizing powers in Africa, and its was nothing in Europe without its colonies: so much so that it came to insist that Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea were integral parts of Portugal, just like any province of the European country named Portugal."

"Few areas of the national life of those Western European countries failed to benefit from the decades of parasitic exploitation of the colonies. One Nigerian, after visiting Brussels in 1960, wrote: “I saw for myself the massive palaces, museums and other public buildings paid for by Congo ivory and rubber.” In recent times, African writers and researchers have also been amazed to find the amount of looted African treasure stacked away in the ; and there are comparable if somewhat smaller collections of African art in Paris, Berlin, and New York. Those are some of the things which, in addition to monetary wealth, help to define the metropoles as developed and “civilized.”"

"In French Equatorial Africa, it was a black man, Felix Eboue, who proved loyal to the forces led by General de Gaulle, and who mobilized manpower against the French and German fascists. Africa provided the base and much of the manpower for launching the counterattack which helped General de Gaulle and the Free French to return to power in France."

"No comprehensive studies have as yet been devoted to the role of Africans in the armies of the colonial powers in a variety of contexts. However, the indications are that such studies would reveal a pattern very similar to that discovered by historians who have looked at the role of black soldiers in the white-controlled armies of the U.S.A.; namely, that there was tremendous discrimination against black fighting men, even though black soldiers made great and unacknowledged contributions to important victories won by the white-officered armies of the U.S.A. and the colonial powers. Hints regarding discrimination are to be seen from regulations such as that barring African soldiers in the West African Regiment from wearing shoes and from the fact that there were actually race riots in the European campaigns, just as black troops fighting for the U.S.A. continued to riot right up to the Vietnam campaign."

"The whole existence and development of capitalism in Britain and France between 1885 and 1960 was bound up with colonization, and Africa played a major role. African colonies meant surplus appropriated on a grand scale; they led to innovations and forward leaps in technology and the organization of capitalist enterprise; and they buttressed the capitalist system at home and abroad with fighting men. Sometimes, it appeared that these two principal colonial powers reaped so many colonial benefits that they suffered from “too much of a good thing.”"

"The composition of should serve as a warning that colonialism was not simply a matter of ties between a given colony and its mother country, but between colonies on the one hand and metropoles on the other. The German capital in Unilever joined the British in exploiting Africa and the Dutch in exploiting the East Indies. The rewards spread through the capitalist system in such a way that even those capitalist nations who were not colonial powers were also beneficiaries of the spoils. Unilever factories established in Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S.A. were participants in the expropriation of Africa’s surplus and in using that surplus for their own development."

"To fully understand the colonial period, it is necessary to think in terms of the economic partition of Africa. Unlike the political partition of the nineteenth century, the economic partition had no fixed or visible boundaries. It consisted of the proportions in which capitalist powers divided up among themselves the monetary and non-monetary gains from colonial Africa. For instance, Portugal had two large political colonies in Southern Africa, but economically Mozambique and Angola were divided among several capitalist powers, which were invited by the Portuguese government, because Portuguese capitalists were too weak to handle those vast territories."

"Economic partition and repartition of Africa was going on all the time, because the proportions of the spoils that went to different capitalist countries kept changing."

"United States capitalists did not confine themselves to mere trade with Africa, but they also acquired considerable assets within the colonies. It is common knowledge that Liberia was an American colony in everything but name. The U.S.A. supposedly aided the Liberian government with loans, but used the opportunity to take over Liberian customs revenue, to plunder thousands of square miles of Liberian land, and generally to dictate to the weak ."

"It must be recalled that North America was that part of the European capitalist system which had been the most direct beneficiary of the massacre of the American Indians and the enslavement of Africans. The continued exploitation of African peoples within its own boundaries and in the Caribbean and Latin America must also be cited as evidence against American monster imperialism. The U.S.A. was a worthy successor to Britain as the leading force and policeman of the imperialist/colonialist world from 1945 onwards."

"Over the last few decades of colonialism, colonial possessions served capitalism as a safety valve in times of crisis. The first major occasion when this was displayed was during the great economic depression of 1929–34. During that period, forced labor was increased in Africa and the prices paid to Africans for their crops were reduced. Workers were paid less and imported goods cost a great deal more. That was a time when workers in the metropolitan countries also suffered terribly; but the colonialists did the best they could to transfer the burdens of the depression away from Europe and on to the colonies."

"It was a product of the irrationality of the capitalist mode of production. The search for profits caused production to run ahead of people’s capacity to purchase, and ultimately both production and employment had to be drastically reduced. Africans had nothing to do with the inherent shortcomings of capitalism; but, when Europeans were in a mess, they had no scruples about intensifying the exploitation of Africa. The economic depression was not a situation from which Britain could benefit at the expense of Sweden or where Belgium could gain at the expense of the U.S.A. They were all drowning, and that was why the benefits of the colonies saved not only the colonizing powers but all capitalist nations."

"Fascism is a deformity of capitalism. It heightens the imperialist tendency towards domination which is inherent in capitalism, and it safeguards the principle of private property. At the same time, fascism immeasurably strengthens the institutional racism already bred by capitalism, whether it be against Jews (as in Hitler’s case) or against African peoples (as in the ideology of Portugal’s Salazar and the leaders of South Africa). Fascism reverses the political gains of the bourgeois democratic system such as free elections, , parliaments; and it also extolls authoritarianism and the reactionary union of the church with the state. In Portugal and Spain, it was the Catholic church—in South Africa, it was the Dutch Reformed church."

"Like its progenitor, capitalism, fascism is totally opposed to socialism. Fascist Germany and Italy attacked both the other capitalist states and the Soviet Union, which was still the only socialist state in the world by 1939. The defeat of fascism was therefore a victory for socialism, and at the same time it preserved the other capitalist nations from having to take the historically retrograde step of fascism."

"Needless to say, in the 1950s when most Africans were still colonial subjects, they had absolutely no control over the utilization of their soil for militaristic ends. Virtually the whole of North Africa was turned into a sphere of operations for NATO, with bases aimed at the Soviet Union. There could easily have developed a nuclear war without African peoples having any knowledge of the matter. The colonial powers actually held military conferences in African cities like Dakar and Nairobi in the early 1950s, inviting the whites of South Africa and Rhodesia and the government of the U.S.A. Time and time again, the evidence points to this cynical use of Africa to buttress capitalism economically and militarily, and therefore in effect forcing Africa to contribute to its own exploitation."

"The principal contradiction within capitalism from the outset was that between the capitalists and the workers. To keep their system going, the capitalists had constantly to step up the rate of exploitation of their workers. At the same time, European workers were gaining increasing mastery over the means of production in the factories and mines, and they were learning to work collectively in big enterprises and within their own trade union structures. If the bourgeoisie continued to deprive them of the major part of the fruits of their own labor and to oppress them socially and politically, then those two classes were set on a collision path. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, Marx had predicted class collision would come in the form of revolution in which workers would emerge victorious. The capitalists were terribly afraid of that possibility, knowing full well that they themselves had seized power from the feudal landlord class by means of revolution."

"The class in power controls the dissemination of information. The capitalists misinformed and miseducated workers in the metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial exploitation. In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves with bargaining for small wage increases, which were usually counter-balanced by increased costs of living. They ceased to be creative and allowed bourgeois cultural decadence to overtake them all. They failed to exercise any independent judgment on the great issues of war and peace, and therefore ended up by slaughtering not only colonial peoples but also themselves."

"Fascism was a monster born of capitalist parents. Fascism came as the end-product of centuries of capitalist bestiality, exploitation, domination, and racism—mainly exercised outside Europe. It is highly significant that many settlers and colonial officials displayed a leaning towards fascism. Apartheid in South Africa is nothing but fascism. It was gaining roots from the early period of white colonization in the seventeenth century, and particularly after the mining industry brought South Africa fully into the capitalist orbit in the nineteenth century. Another example of the fascist potential of colonialism was seen when France was overrun by Nazi Germany in 1940. The French fascists collaborated with Hitler to establish what was called the Vichy regime in France, and the French white settlers in Africa supported the Vichy regime. A more striking instance to the same effect was the fascist ideology developed by the white settlers in Algeria, who not only opposed independence for Algeria under Algerian rule, but they also strove to bring down the more progressive or liberal governments of metropolitan France."

"In brutally suppressing the Maji Maji War in and in attempting genocide against the of (South-West Africa), the German ruling class were getting the experience which they later applied against the Jews and against German workers and progressives."

"Colonialism strengthened the Western European ruling class and capitalism as a whole. Particularly in its later phases, it was evidently giving a new lease of life to a mode of production that was otherwise dying. From every viewpoint other than that of the minority class of capitalists, colonialism was a monstrous institution holding back the liberation of man."

"Colonialism had only one hand—it was a one-armed bandit."

"For the first three decades of colonialism, hardly anything was done that could remotely be termed a service to the African people. It was in fact only after the last war that social services were built as a matter of policy. How little they amounted to does not really need illustrating. After all, the statistics which show that Africa today is underdeveloped are the statistics representing the state of affairs at the end of colonialism."

"The Portuguese stand out because they boasted the most and did the least. Portugal boasted that Angola, Guinea, and Mozambique have been their possessions for five hundred years, during which time a “civilizing mission” has been going on. At the end of five hundred years of shouldering the white man’s burden of civilizing “African natives,” the Portuguese had not managed to train a single African doctor in Mozambique, and the life expectancy in eastern Angola was less than thirty years. As for Guinea-Bissau, some insight into the situation there is provided by the admission of the Portuguese themselves that Guinea-Bissau was more neglected than Angola and Mozambique!"

"There were no roads connecting different colonies and different parts of the same colony in a manner that made sense with regard to Africa’s needs and development. All roads and railways led down to the sea. They were built to extract gold or manganese or coffee or cotton. They were built to make business possible for the timber companies, trading companies, and agricultural concession firms, and for white settlers. Any catering to African interests was purely coincidental."

"One South African saying put forward that “the white man has no kin, his kin is money.”"

"That is a profound revelation of the difference between capitalist and pre-capitalist societies; and when capitalism came into contact with the still largely communal African societies, it introduced money relations at the expense of kinship ties."

"After the Second World War, Guinea began to export . In the hands of French and American capitalists, the bauxite became aluminum. In the métropoles, it went into the making of refactory material, electrical conductors, cigarette foil, kitchen utensils, glass, jewel bearings, abrasives, light-weight structures, and aircraft. Guinean bauxite stimulated European shipping and North American hydroelectric power. In Guinea, the colonial bauxite mining left holes in the ground."

"In the south of Tanganyika, the British mined gold as fast as they could from 1933 onwards at a place called . By 1953, they had gobbled it all up and exported it abroad. By the end of the colonial period, Chunya was one of the most backward spots in the whole of Tanganyika, which was itself known as the poor Cinderella of East Africa. If that was modernization, and given the price paid in exploitation and oppression, then Africans would have been better off in the bush."

"Capitalism could revolutionize agriculture in Europe, but it could not do the same for Africa. In some districts, capitalism brought about technological backwardness in agriculture. On the reserves of Southern Africa, far too many Africans were crowded onto inadequate land, and were forced to engage in intensive farming, using techniques that were suitable only to shifting cultivation. In practice, that was a form of technical retrogression, because the land yielded less and less and became destroyed in the process. Wherever Africans were hampered in their use of their ancestral lands on a wide-ranging shifting basis, the same negative effect was to be found. Besides, some of the new cash crops like groundnuts and cotton were very demanding on the soil. In countries like Senegal, Niger, and Chad, which were already on the edge of the desert, the steady cultivation led to soil impoverishment and encroachment of the desert."

"Failure to improve agricultural tools and methods on behalf of African peasants was not a matter of a bad decision by colonial policy-makers. It was an inescapable feature of colonialism as a whole, based on the understanding that the international division of labor aimed at skills in the metropoles and low-level manpower in the dependencies. It was also a result of the considerable use of force (including taxation) in African labor relations. People can be forced to perform simple manual labor, but very little else."

"Nationalism is a certain form of unity which grows out of historical experience. It is a sense of oneness that emerges from social groups trying to control their environment and to defend their gains against competing groups. The nation-state also imposes order and maintains stability within its own boundaries, usually on behalf of a given class. All of those characteristics were present in nineteenth-century African states, some of which were much larger than the colonies arbitrarily defined by Europeans."

"Under slavery, power lay in the hands of the slavemasters: under colonialism, power lay in the hands of the colonialists. The loss of power for the various African states meant a reduction in the freedom of every individual."

", a former French colonial minister, explained that the French Revolution was not fought on behalf of the blacks of Africa. Bourgeois liberty, equality, and fraternity was not for colonial subjects. Africans had to make do with bayonets, riot acts, and gunboats."

"Power is the ultimate determinant in human society, being basic to the relations within any group and between groups. It implies the ability to defend one’s interests and if necessary to impose one’s will by any means available. In relations between peoples, the question of power determines maneuverability in bargaining, the extent to which one people respect the interests of another, and eventually the extent to which a people survive as a physical and cultural entity. When one society finds itself forced to relinquish power entirely to another society, that in itself is a form of underdevelopment."

"During the centuries of pre-colonial trade, some control over social, political, and economic life was retained in Africa, in spite of the disadvantageous commerce with Europeans. That little control over internal matters disappeared under colonialism. Colonialism went much further than trade. It meant a tendency towards direct appropriation by Europeans of the social institutions within Africa. Africans ceased to set indigenous cultural goals and standards, and lost full command of training young members of the society. Those were undoubtedly major steps backward."

"The removal from history follows logically from the loss of power which colonialism represented. The power to act independently is the guarantee to participate actively and consciously in history. To be colonized is to be removed from history, except in the most passive sense. A striking illustration of the fact that colonial Africa was a passive object is seen in its attraction for white anthropologists, who came to study "primitive society." Colonialism determined that Africans were no more makers of history than were beetles—objects to be looked at under a microscope and examined for unusual features."

"The resourcefulness of West African market women is well known, but it was put to petty purposes. The problem posed to capitalists and workers in Europe while making insecticide from African pyrethrum was one requiring that resourcefulness be expressed in a technical direction. But the problem posed to an African market woman by the necessity to make a penny more profit on every tin of imported sardines was resolved sometimes by a little more vigor, sometimes by a touch of dishonesty, and sometimes by resort to "juju.""

"Colonialism induced the African ironworker to abandon the process of extracting iron from the soil and to concentrate instead on working scraps of metal imported from Europe. The only compensation for that interruption would have been the provision of modern techniques in the extraction and processing of iron. However, those techniques were debarred from Africa, on the basis of the international division of labor under imperialism. As was seen earlier, the non-industrialization of Africa was not left to chance. It was deliberately enforced by stopping the transference to Africa of machinery and skills which would have given competition to European industry in that epoch."

"Instead of speeding up growth, colonial activities such as mining and cash-crop farming speeded up the decay of "traditional" African life. In many parts of the continent, vital aspects of culture were adversely affected, nothing better was substituted, and only a lifeless shell was left."

"There were several spots within different colonies which were sufficiently far removed from towns and colonial administration that they neither grew cash crops nor supplied labor. In southern Sudan, for instance, there were populations who continued to live a life not dissimilar to that which they had followed in previous centuries. Yet, even for such traditional African societies the scope for development no longer existed. They were isolated by the hold which the colonialists had on the rest of the continent. They could not interact with other parts of Africa. They were subject to increasing encroachment by the money economy and were more and more to be regarded as historical relics. The classic example of this type of obstructed historical development is to be found in the U.S.A., where the indigenous population of Indians who survived slaughter by the whites were placed in reservations and condemned to stagnation. in North America are living museums to be visited by white tourists who purchase curios."

"In recent times, economists have been recognizing in colonial and post-colonial Africa a pattern that has been termed "growth without development." That phrase has now appeared as the title of books on Liberia and Ivory Coast. It means that goods and services of a certain type are on the increase. There may be more rubber and coffee exported, there may be more cars imported with the proceeds, and there may be more gasoline stations built to service the cars. But the profit goes abroad, and the economy becomes more and more a dependency of the metropoles. In no African colony was there economic integration, or any provision for making the economy self-sustained and geared to its own local goals. Therefore, there was growth of the so-called enclave import-export sector, but the only things which developed were dependency and underdevelopment. A further revelation of growth without development under colonialism was the overdependence on one or two exports. The term "monoculture" is used to describe those colonial economies which were centered around a single crop. Liberia (in the agricultural sector) was a monoculture dependent on rubber, Gold Coast on cocoa, Dahomey and southeast Nigeria on palm produce, Sudan on cotton, Tanganyika on sisal, and Uganda on cotton. In Senegal and Gambia, groundnuts accounted for 85 to 90 per cent of money earnings. In effect, two African colonies were told to grow nothing but peanuts!"

"Every farming people have a staple food, plus a variety of other supplements. Historians, agronomists, and botanists have all contributed to showing the great variety of such foods within the pre-colonial African economy. There were numerous crops which were domesticated within the African continent, there were several wild food species (notably fruits), and Africans had shown no conservatism in adopting useful food plants of Asian or American origin. Diversified agriculture was within the African tradition. Monoculture was a colonialist invention."

"There was nothing "natural" about monoculture. It was a consequence of imperialist requirements and machinations, extending into areas that were politically independent in name. Monoculture was a characteristic of regions falling under imperialist domination. Certain countries in Latin America such as Costa Rica and Guatemala were forced by United States capitalist firms to concentrate so heavily on growing bananas that they were contemptuously known as “banana republics.” In Africa, this concentration on one or two cash crops for sale abroad had many harmful effects. Sometimes, cash crops were grown to the exclusion of staple foods—thus causing famines. For instance, in Gambia rice farming was popular before the colonial era, but so much of the best land was transferred to groundnuts that rice had to be imported on a large scale to try to counter the fact that famine was becoming endemic. In Asante, concentration on cocoa raised fears of famine in a region previously famous for yams and other foodstuff. Yet the threat of famine was a small disadvantage compared to the extreme vulnerability and insecurity of monoculture. When the crop was affected by internal factors such as disease, that amounted to an overwhelming disaster, as in the case of Gold Coast cocoa when it was hit by swollen-shoot disease in the 1940s. Besides, at all times, the price fluctuations (which were externally controlled) left the African producer helpless in the face of capitalist maneuvers."

"From a capitalist viewpoint, monocultures commended themselves most because they made colonial economies entirely dependent on the metropolitan buyers of their produce. At the end of the European slave trade, only a minority of Africans were sufficiently committed to capitalist exchange and sufficiently dependent upon European imports to wish to continue the relationship with Europe at all costs. Colonialism increased the dependence of Africa on Europe in terms of the numbers of persons brought into the money economy and in terms of the number of aspects of socio-economic life in Africa which derived their existence from the connection with the metropole. The ridiculous situation arose by which European trading firms, mining companies, shipping lines, banks, insurance houses, and plantations all exploited Africa and at the same time caused Africans to feel that without those capitalist services no money or European goods would be forthcoming, and therefore Africa was in debt to its exploiters! The factor of dependency made its impact felt in every aspect of the life of the colonies, and it can be regarded as the crowning vice among the negative social, political, and economic consequences of colonialism in Africa, being primarily responsible for the perpetuation of the colonial relationship into the epoch that is called neo-colonialism."

"Finally, attention must be drawn to one of the most important consequences of colonialism on African development, and that is the stunting effect on Africans as a physical species. Colonialism created conditions which led not just to periodic famine but to chronic undernourishment, malnutrition, and deterioration in the physique of the African people. If such a statement sounds wildly extravagant, it is only because bourgeois propaganda has conditioned even Africans to believe that malnutrition and starvation were the natural lot of Africans from time immemorial. A black child with a transparent rib cage, huge head, bloated stomach, protruding eyes, and twigs as arms and legs was the favorite poster of the large British charitable operation known as Oxfam. The poster represented a case of kwashiorkor—extreme malignant malnutrition. Oxfam called upon the people of Europe to save starving African and Asian children from kwashiorkor and such ills. Oxfam never bothered their consciences by telling them that capitalism and colonialism created the starvation, suffering, and misery of the child in the first place. There is an excellent study of the phenomenon of hunger on a world scale by a Brazilian scientist, Josue de Castro. It incorporates considerable data on the food and health conditions among Africans in their independent pre-colonial state or in societies untouched by capitalist pressures; and it then makes comparisons with colonial conditions. The study convincingly indicates that African diet was previously more varied, being based on a more diversified agriculture than was possible under colonialism. In terms of specific nutritional deficiencies, those Africans who suffered most under colonialism were those who were brought most fully into the colonial economy: namely, the urban workers."

"Those who have studied the nutritional conditions of “primitive” Africans in tropical Africa are unanimous in stating that they show no clinical signs of dietary deficiency. One of the most striking indications of the superiority of indigenous African diet is the magnificent condition of the teeth. One researcher among six ethnic groups in Kenya could not find a single case of tooth decay, not a single deformation of dental arch. But when those same people were transplanted and put on the “civilized” diet available under colonialism, their teeth began to decay at once."

"Education is crucial in any type of society for the preservation of the lives of its members and the maintenance of the social structure. Under certain circumstances, education also promotes social change. The greater portion of that education is informal, being acquired by the young from the example and behavior of elders in the society. Under normal circumstances, education grows out of the environment; the learning process being directly related to the pattern of work in the society. [...] Indeed, the most crucial aspect of pre-colonial African education was its relevance to Africans, in sharp contrast with what was later introduced. The following features of indigenous African education can be considered outstanding: its close links with social life, both in a material and spiritual sense; its collective nature; its many-sidedness; and its progressive development in conformity with the successive stages of physical, emotional, and mental development of the child. There was no separation of education and productive activity or any division between manual and intellectual education. Altogether, through mainly informal means, pre-colonial African education matched the realities of pre-colonial African society and produced well-rounded personalities to fit into that society."

"The colonizers did not introduce education into Africa: they introduced a new set of formal educational institutions which partly supplemented and partly replaced those which were there before. The colonial system also stimulated values and practices which amounted to new informal education. The main purpose of the colonial school system was to train Africans to help man the local administration at the lowest ranks and to staff the private capitalist firms owned by Europeans. In effect, that meant selecting a few Africans to participate in the domination and exploitation of the continent as a whole. It was not an educational system that grew out of the African environment or one that was designed to promote the most rational use of material and social resources. It was not an educational system designed to give young people confidence and pride as members of African societies, but one which sought to instill a sense of deference towards all that was European and capitalist. Education in Europe was dominated by the capitalist class. The same class bias was automatically transferred to Africa; and to make matters worse the racism and cultural boastfulness harbored by capitalism were also included in the package of colonial education. Colonial schooling was education for subordination, exploitation, the creation of mental confusion, and the development of underdevelopment."

"A country’s wealth comes not from taxes but from production."

"Some of the contradictions between the content of colonial education and the reality of Africa were really incongruous. On a hot afternoon in some tropical African school, a class of black shining faces would listen to their geography lesson on the seasons of the year—spring, summer, autumn, and winter. They would learn about the and the river Rhine but nothing about the of or the river . If those students were in a British colony, they would dutifully write that "we defeated the in 1588"—at a time when Hawkins was stealing Africans and being knighted by Queen Elizabeth I for so doing. If they were in a French colony, they would learn that "the , our ancestors, had blue eyes," and they would be convinced that "Napoleon was our greatest general"—the same Napoleon who reinstituted slavery in the Caribbean island of , and was only prevented from doing the same in Haiti because his forces were defeated by an even greater strategist and tactician, the African Toussaint L'Ouverture."

"There is no getting away from the conclusion reached by the African educationalist Abdou Moumini that “colonial education corrupted the thinking and sensibilities of the African and filled him with abnormal complexes.”"

"What is seldom commented upon is the fact that many Africans were the victims of fascism at the hands of the Portuguese and Spanish, at the hands of the Italians and the Vichy French regime for a brief period in the late 1930s and the early 1940s, and at the hands of the British and in South Africa throughout this century. The fascist colonial powers were retarded capitalist states, where the government police machinery united with the Catholic church and the capitalists to suppress Portuguese and Spanish workers and peasants and to keep them ignorant. Understandably, the fascist colonialists wanted to do the same to African working people, and in addition they vented their racism on Africans, just as Hitler had done on the Jews."

"Like most colonial administrations, that of the Italians in Libya disregarded the culture of the Africans. However, after the fascist Mussolini came to power, the disregard gave way to active hostility, especially in relation to the Arabic language and the Moslem religion. The Portuguese and Spanish had always shown contempt for African language and religion. Schools of kindergarten and primary level for Africans in Portuguese colonies were nothing but agencies for the spread of the Portuguese language. Most schools were controlled by the Catholic church, as a reflection of the unity of church and state in fascist Portugal. In the little-known Spanish colony of Guinea (Rio Muni), the small amount of education given to Africans was based on eliminating the use of local languages by the pupils and on instilling in their hearts "the holy fear of God." Schools in colonial Africa were usually blessed with the names of saints or bestowed with the names of rulers, explorers, and governors from the colonizing power. In Spanish Guinea, that practice was followed, resulting in the fact that Rio Muni children had to pass by the José Antonio school—the equivalent of saying the Adolf Hitler school if the region were German, for the school was named in honor of José Antonio, the founder of the Spanish fascist party."

"Early educational commissions also accorded high priority to religious and moral flavoring of instruction—something that was disappearing in Europe itself. The role of the Christian church in the educational process obviously needs special attention. The aries were as much part of the colonizing forces as were the explorers, traders, and soldiers. There may be room for arguing whether in a given colony the missionaries brought the other colonialist forces or vice versa, but there is no doubting the fact that missionaries were agents of colonialism in the practical sense, whether or not they saw themselves in that light. The imperialist adventurer Sir Henry Johnston disliked missionaries, but he conceded in praise of them that "each mission station is an exercise in colonisation." In Europe, the church had long held a monopoly over schooling from feudal times right into the capitalist era. By the late nineteenth century, that situation was changing in Europe; but, as far as the European colonizers were concerned, the church was free to handle the colonial educational system in Africa. The strengths and weaknesses of that schooling were very much to be attributed to the church."

"The church's role was primarily to preserve the social relations of colonialism, as an extension of the role it played in preserving the social relations of capitalism in Europe. Therefore, the Christian church stressed humility, docility, and acceptance. Ever since the days of slavery in the West Indies, the church had been brought in on condition that it should not excite the African slaves with doctrines of equality before God. In those days, they taught slaves to sing that all things were bright and beautiful, and that the slavemaster in his castle was to be accepted as God's work just like the slave living in a miserable hovel and working twenty hours per day under the whip. Similarly, in colonial Africa, churches could be relied upon to preach turning the other cheek in the face of exploitation, and they drove home the message that everything would be right in the next world. Only the Dutch Reformed church of South Africa was openly racist, but all others were racist in so far as their European personnel were no different from other whites who had imbibed racism and cultural imperialism as a consequence of the previous centuries of contact between Europeans and the rest of the world."

"It is a common myth within capitalist thought that the individual through drive and hard work can become a capitalist. In the U.S.A., it is usual to refer to an individual like John D. Rockefeller, Sr., as someone who rose "from rags to riches." To complete the moral of the Rockefeller success story, it would be necessary to fill in the details on all the millions of people who had to be exploited in order for one man to become a multimillionaire. The acquisition of wealth is not due to hard work alone, or the Africans working as slaves in America and the West Indies would have been the wealthiest group in the world. The individualism of the capitalist must be seen against the hard and unrewarded work of the masses."

"Apart from language, the pillar of cultural imperialism in most colonies was religion."

"s are designed to function as props to a given society, and the educated in the young age groups automatically carry over their values when their turn comes to make decisions in the society."

"The only positive development in colonialism was when it ended."

"The process by which Africa produced thirty-odd sovereign states was an extremely complex one, characterized by an interplay of forces and calculations on the part of various groups of Africans, on the part of the colonial powers, and on the part of interest groups inside the metropolis. [...] It must be stressed that the move for the regaining of independence was initiated by the African people; and, to whatever extent that objective was realized, the motor force of the people must be taken into account."

"Apart from the Portuguese, the Belgians were the colonialists who were the most reluctant in withdrawing in the face of African nationalism. In 1955, a Belgian professor suggested independence for the Congo in thirty years, and he was regarded as a radical! Of course, Congo turned out to be one of the places where imperialism was successful in hijacking the African revolution. But, the order of events must still be considered. Firstly, it was the intensity of the Congolese and African demands that made independence thinkable, as far as the Belgians were concerned; and, secondly, it was precisely the strength and potential of the nationalist movement under Lumumba which forced the imperialists to resort to murder and invasion."

"In brief, it is enough to say that the African people as a collective had upset the plans of the colonialist, and had surged forward to freedom. Such a position may seem to be a mere revival of a certain rosy and romantic view of African independence which was popular in the early 1960s, but, on the contrary, it is fully cognizant of the shabby reality of neo-colonial Africa. It needs to be affirmed (from a revolutionary, socialist, and people-centered perspective) that even “flag independence” represented a positive development out of colonialism. Securing the attributes of sovereignty is but one stage in the process of regaining African independence. By 1885, when Africa was politically and juridically partitioned, the peoples and polities had already lost a great deal of freedom. In its relations with the external world, Africa had lost a considerable amount of control over its own economy, ever since the fifteenth century. However, the loss of political sovereignty at the time of the Scramble was decisive. By the same reasoning, it is clear that the regaining of political sovereignty by the 1960s constitutes an inescapable first step in regaining maximum freedom to choose and to develop in all spheres."

"As far as the mass of peasants and workers were concerned, the removal of overt foreign rule actually cleared the way towards a more fundamental appreciation of exploitation and imperialism. Even in territories such as Cameroon, where the imperialists brutally crushed peasants and workers and installed their own tried and tested puppet, advance had been made insofar as the masses had already participated in trying to determine their own destiny. That is the element of conscious activity that signifies the ability to make history, by grappling with the heritage of objective material conditions and social relations."

"As late as 1959, a friend and colleague of Albert Schweitzer defended his unsterile hospital in the following terms: Now to the domestic animals at the Hospital. People have been shocked by the informality with which animals and people mix, and although it is perhaps not always defensible on hygienic grounds, the mixture adds considerably to the charm of the place. The writer was a dental surgeon from New York, who would obviously have had a fit if a goat or chicken had wandered into his New York surgery. He knew full well that at Schweitzer’s hospital “the goats, dogs and cats visit hospital wards teeming with microbial life of the most horrifying varieties,” but he defended their habitation with Africans because that was part of the culture and charm that had to be preserved!"

"African independence was greeted with pomp, ceremony, and a resurgence of traditional African music and dance. “A new day has dawned,” “we are on the threshold of a new era,” “we have now entered into the political kingdom”—those were the phrases of the day, and they were repeated until they became clichés."

"…it becomes self-defeating for someone in the Caribbean or in the United States to suggest that Africa is the sole, or even the main, vehicle of black struggle. Because black struggle must be universalized wherever black people happen to be."

"When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic prejudices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work. … The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. … The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods."

"Jehovah … gave his worshippers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity."

"Philanthropy means to steal wholesale, and give away retail."

"The blood of three oppressed races runs in my veins."

"I am proudest of my Negro extraction."

"Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money."

"The materialist theory of knowledge amounts, then, to this statement, that the human organ of cognition radiates no metaphysical light, but is a piece of Nature which pictures other pieces of Nature whose essence is explained when we describe it and bring it in connection with the whole Universe as the one Reality and the real Unity. Such a description demands from the epistemologist or philosopher that he should treat his subject in the same precise way as the animal world is treated by the zoologist. Should I be reproached with not following this precept immediately, I would point to Rome which, too, was not built in one day."

"One who knows little may explain that little with more ease and efficacy than one who has his head stuffed full of the prescribed bunch of official wisdom."

"Nothing can be learned without mental exertion. If you are concerned in your further development, you will recognize the Christian word as to the curse of work as untrue. Work cannot be descended from sin, for it is a blessing. You will have experienced in yourself how elated one feels after successful physical or mental work."

"My logic deserves its proletarian qualification for the reason that it requires for its understanding the overcoming of all prejudices by which the capitalist world is held together."

"Logic aims to instruct the human mind as to its own nature and processes; it will lay bare the interior working of our mind for our guidance. The object of the study of logic is thought, its nature, and its proper classification."

"The human brain performs the function of thinking as involuntarily as the chest the function of breathing. However, we can, by our will, stop breathing for a while, and accelerate or retard the breathing movements. In the same way, the will can control the thoughts. We may choose any object as the subject matter of our thought, and yet we may quickly convince ourselves that the power of our will and the freedom of the mind are not any greater than the freedom of the chest in breathing."

"It is with logic as it is with other sciences. They draw wisdom from the mysterious source of plain experience. Agriculture, e. g., aims to teach the farmer how to cultivate the soil; but fields were tilled long before any agricultural college had begun its lectures. In the same way human beings think without ever having heard of logic. But by practice they improve their innate faculty of thought, they make progress, they gradually learn to make better use of it. Finally, just as the farmer arrives at the science of agriculture, so the thinker arrives at logic, acquires a clear consciousness of his faculty of thought and a professional dexterity in applying it."

"Much of what I have to say for my case may sound wonderful, because it runs counter to the popular prejudice, but the only witness required to prove the truth of my statements is the clear brain of my pupil, who has only to examine his own experience without preconceived notions, in order to find proofs on every hand."

"It is a peculiarity of thought that it never stays with itself, but always digresses to other things."

"But it is not alone the harmony of music which has such a power over the mind. The harmony of colors, every art and science, has the same power. Even the most common craft, and the most prosaic of all prose, the chase after the dollar, may take possession of a man’s soul and prostrate him in adoration before its idol."

"Anything which may take possession of one’s soul shares its sublimity with all other things, and is for this reason at the same time something ordinary. Without such a dialectic clarification of our consciousness all adoration is idol worship."

"Adherents of formal logic may be compared to a maker of porcelain dishes who would contend that he was simply paying attention to the form of his dishes, pots, and vases, but that he did not have anything to do with the raw material."

"Such is the importance of Dietzgen—a worker who arrived at dialectical materialism, i.e., Marx’s philosophy, independently."

"The problem of ideology ... has especially to do with the concepts and the languages of practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation."

"Much of my professional life has been concerned with the politics of who we think we are. I've been riveted by the question of how we can understand the chaos of identifications which we seek to reach somehow, 'ourselves'. Of course this arrival never occurs; we'll never be ourselves, whatever that could mean."

"Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite."

"You know what Lenin says about 'intellectuals'. Individually certain of them may (politically) be declared revolutionaries, and courageous ones. But as a mass, they remain 'incorrigibly' petty-bourgeois in ideology."

"To become 'ideologists of the working class' (Lenin), 'organic intellectuals' of the proletariat (Gramsci), intellectuals have to carry out a radical revolution in their ideas: a long, painful and difficult re-education. An endless external and internal struggle."

"Class instinct is subjective and spontaneous. ... To arrive at proletarian class positions, the class instinct of proletarians only needs to be educated; the class instinct of the petty bourgeoisie, and hence of intellectuals, has, on the contrary, to be revolutionized."

"The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx, two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks (Thales), the second by Galileo. Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History."

"The number-one philosophical battle therefore takes place on the frontier between the scientific and the ideological. There the idealist philosophies which exploit the sciences struggle against the materialist philosophies which serve the sciences."

"To be a Communist is to be a partisan and artisan of Marxism-Leninist philosophy: of dialectical materialism."

"The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as its sine qua non not only the reproduction of its ‘skills’ but also the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology. ... It is in the forms and under the forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the reproduction of the skills of labour power."

"The proletariat must seize state power in order to destroy the existing bourgeois state apparatus and, in a first phase, replace it with a quite different, proletarian, state apparatus, then in later phases set in motion a radical process, that of the destruction of the state."

"I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions: ..."

"But someone is bound to question ... by what right I regard as Ideological State Apparatuses, institutions which for the most part do not possess public status, but are quite simply private institutions. As a conscious Marxist, Gramsci already forestalled this objection in one sentence. The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its ‘authority’. The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is ‘above the law’: the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are ‘public’ or ‘private’. What matters is how they function."

"For you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary ‘obviousness’ (obviousnesses are always primary): it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc.). Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word ‘name a thing’ or ‘have a meaning’ (therefore including the obviousness of the ‘transparency’ of language), the ‘obviousness’ that you and I are subjects – and that that does not cause any problems – is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are ‘obviousnesses’) obviousnesses as obviousnesses."

"While speaking in ideology, and from within ideology we have to outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific (i.e. subject-less) discourse on ideology."

"All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject. ... ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’"

"Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)."

"Marx compellingly proved it in Capital Volume Two, that no production is possible which does not allow for the reproduction of the material conditions of productions: the reproduction of the means of production."

"What do children learn at school? They go varying distances in their studies, but at any rate they learn to read, to write and to add - i.e. a number of techniques, and a number of other things as well, including elements (which may be rudimentary or on the contrary thoroughgoing) of scientific' or 'literary culture', which are directly useful in the different jobs in production (one instruction for manual workers, another for technicians, a third for engineers, a final one for higher management, etc.). Thus they learn 'know-how'."

"The class (or class alliance) in power cannot lay down the law in the ISAs as easily as it can in the )repressive) State apparatus, not only because the former ruling classes are able to retain strong positions there for a long time, but also because the resistance of the exploited classes is able to finds find means and occasions to express itself there, either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in struggle."

"Into the 1960s the new Marx, the newly discovered Marx, was the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts. These are, as Marx once wrote to Engels in their later years, green, in contrast to the later grey of theory and the dull industrial culture of factory civilization which it sought to explain. Reading the young Marx was fun, more or less; reading Capital, in contrast, was hard work. Althusser sternly took on the duty of reading Capital, writing a very serious book called Reading Capital, and insisting that we should all read Capital seriously, in its multiple volumes, preferably in the original (Althusser and Balibar 1970). The early Marx was Marx before he was Marx, foreplay rather than the real action. Capital was taken to represent a new form of knowledge, building upon a significant epistemological break or rupture. We all became epistemologists. Nobody seemed to notice that this was a step away from practice, rather than towards it. But these were times of great seriosity, and high illusions, as well as very serious scholarship. Yet there was something important in this mission. Marx’s early writings give us the perspective of his laboratory. We can watch him thinking, and it can be an exhilarating experience. But his life’s work was Capital, and the architectonic of that work repays serious close reading. Rightly or wrongly, Marx had become convinced that the mode of presentation of this work was crucial; that there was a best way to explain capital, and that he had sorted it out. He was also convinced that capital was the privileged category, to be accessed via the logic of the commodity form. It did seem something of an irony that none, or few, of the Marxists had read Marx, because it was too hard. And this was part and parcel of the story of the fate of marxism. Engels, Kautsky (the pope of Marxism), then Lenin, and finally Stalin had reduced Marx’s theory to a series of axioms or platitudes about surplus value, historical and finally dialectical materialism. Marxists got by reciting these axioms in their daily denunciations of capitalism. Marxism had become its own caricature. Althusser blew the whistle on this state of affairs. After Althusser, it was inadmissible for Marxists to cut corners. They were now compelled to deal with their own theoretical heritage. A few clichés concerning the ubiquity of alienation and the need for revolution would no longer do."

"Lewis has written that "man makes history." Althusser unleashes a pamphlet at him maintaining that such is not the case: "Ce sont les masses qui font l'histoire." I challenge anyone to find a social scientist outside the Marxist camp who can seriously pose a problem of this type."

"Althusser was not a charlatan. He himself really believed that he had discovered something significant—or was about to discover something significant—when his illness struck. It is not because he was mad that he was a mediocre philosopher; indeed, the recognition of his own intellectual mediocrity may have contributed to his depressions, and thence to his loss of sanity. If there is something humiliating about the Althusserian episode in intellectual history then, the humiliation is not his alone. He was a guru, complete with texts, a cult, and true believers; and he showed occasional insight into the pathos of his followers, noting that they imitated his "smallest gestures and inflections." Althusser's work and his life, with his drugs, his analysts, his self-pity, his illusions, and his moods, take on a curiously hermetic quality. He comes to resemble some minor medieval scholastic, desperately scrabbling around in categories of his own imagining. But even the most obscure theological speculation usually had as its goal something of significance. From Althusser's musings, however, nothing followed. They were not subject to proof and they had no intelligible worldly application, except as abstruse political apologetics. What does it say about modern academic life that such a figure can have trapped teachers and students for so long in the cage of his insane fictions, and traps them still?"

"If people want to anticipate the development of Capitalism over a long period a knowledge of Marx is a much more effective starting point than a knowledge of Wieser, Boehm-Bawerk, Pareto or even Marshall (though the last-named is in this respect much superior). But Marxian economics would be a poor basis for running a central bank or anticipating the effects of a change in the rate of discount."

"I have pointed out that the real source of the superiority of Marxian economics is in the field of explaining and anticipating a process of economic evolution. It is not the specific economic concepts used by Marx, but the definite specification of the institutional framework in which the economic process goes on in capitalist society that makes it possible to establish a theory of economic evolution different from mere historical description. Most orthodox Marxists, however, believe that their superiority in understanding the evolution of Capitalism is due to the economic concepts with which Marx worked, i.e. to his using the labour theory of value. They think that the abandonment of the classical labour theory of value in favour of the theory of marginal utility is responsible for the failure of "bourgeois" economics to explain the fundamental phenomena of capitalist evolution. That they are wrong can be easily shown by considering the economic meaning of the labour theory of value. It is nothing but a static theory of general economic equilibrium. In an individualistic exchange economy, based on division of labour, in which there is no central authority to direct which commodities, and in what quantities, are to be produced, the problem is solved automatically by the fact that competition enforces such a distribution of productive resources between the various industries that prices are proportional to the amount of labour necessary for producing the respective commodities (these being the "natural prices" of classical economics)."

"Our results may be summarised as follows: (1) The superiority of Marxian economics in analysing Capitalism is not due to the economic concepts used by Marx (the labour theory of value), but to the exact specification of the institutional datum distinguishing Capitalism from the concept of an exchange economy in general. (2) The specification of this institutional datum allows of the establishment of a theory of economic evolution from which a "necessary" trend of certain data in the capitalist system can be deduced. (3) Jointly with the theory of historical materialism this theory of economic evolution accounts for the actual changes occurring in the capitalist system and forms a basis for anticipating the future."

"The fundamental propositions of the theory of interest being obtained from a theory of production into which time does not enter as a variable, it follows that interest is not connected with time in any different way from the way in which the general theory of production is connected with time."

"Having treated the theoretical determination of economic equilibrium in a socialist society, let us see how equilibrium can be determined by a method of trial and error similar to that in a competitive market. This method of trial and error is based on the parametric function of prices. Let the Central Planning Board start with a given set of prices chosen at random. All decision of the managers of production and of the productive resources in public ownership and also all decisions of individuals as consumers and as suppliers of labour are made on the basis of these prices. As a result of these decisions the quantity demanded and supplied of each commodity is determined. If the quantity demanded of a commodity is not equal to the quantity supplied the price of that commodity has to be changed. It has to be raised if demand exceeds supply and lowered if the reverse is the case. Thus the Central Planning Board fixes a new set of prices which serves as a basis for new decisions, and which results in a new set of quantities demanded and supplied. Through this process of trial and error equilibrium prices are finally determined. Actually the process of trial and error would, of course, proceed on the basis of the prices historically given. Relatively small adjustments of those prices would constantly be made, and there would be no necessity of building up an entirely new price system."

"The rules of consistency of decisions and of efficiency in carrying them out in a socialist economy are exactly the same as those that govern the actual behavior of entrepreneurs on a purely competitive market. Competition forces entrepreneurs to act much as they would have to act were they managers of production in a socialist system. The fact that free competition tends to enforce rules of behavior similar to those in an ideal planned economy makes competition the pet idea of the economist. But if competition enforces the same rules of allocating resources as would have to be accepted in a rationally conducted socialist economy, what is the use of bothering about socialism? Why change the whole economic system if the same result can be attained within the present system, if only it could be forced to maintain the competitive standard? But the analogy between the allocation of resources in a competitive capitalist and a socialist economy is only a purely formal one. The formal principles are the same, but the actual allocation may be quite different."

"The capitalist system is far removed from the model of a competitive economy as elaborated by economic theory. And even if it conformed to it, it would be, as we have seen, far from maximizing social welfare. Only a socialist economy can fully satisfy the claim made by many economists with regard to the achievements of free competition."

"The actual capitalist system is much better described by the analysis of Mrs. Robinson and of Professor Chamberlin than by that of Walras and of Marshall. But the work of the latter two will be more useful in solving the problems of a socialist system."

"It seems to us, indeed, that the real danger of socialism is that of a bureaucratization of economic life, and not the impossibility of coping with the problem of allocation of resources. Unfortunately, we do not see how the same, or even greater, danger can be averted under monopolistic capitalism. Officials subject to democratic control seem preferable to private corporation executives who practically are responsible to nobody."

"An economic system based on private enterprise and private property of the means of production can work only as long as the security of private property and of income derived from property and from enterprise is maintained. The very existence of a government bent on introducing socialism is a constant threat to this security. Therefore, the capitalist economy cannot function under a socialist government unless the government is socialist in name only."

"The administration of scarce resources is influenced by the standards of civilisation and by the organisation and institutions of the society in which men live. The influence is a two-fold one. The wants which the resources serve to satisfy are produc of standards of civilisation historically developed in society. The ways in which scarce resources are procured, adapted to various purposes, distributed among different persons are all results of social organisation and social institutions. Forms of ownership, institutions like corporations and banks, technical knowledge acquired in institutes of research and transmitted by schools, regulation by government agencies, habits and moral standards all influence the ways of administering scarce resources."

"No scientific law applies when its prerequisite conditions do not occur. Since the administration of scarce resources is influenced by social organisation and institutions, such organisation and institutions are among the conditions implied in economic laws. Consequently, economic laws which hold under one type of social organisation may fail to do so under another type. Most economic laws are thus "limited historically" to certain given types of social organisation and institutions. This, however, does not imply any basic difference between the laws of economics (or of other social sciences) and the laws of the natural sciences. The latter, too, are contingent upon conditions which are subject to change. Different laws of the natural sciences have different degrees of historic permanence, usually a much higher one than the laws of economics, though even this is not always the case (some laws of meteorology are less permanent than some laws of economics). The differences is but one of degree. Like all scientific laws, economic laws are established in order to make successful prediction of the outcome of human actions."

"Our conclusion about the objectivity of economic science may seem startling. Economists are rather notorious for being unable to reach agreement and for being divided into opposing "schools of thought," "orthodox" and "unorthodox," "bourgeois" and "socialist," and many others. The existence of profound disagr ment among economists, however, does not refute our thesis about the objectivity of economics as a science."

"The existence of an ideological element in each science has caused some representatives of the sociology of knowledge to deny the objective validity of scientific statements, particularly in the domain of the social sciences. Such a conclusion is unwarranted. The validity of scientific statements can be ascertained with impersonal objectivity through an appeal to facts. Predictions derived from scientific statements are or are not borne out under the test of verification. The outcome is entirely independent of human motivations, conscious or subconscious; it depends entirely on the correctness of the scientific procedure applied in establishing the statements."

"Planning and the market do not exclude each other. Planning may utilise the uniformity of behaviour patterns of units operating in the market as one of the means of influencing their decisions. This happens, for instance, when the planning authority imposes tariffs or pays subsidies in order to influence the quantities bought or sold. Sometimes regulation—a special method of planning—is necessary in order to enable the market to achieve co-ordination of the units' decisions. The two methods of co-ordination co-exist with each other. However, in different historic societies, one or the other of these methods plays the preponderant role and appears as the chief means of co-ordinating all the units in the economy. The development of economics as a science is closely connected with the growing preponderance of the market in modern times. The co-ordinating operation of the market and, at times, the failure of the market to achieve co-ordination of decisions have posed the intellectual problems which have led to the emergence and growth of economic science."

"Capitalism operates only on the basis of private costs, only private costs are rewarded and repaid, and not social costs. And even in a competitive capitalism where competition forces producers to sell at cost price takes into account only private costs and not social costs."

"Human needs, although originally derived from biological necessity, are thus a result of the existence of society and are conditioned by the stage of development which society has reached."

"In my essay I refuted the Hayek-Robbins argument by showing how a market mechanism could be established in a socialist economy which would lead to the solution of the simultaneous equations by means of an empirical procedure of trial and error. [...] Were I to rewrite my essay today my task would be much simpler. My answer to Hayek and Robbins would be: so what’s the trouble? Let us put the simultaneous equations on an electronic computer and we shall obtain the solution in less than a second. The market process with its cumbersome tatonnements appears old-fashioned. Indeed, it may be considered as a computing device of the preelectronic age."

"Mathematical programming assisted by electronic computers becomes the fundamental instrument of long-term economic planning, as well as of solving dynamic economic problems of a more limited scope. Here, the electronic computer does not replace the market. It fulfils a function which the market never was able to perform."

"The basic sources of the defects in Lange's theoretical analysis are the emphasis on formal structure, the attempt to generalize without first specifying in detail the facts to be generalized, and the failure to recognize that the ultimate test of the validity of a theory is not conformity to the canons of formal logic but the ability to deduce facts that have not yet been observed, that are capable of being contradicted by observation, and that subsequent observation does not contradict. In consequence, these defects are found in much economic theorizing that is not taxonomic in character. They are, however, especially likely to arise when the taxonomic approach is adopted, as their presence in the writings of so able and careful a theorist as Lange testifies."

"Malema: So these popcorn and mushrooming political parties in Zimbabwe, they will never find friendship in us. They can insult us here from air-conditioned offices of Sandton, we are unshaken. They must stop shouting at us, they must go and fight with their battle in Zimbabwe and win. Even if they've got ground and they are formed on the basis of solid ground in Zim, why are they speaking in Sandton and not Mashonaland or Matabeleland? ... Let them go back and go and fight there. Even when the ANC was underground in exile, we had our internal underground forces fighting for freedom. Fisher: You live in Sandton. Malema: And we have never spoken from ... exile. Let me tell you before you are tjatjarag [i.e. chatty]. This is a building of a revolutionary party, and you know nothing about the revolution. Fisher: So, so they are not welcome in Sandton but you are? Malema: So here you behave or else you jump. [Fisher and others laugh.] Don't laugh. Fisher: You're joking. Malema: Chief, can you get security to remove this thing here. If you are not going to behave ... call security to take you out. This is not a news room this. This is a revolutionary house. And you don't come here with that tendency. Don't come here with that white tendency, not here. ... If you've got a tendency of undermining blacks even while you work, you are in a wrong place ... Fisher: That's rubbish. Malema: ... and you can go out! Fisher: Absolutely rubbish. Malema: Rubbish is what you have covered in that trouser. ... You are a small boy, you can't do anything. ... Bastard! Go out! You bloody agent! ... So we think that we need to ensure that we encourage Zanu PF comrades to engage in peaceful means."

"We are worse [off] than we were during the times of apartheid. We are being killed by our own people. We are being oppressed by our own government. … Every mine has a politician inside. They give them money every month, they call it shares. But it is a protection fee to protect whites against the workers."

"Absolutely, what we need to do is that companies must just surrender 51%. ... They have exploited the wealth of that country [South Africa] for far too long. It is time that the people are now beginning to benefit. Our people don't have money to buy those shares, and they will never have money to buy those shares. ... Under president Mbeki they had 2/3 majority, they could have done anything they wanted. Till today they have not done anything. ... because the ANC did not want to tamper with the economic structure and ... property ownership ... We are going to engage in a very persuasive, peaceful engagement with capital. ... We are meeting captains of the industry. Some of them are beginning to respond to our memorandum. Some are saying, well these are doable proposals. ... We'll not use that [civil disobedience] until that our people are pushed to the limit. ... These people are prepared to give shares to the black elite who are politically connected. ... why not give it to the workers themselves who are ... making this company ... what it is."

"There is nothing wrong with crushing white supremacy. It is wrong to think you’re superior to others on the basis of the colour of your skin ... and what perpetuates that is the economic exclusion of our people. ... If we can’t find the necessary skill‚ let’s go and fetch the old man. ‘Old man‚ you are coming to mentor this young one to produce the best product’ to build a better SA."

"Zuma is standing between us and our enemy. Move out of the way. Zuma must pave the way because they [whites] are the one who stole our land. ... White people are going to return our land the same way Zuma will return our money. White people must never think we have abandoned the land question. We will never abandon it. We are the land, our identity is our land. We are nothing without our land. ... What we do with it is none of your business. Solomon Mahlangu died for this land."

"Zuma ... stands in the way towards acquiring land for our people. That is why we will continue attacking him, ... We are at war with whites who took our land and we now want it back. We want our land and we want our wealth; if you stand in our way we will crush you, ..."

"So black people, you are subjects of white people. Even under ANC, even under the so-called democracy, you are subject, you are servant of white people. No white man will be served by me. I do not serve white masters. ... I am here to disturb the white man's peace. ... The white man has been too comfortable for too long. We are here unashamedly to disturb the white man's peace, because we have never known peace. We don't know what peace looks like. ... They have been swimming in a pool of privilege. They have been enjoying themselves because they always owned our land. We, the rightful owners, our peace was disturbed by white man's arrival here. They committed a black genocide. They killed our people during land dispossession. ... They found peaceful Africans here. They killed them. They slaughtered them like animals. We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now. What we are calling for is for peaceful occupation of the land. And we don't owe anyone apology about that. ... Revolution is about making those who are comfortable uncomfortable. ... Revolution is about disturbing the peace of those who are swimming in a peaceful environment through exploitation of the working class. ... Our strategic objective is the defeat of white monopoly capital. And that defeat [...] means the ownership of property must change and be transferred into the hands of the people. Their mines must be nationalized, the banks must be nationalized, the land must be expropriated without compensation. ... But white minority be warned, we will take our land no matter what."

"I am not for reconciliation, I am for justice. There is no reconciliation without justice and justice is the return of land. [...] AfriForum is a boeremag. It’s a group of Afrikaners who still wish for apartheid. They will never see it. Afrikaner boys, die poppe sal dans. The EFF is coming for you boys. Afrikaner boys, the ANC has made you to think this thing is still Orange Free State. This thing is not Orange Free State. This is Free State. When we take over power, Afrikaner males, you will know your place. Just pray, pray to [your] ancestors, pray to Malan, pray to Verwoerd, pray and ask them for EFF not to come into power. Because [if] we come into power, Afrikaner men, this side! This is where you belong, this is how you are going to behave. They must know, these Afrikaner males, they must know, we are not scared of them ideologically, politically and otherwise. We can take each other toe to toe."

"One of the things that we can learn [from] the Cubans is that they are highly politically conscientized. ...they understand what constitute progress and what constitute the enemy. And they have come to appreciate that they are in the situation they are because of the choice they have made, of not wanting to follow what the big brother America says they must do. And they know that if it was not [for the] illegal embargo imposed on them, they were actually going to be a much much more better country. Look at them, they have succeeded, the better education, better healthcare, the illiteracy levels are extreme low, under difficult circumstances. [The] quality of education, the quality of primary healthcare [of some country's without embargoes] is nothing compared to a country [Cuba] which is suffering from a serious economic embargo. So we can learn from the Cubans through their determination, through their appreciation that they are a unique nation, and have chosen their path, and they will lead by their conviction. [Interviewer Bryce-Pease asks Malema about Cuba's socialist-democratic model, lack of human rights, lack of freedom of association or freedom of speech among the opposition, and whether South Africa should take those as lessons.] Malema: ...if they think that their model works for them I am not the one to impose on them what should be the type of political systems in Cuba. They are the ones who can chose which direction they want to take. [Bryce-Pease: Do you see a model like Cuba existing in South Africa?] Malema: When we can do actually much better, our democratic system is intact, it is working [...] but there are a lot of things to learn from Cuba [for instance] inculcating the history of the revolution in our education system, so that everybody else is conscientized... Of course there will be some few elements who are not happy. ... [Castro] is bound to commit mistakes but generally we are more than happy with the type of work he has done for the Cubans and for the Africans as well, having contributed to the decolonization of Africa and the defeat of apartheid in southern Africa..."

"We all know that the Dutch gangsters arrived here and took our land by force. And the struggle has since been about the return of the land to the hands of rightful owners. ... Yet those who went to negotiate for our people during the [Codesa] negotiations sold out this fundamental principle, which constituted the struggle against colonialism."

"Victory will only be victory if the land is restored in the hands of rightful owners. And rightful owners unashamedly is black people. No white person is a rightful owner of the land here in South Africa and in the whole of the African continent. This is our continent, it belongs to us."

"The rejection of other Africans is a self-rejection, it is a self-hatred, it's because you don't know who you are. If you know who you are you will never reject people from DRC, you will never reject people from Nigeria, you will never reject people from Ghana, you will never reject people from Zimbabwe, because if you [ap]praise your history, your are actually Zimbabwean, if you [ap]praise your history, you are actually Nigerian. That is what makes us African. That is the beauty of Africa, we share history, we share culture, and all of that. Civilization started here."

"We also want to call upon our fellow Indians here in Natal to respect Africans. They are ill-treating them worse than Afrikaners will do. We don’t want that to continue here in Natal. This is not anti-Indian statement, it is the truth. Indians who own shops don't pay our people, but they give them food parcels. They must be paid a minimum wage. We're not going to nurse feelings here."

"If you don't own a piece of land, you're a coward."

"I heard that these whites are coming to march again, they will announce a new date. I’m thinking national chair we must organise a counter-march and meet them half way. We cannot allow white people to do as they wish in this country, like they’re doing in Palestine. Let them announce the day they’re coming back. Let us meet them toe to toe, let us teach them who owns South Africa. We cannot be harassed in our own country during apartheid and be harassed in our own country during a democratic dispensation by a nonsense Afrikaner community. It must come to an end, let us meet them toe to toe."

"Every land in South Africa should be expropriated without compensation and it will be under the state. The state should be the custodian of the land. ... No one is going to lose his or her house, no one is going to lose his or her flat, no one is going to lose his or her factory or industry. All we are saying is they will not have the ownership of the land."

"Chinese are like Indians. They think they're close to whiteness. When they practice racism they even become worse than whites. There are even Blacks who mimic whiteness. All of this needs to be confronted."

"I know for a fact that Chinese are taking over strategic sectors in Africa. Their ownership is mounting up and [is] even almost worse than white domination."

"We have taken a decision that we are going to remove the mayor of PE. Why? Why not [mayor of DA-led Johannesburg] Mashaba, why not Solly [mayor of DA-led Tshwane]? Because the mayor of DA in PE is a white man. So, these people, when you want to hit them hard – go after a white man. They feel a terrible pain, because you have touched a white man. Not because Mashaba and Solly will not be touched, they will be touched, don't worry. But we are starting with this whiteness. We are cutting the throat of whiteness. Trollip will not be a mayor after the 6th of April, if they give us that date."

"It didn’t end there [with genocide]. They passed law after law‚ taking land from our people. Yet investors never left the country. When they passed the Land Act of 1913‚ investors never left the country. Investors came into the country."

"All white people who are voting DA, who are angry with what we are going to do in PE, who have insulted us since we announced this decision, and mobilised some of your people in the media, to insult us and say all of this, all of you combined can go to hell! We don't care about you. We don't care about you. We don’t care about White feelings."

"...any farm, on which a bond is registered after December 2017, will not be paid by our government. The bond system is anyway a criminal syndicate, ... We have no respect for banks, because they are run by criminals."

"The Zulu king [Zwelithini] must stop these threats of violence. We are not scared. I am scared of no one. No amount of violence can scare me because some of us are surprised that we are still alive today. ... We want every Zulu-speaking person to get a piece of land. If the king wants to give land through the Ingonyama Trust, he must convince the EFF and the government."

"A racist country like Australia says: ‘The white farmers are being killed in South Africa.’ We are not killing them. ... If they want to go, they must go. They must leave the keys to their tractors because we want to work the land, they must leave the keys to their houses because we want to stay in those houses. They must leave everything they did not come here with in South Africa and go to Australia. ... White farmers are the architect of their own misfortune. ... Don’t make noise, because you will irritate us. Go to Australia. It is only racists who went to Australia when Mandela got out of prison. It is only racists who went to Australia when 1994 came. It is the racists again who are going back to Australia. ... They are rich here because they are exploiting black people. There is no black person to be exploited in Australia, they are going to be poor. ... They will come back here with their tail between their legs. We will hire them because we will be the owners of their farms when they come back to South Africa. As to what we are going to do with the land, it’s our business, it’s none of your business."

"Our people are still staying in the same houses that were given to them by apartheid. Our people still stay in the shacks. They came and abandoned you here. They have forgotten about you. They are going to come back next year during elections and say ‘no, you must remember Nelson Mandela, this is the party of Mandela, and we have come a long way with the ANC’. Mandela is no more. He is dead, with his party."

"We’re a very angry society, bad things have happened to us and many people don’t take that into consideration, especially the people who think that they’ve arrived. They forget the pain we have gone through as black people. That anger shows itself from time to time. In the EFF, we try and control it."

"We have instructed our attorneys to appeal [the judgment]. Not even the courts should be allowed to silence the truth, also if that truth is against the Thuma Mina group of the ruling elite."

"We might be imprisoned, we might go to jail, we might be subjected to fines. Every time such rulings are made against us, you must know that it is not a ruling against the leadership, it's a ruling against the struggle for the land. … You must know that when you are EFF, you are the enemy of the Rothschilds, you are the enemy of the Ruperts, you are the enemy of the establishment. The establishment is white monopoly capital, it's the army, it's the police, it's the courts, every institution that existed 300 years ago, that's what an establishment means. … Not so long ago, they gave a judgment and said, 'according to the new dawn'. How can a judge use a political speech in passing a judgment? You use the same language of politicians as a judge and want to be respected. … We cannot have judges that seek to impress politicians. Did you ever ask yourself a question: 'What would happen to this country if the judiciary is captured?' Then we are gone. It is the end of this country. … The judiciary is about to be captured, I'm warning you now and you'll know, in the past five years, I've never misled you. … There was a judge called Judge Nugent who had a meeting with Pravin Gordhan before Gordhan appeared in that Nugent Commission. The judge did not disclose that he met a politician before that politician came into the commission. … Why are the judges meeting politicians? … South Africa be warned, … something wrong is happening to the judiciary."

"Trevor Manuel has always served the white capital, now he is accused of triple conflict of interest, exactly what we raised earlier. Trevor can kick and scream and win the court cases, but facts don’t change. … Why did you interview other candidates if you knew [your relationship with Edward Kieswetter]? What if you were too hard on the other candidates? … The reason why they want SARS so desperately is because it is the only weapon they can use against their enemies. SARS is being used as a weapon to fight opponents of white monopoly capital. … They can come for us at any time."

"They [the DA] refused with their votes [in DA-led coalitions]. They don’t want to vote with us but they want us to vote with them. … We cannot keep on voting for people who won’t vote for us. It’s done. It’s finished. … We […] took a decision that we are no longer working with the DA in all municipalities of South Africa where the DA requires the votes of the EFF. We’ll also not vote with the ANC."

"When the whites are beating you up at the farms and you are being undermined by whites in the newsroom, you come here. But when it comes time for voting, you are not there. … South Africa chose the government they want."

"[Mnangagwa is either ignorant or had bowed to pressure from the white supremacist world.] We are of the firm view that Mnangagwa is either deeply misinformed about the real causes of the crisis in Zimbabwe, or is simply capitulating to pressure. Either way, this treasonous act of paying white settlers money that Zimbabwe does not have will not resolve the crisis in Zimbabwe, which is essentially a political crisis resulting from years of mismanagement, at the centre of which Mnangagwa features prominently."

"Xoli Mngambi: That is the former president Kgalema Motlanthe who says that if there is any more friction in that town of Senekal it could spark civil war. Are you going to listen to him? Malema: So be it. We are in this mess because of people like him, who allowed whites to undermine us like that. You think we can listen to people like him? You think we can listen to Mbeki? To Zuma? To Mandela? We'll never allow that. This nonsense must come to an end at some point. This whites should know that we are not step-children in this country. This is our country, we too belong here. And if going to Senegal will cause a civil war – if a man exercises his constitutional rights, that will lead to a civil war – so be it. I am not talking here from the comfort of my couch in the NewzRoom Afrika offices. I'll be in Senegal myself. I'll be leading from the front. Do what you want to do. What soldiers ... why should we be scared of retired soldiers, when we are not scared of them when they were soldiers? When they legitimately carried guns to kill black people, we confronted them with stones. Let history repeat itself. Let us confront the same people our parents confronted. If that is going to be the case, let it be. We are not going to live in fear here because we think white farmers are former generals. They can go to hell. Murderous generals. Xoli Mngambi: Mr. Malema, I put it to you that as a responsible leader, you are the third biggest party in this country. Your utterances right now, you sound like a person who is spoiling for war, not the protection of democracy, that you claim to go and do there. Is that what you essentially want? Malema: What is war? When a person says I am going to Senegal to defend a building with my body? I have never told you of AK 47. I have never told you of [?]. You are talking war? When I defend myself against white racist and terrorist. If you are scared of them it is none of my business chief. You are all alone, [when you say you are being] scared of white people. I am standing up to them."

"Well, we send messages of support and condolences to all victims of murder in SA, including the farm manager. There is nothing in our law called farm murder. Murder is murder, it is criminality and should be attended to as such. ... A criminal must rot in jail, once found guilty. We have no interest of people who go around killing innocent people, particularly civilians who are trying to make an honest living. So we really are not going to Senekal to sympathise with a thug. We are going there to defend our democracy, our constitution, which is under threat by racist, terrorist farmers."

"What type of a human being are you white man to stay in a house with an electricity? All you can do is to wire to the [...] workers of the farm a simple electricity so that they can have light at night. Their children too must study. ... We want the children in the farms to own the farms. And they can only own the farms if they are educated. ... So that we can guarantee a better future for our children. What kind of a human being are you white man to deny these children a light to study and make their future bright? .... All we are asking for is the bright future of our children. We don't want our children to travel the same journey their grandfathers travelled."

"If South African police want a fight, they must declare it. We will treat them the same way we treated them in the 80s. We will not only fight them at the picket lines, we will go to their homes and fight them in their own houses, with their own families. [Applause] We are not scared of police. They think this uniform gives them some superior power. We'll see you after you take off the uniform at night at home, when you are about to eat pap. ... Bloody coward. ... We'll come for you one by one at your own comfort zone. We will teach you that no-one can defeat the power of the masses. Not a policeman, not a police state, not a military state, not a dictatorship, once the masses have taken a decision, no-one will defeat them. Racism in South Africa is going to fall – they like it, or they don't like it. It is just a matter of time, we are going to go after racists everywhere, and there will not be a home for racist[s]. They will on their own take a flight or a ship out of South Africa, because they will no longer feel comfortable in South Africa. Let's not make home for racism. Guys, there is no any other way of fighting racism. Racism is violence. It must be responded with violence. That's the only way we are going to stop racist[s] in South Africa."

"Because you must get Malema and Ndlozi guilty through any means necessary, by hook or crook, it doesn't matter. We don't have a case but let's concoct, because perhaps those pictures that are removed are now proving something else which is not in the best interest of AfriForum and the ANC. And what is interesting is that the ANC through the NPA, they are pursuing the same interest as the AfriForum. And it has been the same for quite some time that the ANC shares similar ideological perspective with AfriForum. It comes as not a shock to us, because they even had a press conference together at some point in Gauteng. So you got the right wing with the so-called former liberation movement working together to eliminate what they perceive as a political threat, not through honest political contestation, but through manipulation of law enforcement and abuse of the courts, because politically you can't defeat your opponent. ... we were clearly provoked ... the onus are on them to prove that we were not supposed to be there. ..."

"Sophie Mokoena: The Pan-African Parliament, there has been a contestation Mr Malema, on the powers and the function of the Pan-African Parliament but also whether it is effective enough to deal with issues of governance on the continent. Malema: Well, that's what we are calling for as Pan-African Parliament, that we must have legislative powers, that we must have the capacity to play an oversight role on the executives in the continent, hold them accountable, and we can only do that if countries ratify the protocols which will allow this parliament to become a fully legislative continental body which will hold executives accountable. A lot of presidents aren't comfortable with that because they do not accept being held accountable, and those are some of the people who thrive on violation of human rights, dictatorship and stealing the government money and resources of the countries without being held accountable. They do that with impunity because they know that they control and run those countries as if they are personal properties, but with a continental body like PAP being given legislative powers to hold executives accountable, they will no longer be in a position to do all the shenanigans they are able to get away with now."

"Sophie Mokoena: Mr Malema, some say it was ill-discipline. What was happening? Malema: Well, a member of parliament from Mali has been misbehaving. He moved from his side to our side, started fighting with a Zimbabwean lady, from there he came to me. Every time people disagree with Mali's position on rotation, he bangs tables and he doesn't stop. So when I asked him to keep quiet so that we can listen, he started being aggressive and threatened to kill me, and I said, "I won't do it here, I won't kill you here inside, I will kill you outside, so, stop threatening to kill me inside parliament." So it was a reaction. If a person says to me he will kill me you can't give him roses. I told him, "I will kill you." Mokoena: ... is it necessary really? Malema: I will kill him. He can't threaten me, to kill, I will kill him. I will repeat it anywhere. No-one threatens me. ... My life is more important than any other thing. I will defend myself. I didn't go to where he was sitting. He has been bullying everybody here. He can't bully me. No-one can bully me and threaten to kill me. I said to him, "out of respect for this thing I'll kill you outside, I won't kill you inside parliament." I respect this house. Today he came to me, we smoked a peace pipe and everything is fine now ... The problem here is that the western countries [of Africa] are refusing to accept the principle of rotation. And when they disagree with you, they bully you and do all types of intimidation. ... Mokoena: What is your message [to the youth] after this video? Malema: ... The youth of Africa [...] have tolerated nonsense for a very long time, especially from the so-called elders who are ruling them in an autocratic manner, in a manner that if you disagree you get killed, in an undemocratic manner, where women and children are being raped, [...] people who are opposing the status quo, as a way of punishing their opponents. ... That is why in this country we are able to put a stop to a potential nonsensical situation, because of our attitude [that] it doesn't matter how dangerous the situation can be, if it is not in the best interest of our people, we are going to deal with it. Mokoena: The tension between the Francophones and Anglophones does not project a good image of the continent that is trying to unite. ... Why can Africans not speak in one voice, particularly on issues that are of interest to the continent? Malema: The Francophones are still admiring their colonizers, they still worship the symbols of France. Actually they see themselves as French, and we have to do away with that. ... They seem to be thinking that because of the numbers of their countries they must have dominance over us, and they must serve in the best interests of what France requires them to do. ... A rotational principle helps to unite a continent, in a sense that every region feels that it is part of this parliament."

"... these rich white families in South Africa, they are the face of the land criminal. That was committed in this country. That's why we are here to say to Rupert: Your riches come out of stealing from black people. Your riches come from the exploitation of black people. Our people work in the wine farms and you don't pay them anything. Instead you pay them with bottles of wine and alcohol because you have no regard for black people and black dignity. So you are not rich because you are smarter than us, you are rich because your forefathers committed a black genocide and stole our cattle and killed our leaders and took everything that belongs to us. The unbanning of the ANC, when they came back from exile, they came here in Stellenbosch to hold the first national executive committee meeting in a farm owned by the Ruperts. That day they came, Mandela out of prison, exiles returned, but guys we need to have our first meeting. It was held in a Ruperts' farm. And then how can you say the ANC will not sell out when their first historic meeting was held in the Ruperts' farm. The person who lead such facilitation and processes is one of our own, our own black brother Trevor Manuel. He's the one who has been working with them even before the liberation. He is one of them. That is why Trevor and them are rich like that and you can't touch them."

"Russians have not done anything wrong to anyone. You have a problem, go and talk to NATO. It is the one that provoked Russia and Russia it is well within its right to defend itself. So the Russian foreign minister was at home. ... So, we are happy that they saw it befitting to respect us and to come to us as a way of saying we respect you and we want to give you a some form of an explanation as to what is really happening in our country, and all of that. We can't say the same about this one of Treasury of the USA, who was coming to steal our minerals and our wildlife. I don't know what she was doing in those game farms and all of that, and the Reserve Bank, and she came here to monitor their puppet if it's following the instructions of surrendering the sovereignty of South Africa. So, America can never be welcomed here in South Africa and the African continent because we now when they come here, they are coming to check what more can we steal and finish off this continent. So, she was even going to Mpumalanga to go and run some symposiums or something on just transitions, and how renewables work. You can see that she was preparing to indoctrinate our people to abandon coal so that they can enjoy to build their economies with our coal. ... So, she was not welcomed here."

"That man's credentials were supposed to be withdrawn. There are lots of protocol channels that are established for those types of concerns. He could have utilized those channels to go raise his concerns. But to create such atmosphere for our country, to create such doubt and smear our country in a manner he did, and he still has not come out to apologize. ... If there were guns that were given to Russia, it was a good thing. I would have done the same as a president of the Republic. ... Russia must be given a practical support, because when we needed one they didn't give us a non-alignment position, they didn't give us this neutral nonsense position, they gave us arms."

"Comrades, we want to make sure that BRICS is strengthened, and BRICS is an alternative to Europe and America. We are with president Putin, and we want to say to president Putin, it is not us South Africans who refused you from coming into the country, it is Ramaphosa, the coward Ramaphosa, who could not guarantee that we will not arrest Putin. We are Putin and Putin is us, and we will never support imperialism against president Putin."

"The statement by Donald Trump is offensive and undermines our sovereignty, and is a reminder that our reliance on foreign aid and foreign direct investment surrenders us to the will of imperialist[s] who use money to dictate the economic and policy direction of Africa. We want to make it categorically clear to the president of the USA that we are going to expropriate land without compensation and pursue legislative measures to do so and no threat will stop us. His misinterpretation of the expropriation act which is a mild and cosmetic intervention is an assessment of a measure which is going to be pursued through the amendment of our constitution as South Africans and there is nothing he can do to undermine our independence. The EFF reiterates its position that we must build state capacity, build a strong agricultural and industrial nation which will not depend on the West, and intensify trade relations with progressive nations such as China, Russia and nations within BRICS who do not use foreign policy as an instrument to impose their will or bully other nations into submission."

"Donald Trump is not saying anything we have not heard from white people. ... I still have to meet a white person who support expropriation of land without compensation. So why are you shocked? ... I don't have time for nonsense, I expected this. And more, backlash is going to come. If South Africans are not ready to expropriate the land because they are scared of sanctions, they are scared of backlash, then don't vote for the EFF. Because you vote for us, we are going to expropriate land. And Donald Trump will come for us, and Britain will come for us, and EU will come for us. ...for everything good comes the pain before. If you are not prepared South Africa to take the pain, then forget about the land. ... We know that the first response will be killing. They will kill us for that. There is a group of white rightwingers who are being trained by Jews in Pretoria to be snipers. ... So we know that death is the first price that we are prepared to pay. The second price we are prepared to pay for this land is poverty. They will close taps. But if there is a conviction, ... and not sloganeering and public opinions, then we must be prepared for everything. It is a war. We must be prepared for Donald Trump and all of them, we are not scared of them. ... There is no white genocide here, it is an absolute rubbish. ... There is black genocide in the USA. They are killing black people in the USA. There is black genocide here in South Africa. Black people are being killed all the time. ... We are not going to be distracted by anyone. Only death will stop us, not Trump, not poverty, not sanctions. ... We know the consequences of what we are asking for. ... So Afriforum is the embassy of the USA. If you want issues to reach USA, then go to Afriforum. Then you shall get a proper response. ... We are not scared of Afriforum."

"How do you say you must expropriate land and give people title deeds? Our people ... won't eat title deed. Here is a paper called title deed, yet you remain poverty stricken, and here is a man with money, who says to me: Give me that paper, I give you the money to eat now. They will take the money. You are setting our people up for failure when you talk title deeds. ... Our people are going to use those title deeds as surety, and they will not be in a position to pay their debt. ... So they are going to give you the land, and come to buy it from you, close to nothing. ... RDP houses are being rented out. The owners of the RDP houses went to squat somewhere."

"Julius Malema is a devotee of the Goebbels/Stalin/Mao rulebook on propaganda which preaches if you tell a lie enough times, people will eventually believe it. Witness the EFF leader’s racist ranting about who should own South Africa’s land [...] stirring murderous thoughts in revolutionary breasts. But Malema’s self-righteous belief that he can force expropriation of legally owned land has been made once too often."

"This fool is misinformed and does not have any insight with regard to business ownership in KZN. Why does he not talk about Huletts and other big, white capital and business in the province? The issue of land distribution must begin with Huletts, why is Malema silent on this? Is the Indian community an easy target in Malema’s political stage performance? Workers are aware of their rights these days and know about labour courts and their right to CCMA if there are issues around labour matters. There are very few who are not familiar with this recourse. Instead of playing on racial tensions, why doesn’t Malema encourage workers to challenge their working conditions through proper structures? I am disappointed in Malema and will not support his political agenda, as he is clearly causing dissension and division in our society. A true leader does the opposite."

"During the State of the Nation Address debate, EFF leader Julius Malema (a Marxist) accused President Cyril Ramaphosa of making empty promises regarding the [principle of land expropriation without compensation] issue. Malema is a dangerous individual who encourages farm terror and murder. [...] For far too long the hard left of the ANC has been taking control, their policies shaped by the EFF because they are losing votes to the EFF's rhetoric of hate, divisive racism and a promise to under-educated South Africans that all will be well if they just take the white people's farms and businesses."

"He must do what he must do and we will do what we must do. We are a party of principle, we believe in property rights and there's no way that we can support that, so if they want to blackmail us into doing it, they will have to remove us."

"The EFF’s remarks are blatantly racist and offensive."

"It’s time we condemned black people’s racism. Malema prejudicing Trollip on skin colour is nothing but racism. He can make whatever political decision but race is no justification for differentiation in this context."

"When an individual or a political party tables a motion in a meeting or the National Assembly and the motion wins the day by an overwhelming majority, what is the reason for attacking those who voted against it? Is this not intolerance? It is clear that if the EFF won elections, those who voted against it will be in serious trouble."

"My blackness gets questioned by other blacks when I disagree with Julius Malema. I didn't know that my identity as a black man depended on whether I agree with a man who is a communist, gave us Zuma, bankrupted Limpopo and uses race politics to poison the minds of our youth."

"I'm going to say something that I know I will be attacked [for]. We mismanaged the Julius Malema phenomenon. … We were quick to expel people that we should have spoken to them. … If you check the knock-on effect of the members that left us to join the EFF, that's exactly what we have lost in terms of voter participation. People didn't leave the ANC for the opposition, they left for a far left movement or a movement that felt the ANC was not strong enough. … Our incapability to manage internal differences, unfortunately, affected us. For me how we mismanaged those internal differences remains the key part that led us to lose power in those two metros."

"Mazzotti and Phillips are no choir boys and you [i.e. Malema] must be aware of it."

"On this occasion, we cannot remain silent in the face of the EFF’s [i.e. Malema's] pretentiousness to know more about the history and politics of Zimbabwe than the Zimbabweans themselves. Even more, the EFF has the audacity to dare teach Zimbabweans, even our head of state about the land question in our country."

"I make a challenge to him today, if you believe what you say around the police not doing their job and being at war with you, I challenge you, Mr Malema, to give up your security detail that is provided to you by the state – you are the only opposition leader who has a SAPS security detail – I challenge you today, to give up your security detail. ... If you are calling on the public to attack police officers, then I think that is a disgrace that you yourself would be sitting with police protection, and expect people to attack the very people that you are relying on to be safe. And I think it is hypocrisy of the highest order."

"The problem of the twenty-first century, then, is the problem of the color-blind. This problem is simple: it believes that to redress racism, we need to not consider race in social practice, notably in the sphere of governmental action. The state, we are told, must be above race. ... We are led to believe that racism is prejudicial behavior of one party against another rather than the coagulation of socioeconomic injustice against groups. If the state acts without prejudice (this is, if it acts equally), then that is proof of the end of racism. Unequal socioeconomic conditions of today, based as they are on racisms of the past and of the present, are thereby rendered untouchable by the state. Color-blind justice privatizes inequality and racism, and it removes itself from the project of redistributive and anti-racist justice. This is the genteel racism of our new millennium."

"The list of "accidents" is long and painful. In April 2005, a garment factory in Savar collapsed, killing seventy-five workers. In February 2006, another factory collapsed in Dhaka, killing eighteen. In June 2010, a building collapsed in Dhaka, killing twenty-five. These are the “factories” of twenty-first century globalization – poorly built shelters for a production process geared toward long working days, third rate machines, and workers whose own lives are submitted to the imperatives of just-in-time production. Writing about the factory regime in England during the nineteenth century, Karl Marx noted, "But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its wear-wolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight…. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by reducing it of its fertility" (Capital, Chapter 10)."

"For the past 40 years, the IMF has had the same agenda: to make sure that developing countries adhere to the rules of globalization set by the advanced capitalist states... Over these four decades, fires have burned on the streets of the countries that have gone to the IMF and then forced austerity upon their populations. In the 1980s, these uprisings used to be called “IMF riots.” It was clear to everyone that the IMF’s policies had provoked desperate people to take to the streets. The name given to these riots was precise. The emphasis had to be on the IMF and not on the riots themselves. The most famous of these riots took place in Venezuela—the Caracazo of 1989—which opened up a process that brought Hugo Chavez to power and that created the Bolivarian Revolution. It is reasonable to call the Arab Spring of 2011 an IMF riot because it was provoked by IMF austerity policies combined with rising food prices. The current unrest from Pakistan to Ecuador should be filed under IMF riot... The main lesson of these uprisings is not only that the people want fuel subsidies or a stable currency; what they want more than anything is democratic control over their own economy."

"The consequences of IMF orthodoxy are often deadly, with the Malawi case as one very painful episode. In 1996, the IMF staff pushed the government of Malawi to privatize its agricultural development and marketing corporation. This body held Malawi’s grain stock, and it regulated the price for the sale of grain in the country. Privatization of the corporation in 1999 left Malawi’s government without a means to protect its population in case of an emergency. Between October 2001 and March 2002, the price of maize shot up by 400 percent. Flooding in 2000-2001 and a year of drought set the food production in the country into distress. People began to die of starvation... The IMF did not relent. Malawi had to continue to service its debt. In 2002, it spent $70 million on its debt service payments, which was 20 percent of its national budget (more than Malawi spent on health, education, and agriculture combined). There was no lifeline through to Malawi, whose food crisis continues till today... No one within the IMF meeting will raise the question of democracy, both in terms of the IMF’s own functioning and in terms of the IMF’s relationship with sovereign countries around the world."

"Bolivia’s key reserves are in lithium, which is essential for the electric car. Bolivia claims to have 70 percent of the world’s lithium reserves... Morales made it clear that any development of the lithium had to be done with Bolivia’s Comibol—its national mining company—and Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB)—its national lithium company—as equal partners... Tesla (United States) and Pure Energy Minerals (Canada) both showed great interest in having a direct stake in Bolivian lithium. But they could not make a deal that would take into consideration the parameters set by the Morales government. Morales himself was a direct impediment to the takeover of the lithium fields by the non-Chinese transnational firms. He had to go."

"The moment that the Chinese scientists and doctors announced that the coronavirus could be transmitted between human beings on Jan. 20, 2020, the socialist governments went into action to monitor ports of entry and to test and trace key parts of the population. They set up task forces and procedures to immediately make sure that the infection would not go out of control amongst their people. They did not wait till the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11. This is in stark contrast to governments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and other capitalist states, where there has been a hallucinatory attitude towards the Chinese government and the WHO. There is no comparison between the stance of Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and U.S. President Donald Trump: the former had a sober, science-based attitude, while the latter has consistently laughed off the coronavirus as a simple flu as recently as June 24."

"You don't need to be a statistician or an economist to be able to read the basic facts in the world today: the dominant classes and the corporations that they control extract surplus profits from the wealth produced by society, while billions of human beings who work to produce that wealth find themselves treated as if they are surplus humanity. This immense social divide, a widening gap across the class structure, can be observed in almost every single country in the world. This gap is not the result of any natural development, let alone of the magical phrase 'the Market'. This chasm across human society is produced and reproduced solely because of the civilizational system that privileges the private property of the few above the social needs of the many. That system is known as capitalism, a dynamic social process that - through inter-capitalist competition, through advancements in science and technology - has led to the vast increases in productivity but at the same time - because of private property - to immense social inequality. This double movement of capitalism, which generates enormous social wealth and enormous social inequality, both confounds humanity and provides immense potential for solutions to our great dilemmas - solutions that we call socialism."

"The CIA teachers were excellent at their jobs. of the CIA went to Uruguay, where ge taught the right wing groups how to use torture. 'The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect' - that was his credo. His favorite torture was to electrocute the genitals. He was killed by the left-wing in 1970."

"In 1965, one section of the Indonesian Army moved against Sukarno, and took over the institutions of the country. Then began what is generally understood to be one of the ghastliest political purges in modern times. The Indonesian Army and its allies - mainly fanatical anti-Communists, including religious groups - . What is beyond doubt - even though the US refuses to release fully its documents on this period - is that the United States and the Australians provided the Indonesian armed forces with lists of Communists who were to be assassinated, that they egged on the Army to conduct these massacres, and that they covered up this absolute atrocity."

"In South America, the US government worked with the archipelago of military juntas from Argentina to Paraguay to abduct, torture, and murder Communists in the continent. This programme, which ran from 1975 to 1989, was called . It would kill around 100,000 people and imprison half a million."

"If the United States or the French or the British intervened into countries of the Third World, this was for freedom; the Soviets and the Third World project were the essence of unfreedom: this was a remarkable feat of interpretation."

"As the lights went out in the USSR and as the Third World Project surrendered before imperialist liberalization, a new era of intervention opened up. If the previous era felt like a roll call of coups, interventions, and invasions, populated by a rogues' gallery of butchers, assassins, and wheeler-dealers backed by Western intelligence services, now, after the fall of the USSR and the surrender of the Third World, the shield at the UN disappeared and the interventions from the West came like a tsunami."

"By their critisism of the existing system, which repeats the Social-Democratic critisism almost word for word, the Bolshevik opposition is preparing minds ... for the acceptance of the positive platform of Social-Democracy. ... Not only among the mass of the workers, but among communist workers as well, the opposition is rearing the shoots of ideas and sentiments which, if skillfully tended, may easily bear social-democratic fruit."

"The Social Democratic movement need have no fear in regard to the political activity of Trotsky. On the contrary, he is more likely to give the death blow to the Communist movement outside Russia and to induce the Communist workers to return to Social Democracy than to strengthen any Communist Party or to weaken the Social Democrats in any way."

"I mean by pacifism, not the love of peace as a good to be secured by a definite form of action, but the belief that any form of social constraint of others or any violent action is in itself wrong, and that violence such as war must be passively resisted because to use violence to end violence would be logically self-contradictory. I oppose pacifism in this sense to the Communist belief that the only way to secure peace is by a revolutionary change in the social system, and that ruling classes resist revolution violently and must therefore be overthrown by force."

"The bourgeois never included the ownership of capital as one of the social restraints that should be abolished, for the simple reason that it was not to him a restraint at all. It never therefore entered his head to regard it as such, and he saw nothing inconsistent in calling for the abolition of privilege, monopoly, and so forth, while hanging on to his capital."

"The bourgeois ... is free not because he is conscious of his causality, but because he is ignorant of the social causes that determine his being."

"The bourgeois ... conception of freedom really arose as a special case of a group of illusions about domination which has been associated with all forms of society based on dominating classes. This group of illusions has for a common factor the belief that domination secures self-determination."

"All relations are determining. ... As soon as we realise there is a determining relation, and become conscious of its nature and how it grips us, we are that much freer."

"Slave-owning culture ... gives rise to the teleological explanation of the Universe, which reaches its subtlest form in Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophies, in which all phenomena are determined by Ideas or Forms. These correspond to the plans formed in the mind of the slave-owner which his slave passively fulfils."

"The domination inherent in the slave-owning system is not repressed, as with the bourgeois, but is conscious, and the illusion consists, not in supposing that no domination exists, but that society is in fact really determined solely by the will of the master, and does not in turn determine his will."

"The slave-owner is at times visited with a nightmare. He finds that his free will, in spite of its freedom, is thwarted, not by a superior will but by things-in-themselves – by inferior wills, accidents, mistakes, and his own ignorance. Yet he is still unable to conceive his will except as being thwarted like that of his slave’s by another will, and since he the master is so thwarted, might not even the world’s master and his – God Himself – be thwarted in his volition by some grand over-riding will, by Will-in-Itself? This is the slaveowning conception of Moira, or Fate, a comparatively late development reaching its noblest expression in Greek tragedy. This Fate, in spite of its closeness to bourgeois determinism, betrays its slave-owning parentage by the fact that it is always visualised as a consciously forseeing Will, and always as thwarting, not determining human wills as well as events, but interfering with human wills by means of events."

"The bourgeois ... necessarily regards all behaviour that bursts ‘spontaneously’ forth from the individual ignorant of its causality, as above all free. Therefore the instincts are conceived as freely striving for unconscious goals, and psychology becomes the adventures of the free instincts in their struggles against the restraints of the environment (in Freud, of society) which impede and cripple their freedom. Out of this struggle cognitive and emotional consciousness is born.Now the only objection to this bourgeois psychology is that it inverts the picture. The instincts are not free springs of connation towards a goal. They are, so far as they can be abstractly separated, unconscious necessities, as Kant realised. They are unfree."

"That the environment does wrongs to man’s mind today none will deny. These wrongs are not done because consciousness imprisons the instincts with the fetters of necessity; but because bourgeois man is unconscious of the determinism of his culture. Because of this the instincts are losing such freedom as they attained, are becoming crippled, and less free. Unconsciousness and inexperience, not consciousness and experience, are the gaolers of modern bourgeois man."

"Socialism without democracy is pseudo-socialism, just as democracy without socialism is pseudo-democracy."

"When I speak here of our policy, I use the word without regard to anything immaterial and superficial, but in the sense which since the beginning of the party it has had for us in contrast to all other parties, – in the sense of the policy of the class struggle, which has very often changed in form, but in substance has remained the same, – our unique proletarian class policy, which separates us from all other political parties in the world of bourgeois society and excludes us from intercourse with them."

"For our party and for our party tactics there is but one valid basis: the basis of the class struggle, out of which the Social Democratic party has sprung up, and out of which alone it can draw the necessary strength to bid defiance to every storm and to all its enemies."

"The importance of a seat in the Prussian legislature was not overlooked by anyone. But it was looked upon as more important that the representatives of the party should depend exclusively upon the strength of the party, and not upon an alliance with parties which might have momentarily a common interest with us, but which in their political make-up are hostile to us and will remain permanently hostile."

"In reference to the Prussian three-class the views of many of the s had in the course of time undergone a change. It had escaped the memory of some of them, here and there, that the logically and cunningly realized purpose of the three-class electoral system was to exclude with hermetic sealing all democratic thought and sentiment, and that the capitalistic era, which began about the same time with the introduction of the “most wretched of all electoral systems,” had by creating a class conscious proletariat rendered the vote of the socialist masses more insignificant than the vote of the democratic masses had been originally. How badly many of the speakers (both men and women) at the Hamburg convention deceived themselves as to the working of the three-class electoral system is clear from the fact that some of them entertained the delusion that the reform of the legislative elections could be used as the means of a grand arousing of the masses. In the jubilation over the success which had been achieved under other non-democratic laws regulating legislative elections, especially in , many had forgotten that the Prussian three-class system made the publicity of the ballot obligatory, and thereby in advance practically disfranchised all who were dependent, either economically, socially or politically, that is, the great majority of the population, and by this means alone rendered it impossible for the masses to take part in the election or get up any general enthusiasm."

"A practical surrender of our party principles appears to me far more dangerous than all of Bernstein’s theoretical will-o’-the-wisps put together. ... Democratic elements do not thereby become Socialists, though many believe they are socialists. ... This political socialism, which in fact is only philanthropic humanitarian radicalism, ... it has diluted and blurred the principles and weakened the socialist party because it brought into it troops upon which no reliance could be placed in the decisive moment."

"It would be an unparalleled case of flying the track and going astray if the German Social Democracy, which has had such wonderful success and such a wonderful growth for the very reason that it has marched ahead unterrified on the basis of the class struggle, should suddenly face about and plunge into mistakes, the avoidance of which has been the power and pride of our party, and has put the German Social Democracy at the head of the international social democracy of all countries."

"The bureaucratic, though capitalistic, spirit of our governments tends towards a which, in fact, is only , but which is dazzling and misleading for those who are easily deceived by external similarities and catch words. The German, or more accurately the Prussian, state socialism whose ideal is a military, landlord and police state, hates democracy above everything else. ... It is to them something inherently political. But all politics is diametrically opposed to what is socialist. So by this trick logic we arrive at the conclusion which has gained footing here and there, even in social democratic circles, that democracy as savoring of politics has nothing in common with socialism, but on the contrary is opposed to it. ... But the truth is that democracy is not a thing that is specifically political, and we must never forget that we are not merely a socialist party, but a social democratic party because we have perceived that socialism and democracy are inseparable."

"As Prince Bismarck, in the ’60s, wanted to move the “Acheron” of socialism, ... it was of course not love for socialism or knowledge of socialism that led Prince Bismarck to do this. He understood nothing about socialism at that time, and never did understand anything about it down to his death; in fact, he never had any conception of the moving forces of political and social life at all. There probably never lived at any time in any country a “statesman” who was less scientific, who had less knowledge, and who relied so purely on experience and a sort of half-gambler, half-peddler cunning, as Bismarck. Those offers to socialists place in the clearest light the untruthfulness of Prince Bismarck’s claim that he always regarded the social democracy as incompatible with the existence of the state. Bismarck wanted to use socialism for the purpose of breaking up and dissolving the bourgeois liberal opposition, especially the Progressive party. This, in itself, is the most conclusive proof that he had no conception of the real nature of socialism. Of course the fate of the boy magician was repeated. The elemental force which was conjured up grew over the head of the dabbler, and he did not get the best of socialism; socialism got the best of him."

"The correctness of the so-called materialistic conception of history, which considers the political development as dependent on the economic, cannot be brought more strikingly and convincingly to the mind than by the change which in the course of the Nineteenth century has been wrought in the bourgeoisie. It can be demonstrated with the greatest precision how with the change in the productive relations a change of political view and attitude has taken place in the bourgeoisie. Every step forward in economic development has been a step forward in the development of class antagonisms and a step in the approach of the bourgeoisie towards its old enemies, the landlords and priests, and a step in drawing away from the rising proletariat, which in order to effect its emancipation, must advocate equal rights for all men and the democratic principles formerly supported by the bourgeoisie. The moment the proletariat steps forth as a class separate from the bourgeoisie and having interests opposed to it, from that moment the bourgeoisie ceased to be democratic."

"The highest triumph of Bismarckian politics carried its downfall and bankruptcy within it."

"It was not possible by any allurements to take from the workingmen the recognition of the inseparability of socialism from democracy and of democracy from socialism."

"Pity for poverty, enthusiasm for equality and freedom, recognition of social injustice and a desire to remove it, is not socialism. Condemnation of wealth and respect for poverty, such as we find in Christianity and other religions, is not socialism. The communism of early times, as it was before the existence of private property, and as it has at all times and among all peoples been the elusive dream of some enthusiasts, is not socialism. The forcible equalization advocated by the followers of Baboeuf, the so-called equalitarians, is not socialism. In all these appearances there is lacking the real foundation of capitalist society with its class antagonisms. Modern socialism is the child of capitalist society and its class antagonisms. Without these it could not be. Socialism and ethics are two separate things. This fact must be kept in mind. Whoever conceives of socialism in the sense of a sentimental philanthropic striving after human equality, with no idea of the existence of capitalist society, is no socialist in the sense of the class struggle, without which modern socialism is unthinkable. Whoever has come to a full consciousness of the nature of capitalist society and the foundation of modern socialism, knows also that a socialist movement that leaves the basis of the class struggle may be anything else, but it is not socialism."

"This foundation of the class struggle, which Marx – and this is his immortal service – has given to the modern labor movement, is the main point of attack in the battle which the bourgeois political economy is waging with socialism. The political economists deny the class struggle and would make of the labor movement only a part of the bourgeois party movements, and the Social Democracy only a division of the bourgeois democracy. The bourgeois political economy and politics direct all their exertions against the class character of the modern labor movement. If it were possible to create a breach in this bulwark, in this citadel of the Social Democracy, then the Social Democracy is conquered, and the proletariat thrown back under the dominion of capitalistic society. However small such a breach may be in the beginning, the enemy has the power to widen it and the certainty of final victory. And the enemy is most dangerous when he comes as a friend to the fortress, when he slinks in under the cover of friendship, and is recognized as a friend and comrade. The enemy who comes to us with open visor we face with a smile; to set our foot upon his neck is mere play for us. The stupidly brutal acts of violence of police politicians, the outrages of anti-socialist laws, the anti-revolution laws, penitentiary bills – these only arouse feelings of pitying contempt; the enemy, however, that reaches out the hand to us for a political alliance; and intrudes himself upon us as a friend and brother, – him and him alone have we to fear. Our fortress can withstand every assault – it can not be stormed nor taken from us by siege – it can only fall when we ourselves open the doors to the enemy and take him into our ranks as a fellow comrade. Growing out of the class struggle, our party rests upon the class struggle as a condition of its existence. Through and with that struggle the party is unconquerable; without it the party is lost, for it will have lost the source of its strength. Whoever fails to understand this or thinks that the class struggle is a dead issue, or that class antagonisms are gradually being effaced, stands upon the basis of bourgeois philosophy."

"Diversity of opinions on theoretical points is never dangerous to the party. There are for us no bounds to criticism, and however great our respect may be for the founders and pioneers of our party, we recognize no infallibility and no other authority than science, whose sphere is ever widening and continually proves what it previously held as truths to be errors; destroys the old decayed foundations and creates new ones; does not stand still for an instant; but in perpetual advance moves remorselessly over every dogmatic belief."

"We recognize no infallible Pope, not even a literary one."

"Our program was a scientific one it must be constantly changed at minor points to meet the continuous advance of science. And I maintain that no man – Marx, in spite of his comprehensive and deep intellect, as little as any other – can bring science to final perfection; and this position is for everyone who understands the nature of science a foregone conclusion. No socialist, therefore, has the right to condemn attacks on the theoretical ideas of the Marxian teachings or to excommunicate any one from the party because of such attacks. But it is wholly different when such attacks imply a complete overturning of our whole conception of society, as, for example, is the case with Bernstein. Then vigorous defense is in order. Far more dangerous than theoretical assaults are practical disavowals of our principles. Theoretical discussions interest only a comparatively small portion of our membership; whereas practical disavowal of principles and tactical offenses against the party program touch every party comrade and arouse the attention of every party comrade; and when they are not quickly checked and corrected they bring confusion into the whole party."

"The establishment, elaboration and clarifying of our program we leave to science, which in our present society is the business of only a few. But the practical application of our program, and the tactics of the party are the business of all; here all work together."

"The supreme importance of tactics and the necessity of maintaining its class struggle character, is something the party has been well conscious of from the beginning. ... We find that in all questions of tactics the thought was continually kept in the foreground that the party must be kept clean from all mixture with all other parties, every one of which, no matter how much they differed from each other or how furiously they fought among themselves, stood upon the ground of bourgeois society as a common basis. This separation of the Social Democracy from all other parties, this essential difference, which silly opponents take as a reason or pretext for declaring us political outlaws, is our pride and our strength."

"This is not an end, but only a means to an end."

"It is a bourgeois feeling to overvalue the possession of representatives. In representation as in money there is power – power over others. Whoever places the purity and the greatness of our party above all else, for him representatives have value only in so far as they serve to give expression to the power and extent of Social Democracy. What do ten, what do a hundred representatives signify, when our escutcheon has lost its gloss through their acquisition? The value of a representative is small. But the value of the integrity of our party is immeasurable. In it rests our strength. As with the shorn hair, that signified his manhood’s honor, the strength of disappeared, so the strength of our party would cease if we allowed the bourgeois s to flatter away our most precious jewel and the roots of our triumphal strength – the party purity, the party honor."

"We may not do as other parties, because we are not like the others. We are – and this cannot be too often repeated – separated from all other parties by an insurmountable barrier, a barrier that any individual can easily surmount; but once on the other side of it, and he is no Social Democrat. We are different from the others; “we are other than the others.” What for the others are necessities and conditions of life are death to us."

"What is it that has made of us in Germany the pivotal part? ... It is the avalanche-like increase of our supporters that gradually, with the certainty of a natural law, or more correctly of a natural force, grows from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, and from hundreds of thousands to millions, and is daily increasing, bidding defiance to our opponents and driving them into impotent rage. And this avalanche-like increase has come, and is coming, as a consequence of our opposition to and struggle with all other parties."

"All who are weary and heavy laden; all who suffer under injustice; all who suffer from the outrages of the existing bourgeois society; all who have in them the feeling of the worth of humanity, look to us, turn hopefully to us, as the only party that can bring rescue and deliverance. And if we, the opponents of this unjust world of violence, suddenly reach out the hand of brotherhood to it, conclude alliances with its representatives, invite our comrades to go hand in hand with the enemy whose misdeeds have driven the masses into our camp, what confusion must result in their minds! ... It must be that for the hundreds and thousands, for the millions that have sought salvation under our banner, it was all a colossal mistake for them to come to us. If we are not different from the others, then we are not the right ones – the Savior is yet to come; and the Social Democracy was a false Messiah, no better than the other false ones! Just in this fact lies our strength, that we are not like the others, and that we are not only not like the others, and that we are not simply different from the others, but that we are their deadly enemy, who have sworn to storm and demolish the Bastile of Capitalism, whose defenders all those others are. Therefore we are only strong when we are alone. This is not to say that we are to individualise or to isolate ourselves. We have never lacked for company, and we never shall so long as the fight lasts. On the essentially true but literally false phrase about a “single reactionary mass,” the Social Democracy has never believed since it passed from the realm of theory to that of practice. We know that the individual members and divisions of the “single reactionary mass” are in conflict with each other, and we have always used these conflicts for our purposes. We have used opponents against opponents, but have never allowed them to use us."

"The social democracy of Germany must fulfill the role of champions of political freedom. The task of uniting the struggle for economic independence with that for political liberty has fallen upon the German laboring class."

"All parties without exception recognize us as a political power, and exactly in proportion to our power. Even the craziest reactionary that denies us the right of existence courts our favor and by his acts gives the lie to his words. From the fact that our assistance is sought by other parties, some of our comrades draw the strange conclusion that we should reverse the party tactics, and in place of the old policy of the class struggle against all other parties, substitute the commercial polities of log rolling, wire pulling and compromise. Such persons forget the power which makes our alliance sought for, even by our bitterest enemies, would have had absolutely no existence were it not for the old class struggle tactics. If Marx, Engels and Lassalle had accepted from Bernstein and his modest or not modest fellow thinkers the tactics of compromise and dependence upon bourgeois parties, then there never would have been any Social Democracy; we would have been simply the tail of the Progressive party."

"We Social Democrats dare not be like the other parties, all of whom are equally guilty of the injustices of the present system and equally responsible for them. Every one who suffers under these injustices looks to us for deliverance. Every one of us has had these victims of society after failing to get justice from the courts, from the government, from the Emperor himself, and from all the other parties, come to us as the last and only ones that can help them. They do not know our scientific program; they do not know what capital and capitalism mean; but they have the belief, the feeling, that we are a party that can help when all other parties fail. This belief is for us an inexhaustible source of power. It was a similar faith of despair that spread more and more in the decaying Roman empire and slowly undermined the heathen world until it finally collapsed. We give up this inexhaustible source of power if we ally ourselves with other parties and drive suffering humanity from us by saying to it: “We are not essentially different from the others.” Once the boundary line of the class struggle is wiped away and we have started upon the inclined plane of compromise, there is no stopping. Then we can only go down and down until there is nothing deeper."

"Membership in the social democracy means a struggle, a political struggle with grievous persecutions, and a private struggle for existence, a struggle that for the majority is far more difficult and heavy than the political struggle. And it is necessary, because the courage for this twofold struggle is created only by the consciousness that the injustice of society by which the great majority of mankind are to-day oppressed, corrupted and crippled, can only be abolished through a revolutionary movement, that is, a movement that shall completely exterminate capitalism with every fiber of its roots."

"Distrust was counted as a democratic virtue, and over-confidence as a democratic vice."

"The proletariat stands politically as well as socially in the most abrupt contradiction to the present class state. It must fight it on all fields and upon every question, both of domestic and of foreign policy."

"We shall never go wrong if we do what is opposed to the interests of our enemy. On the other hand, we shall almost never go right if we do what our enemies applaud. Historical development is a continuous conflict, a conflict of interests, a conflict of races, a conflict of classes. And if friendship does not count even in ordinary business, how much less so in such a conflict. Good-naturedness and sentimentality have no place in politics. They have never won a victory, but have brought unnumbered defeats. Bluecher’s motto, “Always follow the cannon’s roar and throw yourself upon the enemy,” is the best rule also in ."

"The class instinct of the bourgeoisie is far better developed than that of the proletariat. The governing class naturally knows its interests better than the governed, who have so much less opportunity to become informed and are also sometimes intentionally, and sometimes not, systematically deceived and misled from a recognition of their interests. Do not say that it is the rough form in which socialism is often set forth that frightens and embitters the bourgeoisie. That is absolutely false. It is not the form; it is the content which they detest; and the more harmless the form so much the more dangerous do the contents appear to the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie. The fineness of the form makes no difference to them. That is clear from the manner in which they fight out their quarrels among themselves."

"At any rate we may be sure that the political instinct of our bourgeois opponents, as soon as their class interests come into play, will lead them to take a position hostile to us. A classical example is furnished by Belgium, where, as already remarked, a compromise was concluded under the most favorable circumstances conceivable, between the socialists and the liberals. Our party was in undisputed possession of the leadership and was therefore in no danger of being cheated out of the fruits of the common victory. The end sought was universal, equal and direct suffrage. But the clerical party knows its boys, knows its Pappenheimers. It knows that the bourgeoisie has no class interest in giving the laborers, who, in modern industrial states, constitute a majority of the population, the universal suffrage and thereby the prospect of winning a majority and getting political supremacy. It made a counter demand for proportional representation with plural voting, that is, giving more votes to the rich, and thereby granting to the radical bourgeoisie a share in the government, if it would assist in defeating universal and direct suffrage. And behold, without a minute’s hesitation the gentlemen of the radical bourgeoisie broke their agreement with the socialists and joined the clericals in their fight against universal suffrage and the social democracy. Whoever is not convinced by this example that the emancipation struggle of the proletariat is a class struggle is one on whom further arguments would be wasted."

"The class struggle tactics is not only more correct in principle; it is also more practical and successful than compromise tactics."

"The purity of our principles, the idealism of our struggle, these are factors of strengthening and drawing power that have given to us courage for all our battles, and have given to our doctrines an irresistible attraction for all who feel themselves oppressed and have a sense of honor."

"We dare not do all that our opponents do. We dare not sacrifice everything for advantages. For what is an advantage to our opponents is deadly poison to us. The nobility say of themselves, '; so we may say, socialisme oblige, socialism imposes its obligations."

"We come more and more frequently into momentary unions, or momentary relations with other parties. But these momentary relations must never become momentary alliances. We must never bind the party. We must always keep our hand free; exploit the conditions; let our opponents do the dirty work for us; and with the goal of the party firmly in mind, keep in the middle of the road, and go our own way, only going along with opposing parties when our way happens to be the same as theirs. That we are a party of the class struggle, who have nothing in common with any other party, and who have to fight and conquer all other parties, in order to attain our goal, is something which we must never for a moment lose sight of."

"The internationality of socialism is a fact that is daily becoming more evident and more significant. We socialists are one nation to ourselves, – one and the same international nation in all the lands of the earth. And the capitalists with their agents, instruments and dupes are likewise an international nation, so that we can truthfully say, there are to-day only two great nations in all lands that battle with each other in the great class struggle, which is the new revolution – a class struggle on one side of which stands the proletariat, representing socialism, and on the other the bourgeoisie, representing capitalism. While the bourgeois world of capitalism continues and the bourgeoisie rules, so long are all states necessarily class states, and all governments class governments, serving the purposes and interests of the ruling class, and destined to lead the class struggle for the bourgeoisie against the proletariat – for capitalism against socialism, for our enemies and against us. From the standpoint of the class struggle which is the foundation of militant socialism, that is a truth which has been raised by the logic of thought and of facts beyond the possibility of a doubt. A socialist who goes into a bourgeois government, either goes over to the enemy or else puts himself in the power of the enemy. In any case the socialist who becomes a member of a bourgeois government separates himself from us, the militant socialists. He may claim to be a socialist but he is no longer such. He may be convinced of his own sincerity, but in that case he has not comprehended the nature of the class struggle – does not understand that the class struggle is the basis of socialism."

"In these days, under the rule of capitalism, a government, even if it is full of philanthropy and animated by the best of intentions, can do nothing of real value to our cause. One must keep free from illusions."

"If the way to hell is paved with good intentions, the way to defeat is paved with illusions."

"I am for the unity of the party – for the national and international unity of the party. But it must be a unity of socialism and socialists. The unity with opponents – with people who have other aims and other interests, is no socialist unity. We must strive for unity at any price and with all sacrifices. But while we are uniting and organizing, we must rid ourselves of all foreign and antagonistic elements. What would one say of a general who in the enemy’s country sought to fill the ranks of his army with recruits from the ranks of the enemy? Would that not be the height of foolishness? Very well, to take into our army – which is an army for the class struggle and the class war – opponents, soldiers with aims and interests entirely opposite to our own, – that would be madness, that would be suicide."

"On the ground of the class struggle we are invincible; if we leave it we are lost, because we are no longer socialists. The strength and power of socialism rests in the fact that we are leading a class struggle; that the laboring class is exploited and oppressed by the capitalist class, and that within capitalist society effectual reforms, which will put an end to class government and class exploitation, are impossible."

"We cannot traffic in our principles, we can make no compromise, no agreement with the ruling system. We must break with the ruling system and fight it to a finish. It must fall that socialism may arise, and we certainly cannot expect from the ruling class that it will give to itself and its domination the death blow."

"Undoubtedly there are bourgeois who from a feeling of justice and humanity place themselves upon the side of the laborers and socialists, but these are only the exceptions; the mass of the bourgeoisie has , a consciousness of being the ruling and exploiting class. Indeed, the mass of the bourgeoisie, just because they are a ruling class, have a much sharper and stronger class consciousness than the proletariat."

"Long live international socialism!"

"Fear is proverbially a poor adviser for human action; for a party it is destruction. Fear of the labor movement and socialism has caused the political downfall of the German bourgeoisie; and the days of the Social Democracy are numbered as soon as the cry of fear finds a response in us. We should not challenge, but we should not sound the alarm and be misled by fear into taking steps that do not accord with the principles, the nature and the honor of our party. One does not disarm an enemy through timidity and gentleness; one simply emboldens him. Not that we should seek to run our heads through a wall. We wish to be and must be “practical.”"

"Social Democracy must remain for itself, must seek for and generate its power within itself. Every power outside of ourselves on which we seek to lean is for us only weakness. In the consciousness of our strength, in our faith in the world-conquering mission of socialism lies the secret of our extraordinary, almost miraculous success."

"Socialism cannot conquer nor redeem the world if it ceases to believe upon itself alone."

"We will not turn from the old tactics, nor from the old program. Ever advancing with science and economic development, we are what we were and we will remain what we are. Or – the Social Democracy will cease to exist."

"If Theodore Roosevelt is the great champion of democracy —the arch foe of autocracy , what business had he as the guest of honor of the Prussian Kaiser? And when he met the Kaiser, and did honor to the Kaiser, under the terms imputed to him, wasn't it pretty strong proof that he himself was a Kaiser at heart? Now, after being the guest of Emperor Wilhelm, the Beast of Berlin, he comes back to this country, and wants you to send ten million men over there to kill the Kaiser; to murder his former friend and pal. Rather queer, isn't it? And yet, he is the patriot, and we are the traitors. I challenge you to find a Socialist anywhere on the face of the earth who was ever the guest of the Beast of Berlin, except as an inmate of his prison—the elder Liebknecht and the younger Liebknecht, the heroic son of his immortal sire."

"Politics is the art of making the people believe that they are in power, when in fact, they have none"

"The colonization of the Southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse. If Black people, by means of terror and violence, could remain the most brutally exploited group within the swelling ranks of the working class, the capitalists could enjoy a double advantage. Extra profits would result from the superexploitation of Black labor, and white workers’ hostilities toward their employers would be defused. White workers who assented to lynching necessarily assumed a posture of racial solidarity with the white men who were really their oppressors. This was a critical moment in the popularization of racist ideology."

"So we say—we always say in the Black Panther Party that they can do anything they want to to us. We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you’re going to have to keep on saying that. You’re going to have to say that I am a proletariat, I am the people. I am not the pigs. You’ve got to make a distinction. And the people are going to have to attack the pigs. The people are going to have to stand up against the pigs. That’s what the Panthers are doing here. That’s what the Panthers are doing all over the world."

"You state that the Bureau ... should not attack programs of community interest such as the [Black Panther Party] "Breakfast for Children." … You have obviously missed the point.… This program was formed by the BPP for obvious reasons, including their efforts to create an image of civility, assume community control of Negroes, and to fill adolescent children with their insidious poison."

"Revolutionary change means the seizure of all that is held by the 1 percent, and the transference of these holdings into the hands of the remaining 99 percent. If the 1 percent are simply replaced by another 1 percent, revolutionary change has not taken place."

"Prestige stands between the masses and a revolt against their class enemy. The aura of magic, glamour, luster and splendid permanence covers the fascists like a protective layer of fat. The slimy scales of majesty shield and conceal the dilapidation of the old bourgeois reign of terror."

"This is a huge nation dominated by the most reactionary and violent ruling class in the history of the world, where the majority of the people just simply cannot understand that they are existing on the misery and discomfort of the world."

"We are quite obviously faced with a need to organize some small defenses to the more flagrant abuses of the system now. ... While we await the precise moment when all of capitalism's victims will indignantly rise to destroy the system, we are being devoured. ... Some of us are going to have to take our courage in hand and build a hard revolutionary cadre for selective retaliatory violence."

"Comrade, Repression exposes. By drawing violence from the beast, the vanguard party is demonstrating for the world to examine just exactly what terms their rule is predicated on—their power to organize violence, our acquiescence."

"If the truth be told, which it rarely was except in private, most of the white Left found the Black Panthers a little bit scary. While most of the New Left whites were from the comfortable middle class, and most of the civil rights blacks such as Bob Moses and Martin Luther King were well educated, the Black Panthers were mostly street people from tough neighborhoods, often with prison records. Dressing in black with black berets and posing for photos with weapons, they intended to be scary. They preached violence and urged blacks to arm themselves for a coming violent revolution. They might have gotten little sympathy and few admirers except for two things. By 1968 it was becoming clear that the political establishment, especially in certain fiefdoms such as Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago and Governor Ronald Reagan’s California, was prepared to use armed warfare against unarmed demonstrators. In April Daley announced that he had given his police force orders to “shoot to kill” any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail and “shoot to maim” any looters, a license to open fire on any civil disturbance. Once Reagan became governor in 1967, along with cutting the state budget for medical care and education, he initiated a policy of brutalizing demonstrators. Following an October 16, 1967, attack on antiwar demonstrators in Oakland that was so barbarous it was dubbed “bloody Tuesday,” he commended the Oakland Police Department for “their exceptional ability and great professional skill.” Young, privileged white people were starting to be treated by police the way black people had been for a long time."

"the newspaper we put out, El Grito del Norte — which we did start with Beverly’s help — that newspaper was started, I want you to know, on the same typewriter as the first Black Panther Party newspaper, the same typewriter"

"The FBI was most disturbed by the Panthers' survival programs providing community service. The popular free breakfast program, in which the party provided free hot breakfasts to children in Black communities throughout the United States, was, as already noted, a particular thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover. Finding little to criticize about the program objectively, the Bureau decided to destroy it."

"I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism."

"Some see our struggle as a symbol of the trend toward suicide among Blacks. Scholars and academics, in particular, have been quick to make this accusation. They fail to perceive differences. Jumping off a bridge is not the same as moving to wipe out the overwhelming force of an oppressive army. When scholars call our actions suicidal, they should be logically consistent and describe all historical revolutionary movements in the same way. Thus the American colonialists, the French of the late eighteenth century, the Russians of 1917, the Jews of Warsaw, the Cubans, the NLF, the North Vietnamese—any people who struggle against a brutal and powerful force—are suicidal."

"I had read a pamphlet about voter registration in Mississippi, how the people in Lowndes County had armed themselves against Establishment violence. Their political group, called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, had a black panther for its symbol. A few days later, while Bobby Seale and I were rapping, I suggested that we use the panther as our symbol."

"When we first started, we had a police alert patrol. We would patrol the community; if we saw the police brutalizing anyone we would put an end to it. Usually, the police wouldn't brutalize anyone if we were on hand because we were armed."

"We, the Black Panther Party, see ourselves as a nation within a nation, but not for any racist reasons. We see it as a necessity for us to progress as human beings and live on the face of this earth along with other people. We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative capitalism with black capitalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism. And we do not fight imperialism with more imperialism. We fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism."

"While Chicanos in the Southwest sought to emulate the paramilitary style of the Black Panthers by forming groups such as the Brown Berets, it was Puerto Rican organizations like the Young Lords Party that most self-consciously modeled themselves on the Black Power movement."

"One militant black group, however, endorsed me strongly-the Black Panthers. National chairman Bobby Seale said I was the best social critic of America's injustices to run for President from whatever party," and promised that the Panthers' full membership would work for me. More than one supporter wanted me to disavow the Panthers' endorsement, but I flatly refused. "The Black Panthers are citizens of the United States and they have a right to endorse whomever they decide to endorse," I told reporters in Sacramento, where we got word of the action. "What has happened to them as an oppressed group in America has led them to the conclusion that perhaps with me there is hope." From where I stood, it was a highly hopeful sign that this group appeared to be emerging into an active participation in elective politics; they were acting according to a principle that I had always strictly maintained: that the way to change the system must be to work within the system. To disavow their support would have been arrogant and inconsistent with my strongest principles; if failing to do so cost me any votes from whites and moderate blacks, so be it. They are my brothers and sisters too, and I was pleased and proud at their action. One thing that gratified me was that the Panthers had succeeded in rising above sex prejudice, something that many blacks find difficult; they were supporting me because of my positions and my programs, without regard to my being female. This showed that in some ways they were farther along the path of political maturity than some of the moderate leaders of elements of the black community, who, I am convinced, never took me seriously as a candidate because they were not capable of taking any woman seriously as a potential leader."

"The civil rights movement tended to be focused on integration, but there were those who said, "We don't want to assimilate into a sinking ship, so let's change the ship altogether." The emergence of the Black Panther Party marked a moment of rupture, and we are still in that moment. The party had two different kinds of activism: grass-roots activism that helped to create institutions that are still working-for example, the Agriculture Department now runs free breakfast programs. On the other hand, the posture of self-defense and monitoring the police. If one looks at the party ten-point program, every single point is as relevant or more relevant fifty years later. The tenth point includes community control of technology. That was very prescient. It's about using technologies rather than allowing them to use us."

"In Berkeley and Oakland, "Free Huey" was the call. I found the militancy and relevance of the Panthers' program irresistible. The Black Panther Party's "10-Point Program" called for black freedom and the power to determine the destiny of the black community. The program demanded jobs, housing, education, an end to white exploitation of the black community, an end to police brutality, instigation of trials by peer juries, and freedom for incarcerated blacks. Most interesting of all, the Panthers revived a demand enunciated by Malcolm X just before his death-a U.N.-sponsored plebiscite to determine whether blacks wanted to be part of the United States, or form a separate nation. The Panthers began calling their program "intercommunalism.""

"In the 1960s I was part of a number of Black revolutionary movements, including the Black Panther Party, which I feel partially failed because of the authoritarian leadership style of Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and others on the Central Committee. This is not a recrimination against those individuals, but many errors were made because the national leadership was too divorced from the chapters in cities all over the country, and therefore engaged in “commandism” or forced work dictated by leaders. But many contradictions were also set up because of the structure of the organization as a Marxist-Leninist group. There was not a lot of inner-party democracy, and when contradictions came up, it was the leaders who decided on their resolution, not the members. Purges became commonplace, and many good people were expelled from the group simply because they disagreed with the leadership. Because of the over-importance of central leadership, the national organization was ultimately liquidated entirely, packed up and shipped back to Oakland, California. Of course, many errors were made because the BPP was a young organization and was under intense attack by the state. I do not want to imply that the internal errors were the primary contradictions that destroyed the BPP. The police attacks on it did that, but, if it were better and more democratically organized, it may have weathered the storm. So this is no mindless criticism or backstabbing attack. I loved the party. And, anyway, not myself or anyone else who critique the party with hindsight, will ever take away from the tremendous role that the BPP played in the Black Liberation movement of the 1960s. But we must look at a full picture of out organizations from that period, so that we do not repeat the same errors."

"I admired the personal courage and commitment of individual Black Panthers I got to know, but I was not a fan of their politics. With the Panthers you found this curious mixture of selfless dedication and some of the worst aspects of street culture. They maintained discipline in their party "with a stick," as their own phrase had it. In Los Angeles they would run classes every Saturday in "political education" in which their members had to memorize sections of Mao's little red book. If they failed to memorize their assignment, they were beaten up. The same thing would happen if they failed to sell their weekly quota of their party newspaper. The Panthers picked up the Maoist slogan "All power grows out of the barrel of a gun" and made an ideological fetish out of it. That phrase has to be one of the stupidest things Mao ever said, because what power really grows out of is the organized consciousness of millions of people. At some point guns may become important tactically in the revolutionary process in some countries, but that isn't where power comes from-and a good thing, too, because revolutionaries are always going to be outgunned by the forces defending the old order."

"One of the problems the Panthers faced was that their founding leaders, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, were either on trial or in prison for most of the late 1960s and early 1970s. That left control of the party pretty much in the hands of Eldridge Cleaver, an unstable character who led it close to the brink of destruction. After Huey and Bobby got out of prison and broke with Cleaver, they shifted their emphasis from "self-defense" to "survival programs." The place where they did most to implement the new strategy was in Oakland, the only city where they were able to build any kind of a base. There they functioned as a kind of free-lance social welfare agency, providing free food, clothes, and health care services to the community. We obviously didn't have anything against people receiving those kinds of services, but our idea had always been that the role of radicals was to organize people to demand that such benefits be provided by the government. Radicals shouldn't be in the position of competing with the churches as dispensers of charity. At the height of the Panthers' "serve the people" phase, Bobby Seale came down to Los Angeles to speak at a fundraising event in some wealthy white supporter's house. He was standing up at one end of the room explaining why this free-groceries strategy was the key to political success, and the rest of us were literally sitting at his feet. I think I was one of the few skeptics in the room, and I asked him, "How is the Black Panther Party different from any church running a soup kitchen?" He didn't know who I was, and when he turned to me he said, "I'm afraid I can't explain it to you because you don't understand dialectical materialism." That got a big laugh. The problem with the Panthers' approach to politics, in both its early and later stages, was that they were always substituting themselves for someone. When their emphasis was on military confrontation, they were substituting themselves for mass revolutionary activity, and when their emphasis was on free handouts, they were substituting themselves for the welfare department."

"In October of 1966-just one month after the Hunter's Point mêlée and one month before a conservative Republican by the name of Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California-Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panthers in nearby Oakland. Other fiery militant black leaders such as Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver came forward to repudiate the conventional white culture and to advance the war cry that for them said it all-"Black is Beautiful." But beyond that catchy axiom was a definite self-help message in the Black Panthers' rhetoric. They established free breakfast programs and alternative schools. During the group's heyday, it was not uncommon to see Huey Newton on local talk shows discussing civil rights and police harassment of young black men. The first activist group I truly identified with was the Black Panther Party. They talked about problems I was familiar with. I had never before seen any minority stand up to police, judges, and other white people."

"we became involved in the Black Panther Defense Committee. My parents were doing various kinds of support activities for the Panthers. They lent them the car for the breakfast program and various things. My dad was teaching history class to the Young Lords…the Panthers themselves were very young. They were teenagers. I’m trying to remember — Bobby Rush — Fred Hampton was 21 when he was killed. You know, they were all very young and so they were kind of, you know, these strutting, macho boys who were coming into a kind of political power that they had not had access to before. So there were all kinds of dynamics that were icky about it, but you know, I don’t remember the details of what we did with them, as it wasn’t for that long of a period."

"We're gonna make our own revolution because we're sick of revolutionary posters which depict straight he-man types and earth mothers, with guns and babies. We're sick of the Panthers lumping us together with the capitalists in their term of universal contempt-"faggot.""

"I think the most probably visible historical example of mutual aid in the U.S. that people talk about a lot is, of course, the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast programs and health programs, which were a vital part of the party’s work. And it’s a good example of how social movements often, pretty much always, centrally organize mutual aid, because people come into social movements to get immediate needs met, and they also desperately want to help others facing what they’re facing. And when they’re there, they can build a shared analysis: Hey, why don’t we have food? Why don’t we have shelter? What systems are in place that we all actually want to get to the root causes of?"

"The Black Panther, the official publication of the BPP, criticized the legalization of abortion in New York in 1970, and equally scathing essays continued to appear throughout the early 1970s."

"By 1975, moreover, the Black Panthers had endorsed abortion rights. The organization first reversed positions when protesting the conviction of Dr. Kenneth Edelin, an African American obstetrician-gynecologist convicted for manslaughter in the death of a fetus during a late term abortion. In 1977, the Panthers ran a series of articles criticizing the Hyde Amendment and calling for access to abortion as part of a broader program of welfare rights."

"Our party, the oldest in Iraq, was established in 1934. It stands for the rights of working people; for the country's independence; for its development; and of course, in the current situation, we are calling for a change to the - we're calling for a citizens' state based on justice and . We believe that over the past 12 years, the political process was based on an ethnic and sectarian system. I think this so-called "quota system" is responsible for the crisis the country is now facing. It created the grounds for corruption and lack of development. Change should begin by reforming state s to achieve social justice and real socioeconomic development."

"We had to get rid of occupation and regain and enhance our sovereignty. We have now ended up with a capitalist system. We are calling for social justice, a system in terms of creating jobs and enhancing the productive base of the economy."

"Since 2003, we are fully dependent on oil. Agriculture, industry, manufacturing have all regressed, accounting for not more than 1.25 percent of GDP. Our strategy is to reactivate agriculture, manufacturing and other productive activity, and at the same time provide protection to the people. In terms of social advancement, we want to strengthen s and . Iraq should not be a consumer-only market for the production activities of neighbouring countries."

"We are in a country that's in deep crisis at this particular juncture; all indicators are bad, not only in terms of terrorism and security. There is high unemployment; marginalised people; poor social s; very bad infrastructure. All these big challenges constitute a platform under which you can build a very wide-ranging coalition for the ."

"We should give priority to legislation concerning social security."

"As far as the government is concerned, the first challenge is to form a government which is based not on an ethnic and sectarian affiliation. We should have a government committed to oversee the reform and social development programmes."

"We have a good image among the population - we should distinguish between voting and image, not everyone who appreciate us actually votes for us."

"The country faces big challenges and we can address these challenges together with parties from different backgrounds and ideologies who share the concerns and interest as the people of Iraq."

"We are saying we are for bilateral relations with all countries but based on respect of Iraq's sovereignty and non-intervention in our internal affairs. It is possible to have friendly relations with all our neighbours on the basis of mutual respect. We are saying we can keep balanced relations and we can have trade and other commercial relations with all countries but we don't accept s in our country."

"Our interest must not risk Iraq's interests. If we can build an Iraq on the basis of our own independence and sovereignty, I think this Iraq will be respected by others, whether it be the Americans, Iranians or any other country. And this is what we are working to achieve. We have to work with the Iraqi people - so far they have been divided and all other external forces found it easy to intervene because they found receptive ears. What we are saying is that we should reinforce Iraqi unity."

"We are saying and insisting that all forces should belong to Iraq's interest first. And this should apply to all forces and I think when we are talking about building the state, building armed forces, loyalty to Iraq's interest - this should apply to everybody. As far as I know all, other political forces including Hashd accept these principles. Iraqis will decide who controls Iraq - no one from outside."

"The Quranic conception of God was, and can still be, a revolutionary force of incalculable value for the attainment of human welfare.”"

"The most important fact of the Middle Ages was the rise of Islam. . .. In the thought of the Prophet of Islam as revealed in the Quran and the Hadis (the Prophet's conversations sic) two basic ideas stand out—the principle of unity in the cosmic order and the principle of the brotherhood of those who believed in (the Prophet's) creed. Islam wrought one of the most vital and the most bloodless revolutions in human history. ... Medina under the Prophet was a working-class republic. . . . There was no governing class and no subject people."

"The peaceful Indian Mussalman, descended beyond doubt from Hindu ancestors, was dressed up in the garb of a foreign barbarian, as a breaker of temples, and an eater of beef, and declared to be a military colonist in the land where he had lived for about thirty or forty centuries…. The result of it is seen in the communalistic atmosphere of India today."

"The Hindu feels it his duty to dislike those whom he has been taught to consider the enemy of his religion and his ancestors; the Mussalman, lured into the false belief that he was once a member of a ruling race, feels insufferably wronged by being relegated to the status of a minority community. Fools both! Even if the Muslims eight centuries ago were as bad as they were painted, would there be any sense in holding the present generation responsible for their deeds. It is but an imaginative tie that joins the modern Hindu with Harshavardhana or Asoka, or the modern Mussalman with Shihabuddin or Mahmud."

"No honest historian should seek to hide, and no Musalman acquainted with his faith will try to justify, the wanton destruction of temples that followed in the wake of the Ghaznavid army. Contemporary as well as later historians do not attempt to veil the nefarious acts but relate them with pride. It is easy to twist one’s conscience; and we know only too well how easy it is to find a religious justification for what people wish to do from worldly motives. Islam sanctioned neither the vandalism nor the plundering motives of the invader; no principle known to the Shariat justified the uncalled for attack on Hindu princes who had done Mahmud and his subjects no harm; the shameless destruction of places of worship is condemned by the law of every creed. And yet Islam, though it was not an inspiring motive, could be utilised as an a posteriori justificiation for what had been done. It was not difficult to mistake the spoliation of non-Muslim populations for a service to Islam, and persons to whom the argument was addressed found it too much in consonance with the promptings of their own passions to examine it critically. So the precepts of Quran were misinterpreted or ignored and the tolerant policy of the Second Caliph was cast aside in order that Mahmud and his myrmidons might be able to plunder Hindu temples with a clear and untroubled conscience."

"In 1330 the country was invaded by the Mongols who indulged in arson, rape and murder throughout the Valley (of Kashmir). The king and the Brahmans fled away but among the inhabitants who remained… Muslim ways of life were gradually adopted by the people as the only alternative…"

"Shorn of Marxist jargon, the thesis propounded by [Mohammad] Habib is very simple - the Turkish conquest of India was a historical necessity, a fortunate event in the history of its people. ... in short, Habib's "historical" explanation is factually incorrect, his understanding of Marxism faulty, and his interpretation of Turkish rule over India a futile effort to eulogize Islam's advent in the sub-continent."

"Around 1920 Aligarh historian Mohammed Habib launched a grand project to rewrite the history of the Indian religious conflict."

"[He was] so conscious of the negative aspects of the medieval Islamic civilization or so sensitive to the devastation that the wars and campaigns of the sultans wrought on the inhabitants."

"The urge among Muslims to justify to their non-Muslim contemporaries (and indeed to themselves) the historical record of their community in South Asia is evident in such works of the nineteen- twenties and nineteen-thirties as Professor Muhammad Habib’s Mahmud of Ghaznin (1927)... In the first, Professor Habib attempts to correct what he says was a then recent tendency among Muslims of the sub-continent to adore Sultan Mahmid as a saint. The sultan is rather to be regarded as a foreigner to India and as an imperialist, not as a mujahid."

"Before writing this book it is clear that Professor Habib drank deep both of the teachings of Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan and of western intellectual potions of a generation ago. There is the ‘protestant’ view of Islam as against the ‘catholic’—the urge to return to the Prophet and away from the accretions of later ages. There is, too, the western distinction between religion as social and religion as personal, the western urge to study the interpenetration and interaction of religious, social, and economic factors in the life of a society, the organic revolutionary conception of society and. of historical change. The whole tonc of the book is rational, secular, urbane, and dispassionate. The author's political position at the time of publication appears to be that of an Indian nationalist who, though he speaks as ‘a Muslim—for he feels the need to put Mahmud in a proper historical perspective—yet believes that differences in religion are private and personal and to be submerged in the larger unity of Indian nationhood."

"The significant feature of Professor Habib’s Marxist interpretation of medieval Indian history is not that Marxism has absorbed Islam but that Islam has absorbed Marxism."

"I was told by [Mohammed Habib] with considerable pride that Nehru had learnt the history of medieval India “at his feet.” I have yet to meet a more arrogant man whose manners were uglier than his syphilitic face. He was an ardent admirer of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. He lost his temper and asked me to “go away” when I told him that I did not accept Lenin’s theory of the state."

"It is beyond dispute that, despite all the talks about “sustainable development” or “green growth”, the world continues to head relentlessly towards global ecological catastrophes. We know this as we observe that the global ecological deficit (the gap between ecological footprint and bio-capacity) continue to widen and the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases keeps rising year after year."

"China's dramatic rise as a global economic power is one of the most important developments at the current world-historical conjuncture. Many have wondered how the rise of China will shape the world-historical trajectory of the twenty-first century Will China become the next hegemonic power? If yes, what would the new China-centered global system look like? if not, what would be the implications for the existing world-system?"

"The Revolution is dead. Long Live the Revolution"

"Mao Zedong was a great leader of the Chinese Revolution and as a result enjoyed an enormous amount of prestige among he ordinary Chinese people. However, Mao, as a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist, had always worked with and relied upon other Party leaders as well had always worked with and relied upon either Party leaders as well as the grass-roots Part members and masses to accomplish political, economic and social goals. Mao never relied upon and never believed in a command hierarchy imposed form above. Within the Chinese Communist Party, Mao had never gained that kind of absolute control that Stalin had over the Soviet Communist Party (and even Stalin could not simply impose his will without the cooperation of much of the Party and state bureaucracy). ON the contrary, on many historical occasions, Mao often found himself in the minority (as Lenin did within the Part leadership. If Mai's intention had eventually become the will of the Party, that took place only after patient and sustained persuasion, difficult and sometimes intense intra-Party struggle, criticism and self-criticisms, and most importantly, after the Party leaders and members had learnt from practice themselves."

"For the capitalist world-economy, the problem of China lies with its huge size. China has a labor force that is larger than the total labor force in all of the core states, or that in the entire historical well0to-do semi-periphery. As China competes with the well-to-do semi peripheral states in a wide range of global commodity chains, the competition eventually would lead to the convergence between China and the historical well-to-do semi-peripheral sates in profit races and wage rates. This convergence may take place in an upward manner or a downward manner."

"We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing the mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play. Each time the curtain rises, continuity has to be re-established. The blame, of course is not history's but lies in our vision, encumbered with memory and images learned in the past."

"One may well consider it a stroke of good luck that Fidel Castro had not read the military writings of Mao Tse-Tung before disembarking on the coast of Oriente: he could thus invent, on the spot and to of his own experience, principles of a military doctrine in conformity with the terrain. It was only at the end of the war, when their tactics were already defined, that the rebels discovered the writings of Mao."

"All decisive revolutionary processes must begin and have begun with certain missteps for the reason that we have mentioned: because the existing points of departure are those left by the preceding historical period, and they are used, even if unconsciously."

"In each country that has experienced a revolution a confrontation has taken place between revolutionaries on one side and reformists and future renegades on the other."

"Today, self-defense as a system and as a reality has been liquidated by the march of events."

"In Vietnam above all, and also in China, armed self defense of the peasants, organized in militias, has played an important role as the foundation stone of the structure of the armed forces of liberation-but self-defense extended to zones already militarily liberated or semi-liberated; in no way did it bring autonomous zones into being. These territories of self defense were viable only because total war was being carried out on other fronts, with the regular and mobile forces of the Vietminh. They permitted the integration of the entire population into the war without resting the principal weight of the struggle upon it. By dispersing the French expeditionary force, these zones lightened the task of the regular and semi-regular forces and permitted them to concentrate a maximum of troops on battle fronts chosen in accordance with the strategic plans of the General Staff. Even less than in Vietnam can self-defense be self-sufficing in Latin America-at least not if one aims to avoid the elimination of the civilian population."

"In order to destroy one army, another army is necessary, and this ipmlies training, discipline, and arms. Freternity and bravery do not make an army. Witness Spain, and the Paris Commune."

"We know that Trotskyism flies in the face of common sense, in that its strength lies in its division. It is everywhere and nowhere. It exposes itself by hiding itself. I is never what it is, Trotskyist. The Trotskyist ideology has reappeared today from several directions, taking as its pretext several transitory defeats suffered by revolutionary action, but always propositions the same "strategy for taking power"."

"Condemned to exist in the present within the categories of the past, Trotskyism withers on the vine."

"We know that Trotskyism flies in the face of common sense, in that its strength lies in its division. It is everywhere and nowhere. It exposes itself by hiding itself. It is never what it is, Trotskyist."

"At bottom Trotskyism is a metaphysic paved with good intentions.* It is based on a belief in the natural goodness of the workers, which is always perverted by evil bureaucracies but never destroyed. There is a proletarian essence within peasants and workers alike which cannot be altered by circumstances. For them to become aware of it themselves, it is only necessary that they be given the word, that objectives be set for them which they see without seeing and which they know without knowing. Result: socialism becomes a reality, all at once, without delay, neat and tidy."

"The international disputes which united and divided Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Bordiga or Trotsky on these issues represent the last great strategic debate in the European workers’ movement. Since then, there has been little significant theoretical development of the political problems of revolutionary strategy in metropolitan capitalism that has had any direct contact with the masses. The structural divorce between original Marxist theory and the main organizations of the working class in Europe has yet to be historically resolved. The May-June revolt in France, the upheaval in Portugal, the approaching dénouement in Spain, presage the end of this long divorce, but have not accomplished it. The classical debates, therefore, still remain in many respects the most advanced limit of reference we possess today. It is thus not mere archaism to recall the strategic confrontations which occurred four or five decades ago. To reappropriate them, on the contrary, is a step towards a Marxist discussion that has the—necessarily modest—hope of assuming an ‘initial shape’ of correct theory today. Régis Debray has spoken, in a famous paragraph, of the constant difficulty of being contemporary with our present. In Europe at least, we have yet to be sufficiently contemporary with our past."

"We must fight for one Arab nation, for unity, for freedom, for socialism. We must defeat enemy number one, America, the supplier of Hawk missiles to Israel, and we must seize our own oil resources. We must learn to emulate our Algerian brethren in order to liberate Palestine. Long live Palestine, Arab and revolutionary!"

"I was looking forward to finding out what you wanted to know from me about the security of aviation."

"Who decides and defines what terrorism is? As far as I'm concerned, occupation is terrorism. My people and I have a right to fight it. I don't care what others call it. People have a right to fight those who occupy their country by all means possible including weapons. That's what it says in the UN declaration."

"When we hijacked the planes the whole world wondered who we were. Regardless of what they thought about it, they wondered. But when we were tortured in lsraeli prisons, who heard our screams? We had to do what we did in order to get your attention. Our people suffered in Justice. No sound person accepts that! No one."

"I'll explain why the plane was hijacked. We had to, to get attention so that the world would understand our cause. We weren't refugees who were satisfied with aid. It wasn't a natural disaster that made us refugees. We captured the planes to ask the world a question. Who are the Palestinians?"

"The leadership chose to go for the Oslo Accords [in 1991], thinking that this was a step forward in achieving the main rights of the Palestinians. Some people believed this, but they discovered, after twenty years, that it was nonsense. It brought catastrophe on us. There are more settlements than ever, twice more than before Oslo, the number of settlers has doubled, more land is being confiscated, and, of course, the Wall has been built. The apartheid wall. Israel is an apartheid state."

"There’s a fundamental equation: where there is occupation, there is resistance. Nobody can change this. This is basic, it’s natural; you cannot change the sun and make it rise from the west. This is the truth; it is natural. When you are under oppression, you resist."

"We don’t care about being Christian or Muslim or Jews. This is about the rights of people. We’re not targeting Jews. We are targeting occupants."

"I am a freedom fighter, whatever that means or whatever the media that is controlled by Zionism and the imperialists say. They can give us or label us whatever they want. I say occupation is terrorism. Zionism is terrorism. Imperialists are terrorists. They are the ones who create wars against the people of the world. I don’t know what they label us, but I know myself as a part of my people’s struggle as a freedom fighter."

"I never had a whole pencil, always half. My mother used to cut it into two so every child could go to school."

"I apologized to the passengers. We didn’t hurt anyone. The passengers were all released and went back to their homes - but we didn’t go back to our homes. I didn’t care if I was the first woman hijacking a plane or not, I just wanted to do something for our cause."

"Now Israel wants to say that they are attacking Hamas, but the children are not Hamas, women are not Hamas. They are attacking our people, and it’s a genocide attack this time."

"Now there are no more secrets. Everything is exposed, both audio and video, and no matter how much the Western media tries to spread misinformation and illusions, it will not be able to cover the image."

"In 1969, Wadie Haddad asked me if I was ready to die, and I said yes. He then asked if I was ready for imprisonment, to which I said that we entered this path knowing the risks and there are already many of our Palestinian comrades in prisons due to military operations. I understood what it meant to be imprisoned by the occupation. Then he went on to ask me if I was ready to hijack a plane."

"Anyway, we may conceive of Marx without the labor theory of value should be abandoned. Does he abdicate or support what he calls "Fundamental Marxian theorem"? If he wants to support it, value concept is indispensable."

"The idle lives of a minority ruling class can only be maintained by products, needless to say. So the only method to bring about this state of affairs is to appropriate, gratis, the fruits of labor of those who work by the sweat of their brow."

"In the case of the exploitation of slave labor, by contrast, things are exceedingly clear. Slaves, who exist as a sort of animal owned by another human being, have no freedom. Like a dog, a slave is unable to exercise any degree of physical or mental freedom."

"A newspaper article - I can't recall the exact year - listed the capitalist Kōsuke Matsushita as the person in Japan with the largest income. I don't know anything about Mr. Matsushita personally, and just happened to see this article, but here I would like to use his case to illustrate exploitation. This example, incidentally, will assume that products and labor-power are sold at their value."

"Since the labor-power could be the labor of four, eight, or even twelve hours, the amount of labor expended can be augmented. The value of the labor-power is decided by the consumption goods necessary to maintain the life of the worker, making it possible for that person to exist as a human being who expends the same labor today as yesterday."

"Once the means of production have become capital, a certain quantity of value is augmented through the exploitation of labor. And this valorizing value is capital."

"Marx refers to the value invested on the means of production as constant capital."

"By no definition could Akbar or Aurangzeb be declared a foreigner, unless being a Muslim was made the ground for declaring one a foreigner. In reality, the struggle between Pratap and Akbar or Shivaji and Aurangzeb had to be viewed as a political struggle in its particular historical setting. To declare Akbar or Aurangzeb a ‘foreigner’ and Pratap or Shivaji a ‘national’ hero was to project into past history the communal outlook of 20th century India. This was not only bad history; it was also a blow to national unity."

"Moreover, the British and communal historians attacked the notion of a composite culture in India."

"There was an impression of hope and optimism when the Conference started, but very soon it was clear that Jinnah’s intransigence and rearguard action by the imperialists would make it impossible for it to succeed. The negotiations broke down because Jinnah insisted that all the Muslim members of the Executive Council should be nominated only by the League. Nor were the British willing to sign any agreement with the Congress to which the Muslim League was not a party. The policy of ‘Divide and Rule’ was at its zenith."

"He was successful in articulating a usable political history, and then openly practicing history as ideology by other means. His assumptions are now so widespread that we forget what an achievement it was to make them hegemonic. One assumption, clearly articulated in Communalism in Modern India, was that while communal consciousness could exist in pre-Modern India, communalism could not. This is not the place to go into the veracity of this claim. But what is striking is that this conclusion is arrived at almost a priori. History is an elaboration of this claim, not evidence for it... The strange Congress-Left elective affinity was forged less by a fear of the RSS than by the fact that the Congress, during the ’70s, gave up its own complex historical sensibility and substituted it with the Left. Chandra was the key protagonist in that significant historical transformation and therefore dominated like few historians have."

"As a historian, Chandra had the confidence to admit whenever any of his formulation was disproved. “That’s how he kept evolving as a historian,” says Mukherjee. He was humble too, often admitting in class that his English wasn’t as good as fellow historian and colleague S Gopal. Chandra was a Marxist historian; however, in the last few decades, he also developed an admiration for Gandhi and his methods. In fact, his book on the rise and growth of economic nationalism in modern India was first published by the Left’s in-house, People’s Publishing House. Communist intellectual Mohit Sen was one of his firm friends."

"Academic feudalism – that is, the relations that develop between an influential professor and his protégés – takes many forms... In JNU, an eminent nationalist historian, Professor Bipan Chandra, was so well known for placing his students in departmental posts that others did not even bother to apply if they did not have his support."

"Professor Bipan Chandra was sanctioned a sum of Rs 75,000 for the year 1987-88 for the assignment entitled A History of the Indian National Congress... He never cared to submit any manuscript. Upon inquiry, ICHR stated that the remaining balance is yet to be received because a formal manuscript in this regard is yet to be received…..Later I learnt that the Rs 75,000/- which had been allotted to this “eminent historian” for this project — “the Oral History Project” — had been but a part, a small part of the total take. … As nothing but nothing had turned up in the ICHR in return for its grant, the second part of my query remained: what action had the ICHR taken in the matter? Eventually I was told, ‘No action has been initiated on this as Dr Bipan Chandra is stated to be still working on the project.’ That was the position nine years after his eminence had collected the money!... The ICHR commenced a National Movement Project to document the freedom struggle from the mid-1850. Bipin Chandra took Rs 12000 to produce the volume covering 1885-86. Result? Nothing has been heard of it since….To assist him to shoulder his onerous load in this regard, the ICHR has employed over the years, one regular staff member plus eight staff members on consolidated salary. Result? Not submitted. But, to be fair, this pattern is not confined to this eminent historian alone. It has been the pattern for the entire institution manned and controlled by these ‘eminent historians’."

"Without undue modesty, we can say we know more about India’s past than Marx did."

"In one of his theses Marx said: 'Philosophers have so far interpreted the world. The point is to change it.' Marxism sees an innate unity between perception of the past and present practice. This unity implies continuous interaction: as time passes and history (human experience) lengthens, we draw greater lessons from it for the present; and as our present experience tells us more about the possibilities and limitations of social action, we turn to the past and obtain new comprehensions of it."

"It is inherent in the unity of past and present that Marxist historiography must continuously turn to fresh aspects to explore and re-explore and fresh questions to answer... This examination must cover everything from general principles to specific facts, because both are all the time being brought into question by others. We have to answer them not by denunciation – always a bad counsellor – but careful scrutiny and investigation."

"To begin with, the new conquerors and rulers…were of a different faith (Islam) from that of their predecessors… their principal achievements lay in a great systematization of agrarian exploitation and an immense concentration of the resources so obtained."

"“…the population during the Mughal period did not remain stable though the compound rate of growth, 0.14% per annum, was hardly spectacular and was much lower than the rate attained during the nineteenth century”"

"While medieval Islamic literature referred to Hindus as 'infidels' and denounced polytheism and image worship, there was no criticism of the caste system, the theory of pollution and oppression of untouchables that were rampant in medieval India. ... The attitude of the Muslims towards the caste system was by no means one of disapprobation..."

"The pressure of new circumstances led initially to large-scale slave-trading and the emergence of slave labour during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The numbers of slaves in the Sultans' establishments were very high (50,000 under Alauddin Khilji, and 180,000 under Firuz Tughluq). Barani judges the level of prices by referring to slave prices, and the presence of slaves was almost all-pervasive."

""The evidence for such enslavement is there for all to see. So economically important was it that the success of military campaigns was often judged by the number of captives (burdas) obtained for enslavement. Qutbuddin Aibak's campaign in Gujarat in 1195 netted him 20,000 slaves, seven years later a campaign against Kalinjar yielded 50,000. In 1253 Balban obtained countless 'horses and slaves' from an expedition in Kalinjar. In the instructions that Alauddin Khalji is said to have issued to Malik Kafur before his campaigns in the Deccan it is assumed that 'horses and slaves' would form a large part of the booty. As the Sultanate began to be consolidated, the suppression of mawas or rebellious villages within its limits yielded a continuously rich harvest of slaves. Balban's successful expedition in the Doab made slaves cheap in the capital. How people of the village could be made slaves for nonpayment of revenue is described in the 14th century sources; and women so enslaved are mentioned in different contexts in two others"."

"The publication of Dr. Tasneem Ahmad’s translation is a notable contribution to the National celebration of the 450th Anniversary of Akbar’s birth. I feel confident that it would reinforce the interest in Akbar’s age widespread among those who have a care for the long process of the creation of a composite culture and a unity that together constitute what is India.... ‘What it [the Tarikh-i-Akbari] now needed was a full-scale English translation.’... ‘This has been provided by Dr. Tasneem Ahmad in a very competent manner, aiming at faithful accuracy and at a critical assessment of the information here received by comparing it with that offered by other sources.’"

"But it seems likely... that Sarasvati/Harakhvati was the name for the Helmand. Otherwise it is difficult to understand how Sarasvati could be put between Sindhu and Sarayu as the major intervening river in RV X, 64.9."

"It is true that my conclusions and views on certain issues are based on my knowledge existing prior to the submission of ASI’s report in court. I and Prof. Habib had given this statement that remains of old mosque or Eidgah had been found beneath the disputed site and not of any temple. If this propaganda that remains of temple were found at the disputed site, had not taken place, there would have been no occasion for me and Prof. Irfan Habib to give the above statement."

"Such an insinuation is in conformity with [Irfan] Habib's pattern of thinking and writing. He is a patently biased historian."

"He always went to the extent of stifling the voices of those who disagreed with him.... The Babri issue would have been settled long ago if the Muslim intelligentsia had not fallen prey to the brain washing by the Leftist historians. A set of historians including Romila Thapar, Bipin Chandra and S Gopal argued that there was no mention of the dismantling of the temple before 19th century and Ayodhya is Bhudhist-Jain centre. They were supported by historians Irfan Habib, RS Sharma, DN Jha, Suraj Ben and Akthar Ali."

"Since some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as “McCarthyist” anyone who points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized that “eminent historians” like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore's Dictionary of Marxist Thought."

"Intellectually, these Nehruvian historians and pressmen stand thoroughly discredited. But they have power positions in the media and in the education and research establishments, so they still manage to black out criticism and alternative opinions. A recent example of their power is the nomination of a successor to Leftist Muslim historian Irfan Habib as head of the Indian Council of Historical Research. The expected choice was Prof. G.C. Pande, former vice-chancellor of two universities. But the secularist intelligentsia launched a campaign against him : "RSS connections loom large". It is said that Irfan Habib contacted the Shahi Imam, who in turn had a chat with his friend V.P. Singh, prime minister. At any rate, G.C. Pande's name was scrapped from the list of candidates. This is also one more example of the unscrupled connivance between secularists and Muslim communalists."

"Now, Irfan Habib’s seemingly strongest piece of evidence (not for the temple’s non-existence, of course, but at least for the untrustworthiness of some pro-temple spokesmen) turned out to be false... During the demolition on 6 December 1992, many Hindu artefacts had turned up, albeit in less than desirable circumstances from an archaeological viewpoint... Among the first findings during the demolition was the Vishnu Hari inscription, dating from the mid-11th century Rajput temple, which the Babri Masjid masons had placed between the outer and inner wall. Several Babri historians dismissed the inscription as fake, as of much later date, or as actually brought by the Kar Sevaks during the demolition itself. Prof. Irfan Habib, in a combine with Dr. Jahnawi Roy and Dr. Pushpa Prasad, dismissed this inscription as stolen from the Lucknow Museum and to be nothing other than the Treta ka Thakur inscription. The curator kept this inscription under lock, but after some trying, Kishore Kunal, author of another Ayodhya book (Ayodhya Revisited, 2016), could finally gain access to it and publish a photograph. What had been suspected all along, turns out to be true: Prof. Habib, who must have known both inscriptions, has told a blatant lie. Both inscriptions exist and are different. Here they have been neatly juxtaposed on p.104-5. Yet, none of the three scholars has “responded to the publication of the photograph of the Treta ka Thakur inscription, which falsifies the arguments they have been persistently advocating for over two decades.”"

"So great was the compulsion and enthusiasm of the historians to somehow discredit the archaeological evidence unearthed at Ayodhya that one of them, Prof. Irfan Habib, who is known amongst his fellow historians as a great scholar of medieval India, ended up making a great professional howler. He announced that he had dated the artifacts found in the Ayodhya excavations, by the carbon dating technique, and found that these artifacts were of rather recent origin. And it so happened that an officer of the Archaeological Survey reviewed the procedures of Prof. Irfan Habib and found that if Prof. Habib’s dating procedures were to be followed then one would come to the conclusion that the reign of Emperor Akbar is yet to begin: It shall begin in 2009 A.D.!"

"You have every right to protest. But you cannot shout me down... When you shut the door for debate and discussion, you are promoting culture of violence... Shri Irfan Habib tried on stage to disrupt inaugural address questioning Hon'ble Governor's right to quote Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, shouting that he should quote (Nathuram) Godse. He pushed Hon'ble Governor's ADC and security officer, who prevented his unseemly gesture... Shri Irfan Habib raised some points on CAA. But, when Hon'ble Governor addressed these points, Sh.Habib rose from seat to physically stop him... Hon'ble Governor said that he had responded to points raised by previous speakers,as a person duty bound to defend &protect the Constitution. But trying to disrupt speech from stage&audience due to intolerance towards different opinion is undemocratic."

"His commitment to the Babri Masjid could be gauged from the fact that under his Chairmanship, ICHR was accused of functioning as a wing of the BMAC. Suraj Bhan admitted in Court that during Professor Habib's tenure, ICHR sanctioned him a grant for "exploration" at Ayodhya."

"Irfan Habib.. has been a prominent member of the Stalinist gang which, starting from the days of Pandit Nehru's dominance has come to control all institutions... The gang catapulted him into the chairmanship of the ICHR, an office which members of the gang have occupied by turn for years on end. A second term in the same office was secured for him by Abdullah Bukhari, the Shahi Imam of the Jama Masjid at Delhi and the great friend of the erstwhile Prime Minister, V.P. Singh. It is while occupying this august office that Irfan Habib has launched personal attacks on historians and archaeologists who have been honest to their profession and come out openly against the antics of the Stalinist gang in the context of the Ayodhya controversy."

"Fifteen years ago there was a disagreement between the Chairman Irfan Habib and M.G.S. Narayanan, who was associated with ICHR at that time and is now the chair. In an interview in December 2001, Professor Narayanan explained, Earlier than RJB/BM when I was member secretary at ICHR, and Irfan Habib was the chairman, we had our differences. I found that he was doing many things stealthily, unacademic unethical things, acting for this Babri Masjid committee supporting the Imam… Though he claims himself to be a Marxist he used to take instructions from the Imam. I was in the office. I said that he should not do this in his office… he stopped it there…. But he had other means. He was using the ICHR for organizing the All Indian Babri Masjid Committee."

"Irfan Habib’s role in treating national institutions such as the ICHR as ‘fiefdoms’ and the Ayodhya temple case demonstrate all the hubris of a person who thinks he is beyond scientific evidence. The continuous denial of material evidence of the temple underneath the demolished mosques, the misrepresentation of biographical details about Srīrāma, sending the petitioners on a wild goose chase by claiming that the Treta ka Thakur and Vishnu-Hari inscriptions are the same, and finally refusing to accept the Supreme Court judgment itself and labelling it as judicial fallacy all point to a refusal to consider objective proofs and reason in a scientific manner. Habib’s work on IVC, and especially in his role, along with those such as Romila Thapar, in perpetuating discredited theories which have a tremendous impact on our collective historical identity, through their influence in having them adopted as published learning material from national institutes such as ICHR, for generations of students, needs to be jettisoned for good."

"Irfan Habib, to whom the name Sarasvati is a kind of anathema... has his faith in an obscure nineteenth century opinion that the name Sarasvati was originally given to the Helmand river in Afghanistan and that was later transferred to the one near Kurukshetra in Haryana. This opinion which was ignored by people like C.F. Oldham and Aurel Stein seems to have found favour among some modern Sanskritists and government historians like Habib. The problem with the historical linguists and those who have faith in historical linguists/ comparative philology is that they apparently inhabit a world in which there is no need for independently testing a theory. One would , however, have thought that Habib as a historian would critically examine the source on which the idea that the Helmand was the original Sarasvati was based. In any case, the Sarasvati-phobia of this group of scholars is inexplicable. If they are upset by the density of distribution of Harappan sites in the region drained by the Sarasvati and get alarmed by the prospect of the Indus civilization being associated with ancient Brahmavarta, basically the land between the Sarasvati and the Drishadvati, that is their problem."

"The political principles and the political will of the State are above all else."

"The crucial questions in politics are not questions of right and wrong, but of obedience and disobedience. If you do not submit to political authority, then "If I say you're wrong, you're wrong, even if you're right.""

"Between friends and enemies, there is no question of freedom, only violence and subjugation. This is the reality of politics, a reality that liberals often do not dare to face."

"In human history, Britain may well have been the one and only nation to establish its political virtues completely on commercial operations, and to fully realize the rationalization of politics and morality."

"Time and history constitute the real God."

"This absurd way of looking at the development of democracy on this island is widespread among Hong Kong elites, and is undoubtedly the saddest page in the tragic modern history of China. Long colonial education has made some of Hong Kong's elite totally identify with the western world. Their mentality made them lose their ability to have objective judgment, reflection and critical thinking on the historical course of Hong Kong."

"When Mao Zedong in his later years described himself as "a combination of First Emperor Qin and Marx," his ideology had already leapfrogged the Great Wall and touched the universal brotherhood of Communism."

"Western civilization is built on a philosophical-theological tradition of binary antagonisms, between phenomenon and existence, life on earth and in heaven. In the Christian tradition, the ultimate goal and meaning of human existence comes from God in heaven, which is why the final goal of Western striving is to arrive at the realization of various versions of the "end of history". But in the tradition of Chinese civilization, the worldly and otherworldly realms are not strictly separated, and are both absorbed in a complete world where heaven and mankind are one. The goal and meaning of life for Chinese people was not how to get into heaven, but rather how to locate a universal, lasting meaning within the historically existing "family-state universe". For this reason, Chinese people, and especially politicians, all sought to establish their name in history through professional achievements."

"If the Chinese people want to realize the great revival of the Chinese nation and change the Western model of modernization through which the West has dominated the world, providing late-developing countries with the ‘China solution’ to modernization, they must engage in uncompromising struggle. ... "History looks kindly on those with resolve, with drive and ambition, and with courage; it won’t wait for the hesitant, the apathetic, or those who shy from a challenge" [Xi Jinping]. The former is the master who achieves victory through struggle, while the latter lacks the courage to struggle, and will necessarily suffer the fate of a slave."

"The world is driven by contradictory movements to produce developments and changes which in turn drive struggle and innovation. Marxism and Chinese traditional culture have a high degree of internal consistency on this point, which precisely constitutes the deep philosophical roots of the Sinification of Marxism."

"The roots of struggle lie in the necessary truth that contradictions propel society forward."

"As I speak before this body today, I do so as the representative of a small country which intends to speak with a resolute and principled voice on the issues of substantive concern to the world today. The advent of our Revolution has signalled the beginning of the end of the most dangerous and vicious stage of the colonial experience, that which we recognise as neo-colonialism. This stage had seen us exposed to various constitutional manipulations, all of which had failed to hide the reality of economic bondage under imperialism. Moreover, this neo-colonial stage has also exposed our nation to the vicious, ruthless neo-fascist dictatorship of Eric Gairy. To you here at this renowned body, this petty dictator was known as "Mr. U.F.O.," but to us in Grenada this amusingly descriptive title did not hide the reality of a dictator whose closest links were with imperialism and international criminal elements and openly fascist and dictatorial regimes."

"Our Revolution in Grenada is a people's Revolution and as such one of the fundamental principles of our Revolution is the establishment of the people's rights. Among these rights, we include the right to equal pay for men and women, the right to social and economic justice, the right to work and the right to democratic participation in the affairs of our nation."

"Non-Alignment does not imply for us that we must be neutral in the sterile and negative sense, nor does it imply that our country must regard itself as a political eunuch in the conduct of our international affairs. Our Non- Aligned policy will certainly not lead us to surrender our independence of judgement in world affairs; or to retreat from our right and duty to fully participate in international forums and discussions concerned with issues vital to our interests, concerns and principles. To the contrary, non-alignment for us is a positive concept characterising a vigorous and principled approach to international issues. It is an affirmation of that fundamental attribute of all peoples and states to sovereignty, independence and the right to freely determine their own domestic and foreign policies."

"Consistent with our opposition to colonialism, imperialism and racism, we affirm today before this great assembly our firm support for the struggles being waged by the peoples of Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa under the leadership of the Patriotic Front, SWAPO and ANC for their liberation and against apartheid and racism. We recognise and applaud the principled and consistent support being given to these struggles by the Front Line States. We express our firmest support for and solidarity with the struggles of the people of Palestine led by their sole and legitimate representatives, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). On this basis, we reject the Camp David Agreement which does not have the support of the Palestinian people, the PLO, the Arab World or the entire democratic, progressive and Socialist World. We reaffirm our support for the people of Western Sahara under the leadership of the Polisario Front in their struggle for independence and self determination. We call upon the people of Korea to continue the just struggle for the reunification of their homeland. We express our firm support for Heng Samrin government and the heroic people of Kampuchea - a Government which we recognised on the 20th of August last. We support the struggles of the government and people of Belize for independence with full territorial integrity. We also wish to express our strongest solidarity with the people of Puerto Rico in their struggle for independence. We fully support the ongoing and determined struggle of the government and people of Cuba in their fight to gain control over Guantanamo Bay. Our profound solidarity also goes to the government and people of Panama in their just struggle to recover the Panama Canal. We support fully the struggles of all the people of the Caribbean who are fighting for an end to colonialism."

"The peace of the world is a matter that concerns not only the rich and powerful nations, some of whom produce, purchase and deploy sophisticated weapons of mass destruction, but more profoundly, the poor, weak and small nations, who are the victims of the squander and waste that are characteristic of militarism."

"You can well understand the deep concern that we harbour for lasting peace. It is for this reason that we strongly support the efforts of the World Peace Council and any and all moves towards détente, peaceful co- existence and disarmament. The people of Grenada are gratified therefore that the Helsinki Final Act and now SALT II have been signed by both the U.K. and the U.S.S.R. We are however disturbed to note that reactionary elements who definitely have a vested interest in the prolongation of the arms race, have been making efforts to prevent the ratification of SALT II in the U.S. Senate."

"A wind of change is blowing through the Caribbean bringing with it a new regional balance of forces as a result of the changes towards progress by the peoples of Nicaragua, Grenada, St. Lucia and Dominica - a situation that has led the U.S. Secretary of State to define the Eastern Caribbean me one of the world's "trouble spots.""

"The present distribution of world economic power, wealth and living standards is manifestly unjust. It derives from the long history of imperialist expansion and control of the third world. We seek to change this order and to substitute for it a New International Economic Order."

"Our government is not afraid of criticism, in fact we welcome criticism. We believe that the Revolution has gained over the months some positive and constructive criticisms which have been made from time to time."

"It is the Cuban Revolution that has taught the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean how to face blockades, how to defeat criminal invasions of their territories."

"Certainly, we in Grenada will never forget that it was the military assistance of Cuba in the first weeks of our revolution that provided us with the basis to defend our own revolution."

"Your Revolution, Comrades, has also provided the region and the world with a living legend with your great and indomitable leader, Fidel Castro. Fidel has taught us not only how to fight, but also how to work, how to build socialism, and how to lead our country in a spirit of humility, sincerity, commitment, and firm revolutionary leadership."

"We, the people of this region, demand that our region is recognised and respected as a Zone of Peace. We demand an end to all military task forces and air and sea patrols of our region. We demand that the people of the region must be free from aggressive military harassment of any military power. We demand an end to the Monroe Doctrine and to the Carter Doctrine and all other doctrines which are aimed at perpetuating interventionism or backyardism in the region. There must be an end to all attempts to use the so-called peacekeeping apparatus of the Organization of American States to militarily intervene in the region, to hold back progressive and patriotic movements."

"People of Grenada, this revolution is for work, for food, for decent housing and health services, and for a bright future for our children and great grandchildren. The benefit of the Revolution will be given to everyone, regardless of political opinion or which political party they support. Let us all unite as one. All police stations are again reminded to surrender their arms to the people's revolutionary forces."

"I am appealing to all the people, gather at all central places all over the country, and prepare to welcome and assist the people's armed forces when they come into the your area. The Revolution is expected to consolidate the position of power within the next few hours. LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE OF GRENADA! LONGLIVE FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY! LET US TOGETHER BUILD A JUST GRENADA!"

"Weeks after the invasion, Grenadians were still smelling out and burying bodies which lay all over the island. The true casualty figures will never be known. No civilian body count is available. Even the bodies of Maurice Bishop and his slain ministers are never positively identified, no doubt to forestall any possible enshrinement by the people who loved him, no doubt to make the task of smearing his popular memory more easily accomplished. It has already begun."

"Fellow citizens: Today, after fifteen months of bitter fighting – marked daily by all of the anguish which darkens the sad situation of a civil war – having arrived at the heart of Brazil and the banks of the portentous Tocantins, we have the happy opportunity to once again remind our homeland that the patriotic crusade initiated on the fifth of July in the glorious city of Sao Paulo and whose ranks were later added to by the brave sons of the South, has not yet died and will not die, or be overwhelmed by the bayonets of tyranny."

"Brazilian People!"

"We know well that the country suffers. So too do the people, with the inevitable procession of violence which accompanies war. It is necessary however, no matter the cost, for Brazil to once again sustain control of its own fate – whether or not new martyrs must add their blood to the blood already sacrificed by those who have given their lives for the liberation of their homeland. To retreat at this moment would forsake an ideal, for so many dear companions have made this great sacrifice. Indeed, after such an abjuration would there most certainly be a loss of life and liberty to absolute despotism. Despotism which has not once brought honor to Christianity or the tradition of generosity in our people. No one wishes to see, however, a desire to wage war on intransigent whims or ambitions. On the contrary: we want peace, and only for peace would we fight for more than fifteen months. Furthermore, we want peace without opprobrium, rooted in justice – that is, in short, able to restore to the country a peace of mind which it so desperately needs. We will surely repel the dark and tragic peace which masks the vilification of the slave’s quarters. Ultimately, if the finality of destiny must represent itself like the last swig of bitter gall to consume, we would prefer, without any hesitancy, the great anguish of being crushed."

"Archaeologically, this period is still blank… There is no special Aryan pottery… no particular Aryan or Indo-Aryan technique is to be identified by the archaeologists even at the close of the second millennium."

"Clearly, then, as Kosambi said, There must have been a small but active settlement of Indian traders in Mesopotamia …” And yet, as the same author noted, “The reciprocal settlement seems to have been absent or less prominent in India.”"

"It's about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA."

"[he would be glad to] go back to the 1980s and assassinate Thatcher."

"I was up in Liverpool a fortnight ago where Alec McFadden, one of our organisers, launched the Sack Esther McVey Day, on her birthday. There was a whole group in the audience that completely kicked off quite critical of the whole concept, because they were arguing "Why are we sacking her? Why aren’t we lynching the bastard?""

"I would swim through vomit to vote against this bill. And listening to some of the nauseating speeches in support of it, I might have to."

"Inevitably in this century we will have open borders. We are seeing it in Europe already. The movement of peoples across the globe will mean that borders are almost going to become irrelevant by the end of this century so we should be preparing for that and explaining why people move."

"It's time to turn this debate around, drive out politics of despair and offer a vision for Britain in Europe."

"I think people out there in the real world, our constituents, just want us to get on with the job of getting the best deal possible for them"

"We have to respect the decision that was made in the referendum ... otherwise, to be frank, we undermine all confidence in our democratic process."

"When Britain leaves the European Union, free movement of labour and people will then come to an end"

"We should not pretend the referendum result can be undone."

"This means we must not try to re-fight the referendum or push for a second vote and if Article 50 needs to be triggered in Parliament Labour will not seek to block or delay it."

"We will be cut off from our biggest trading partner. We will be cut off from the skills and contribution that EU nationals have made to our economy and society."

"Our objective is tariff-free access to the market"

"That has been our objective since immediately after the referendum. The structures - whether we are in or out - are a secondary matter. We are not ruling anything out but what we are saying is that we are the fifth largest economy in the world and we have a special status in both our relationship with the EU and the rest of the globe and we feel we can get a deal that achieves tariff-free access."

"We voted for the implementation of Article 50 because we respect the referendum result. But we cannot have this situation where government becomes unaccountable on the implementation of one of the most important decisions for a generation."

"There are enough sensible people in the House of Commons to say 'this cannot happen, we cannot damage our country in this way'."

"If the government says 'well a customs union for a couple of years or maybe customs union until we decide there won't be one,' well actually, that doesn't give the stability for investment for anyone"

"My fear is that if we did have another referendum, we might get the same or similar result and the country will still be divided. Somehow we have got to try and bring the country back together again."

"Therefore now in the national interest we have got to come together and secure a compromise. If we can't do that, well yes, we have to go back to the people."

"The values of Catholicism are the inherent values of the Labour Party and the inherent values of socialism..."

"My view is that you'd put the deal to the people, but you'd have to also have the option of the status quo. Deep in my heart, I'm still a Remainer, but I've got to try and bring together effectively what is a British compromise."

"I think he's reckless and I think he's unstable and I will move heaven and Earth to stop a no-deal Brexit."

"If Jeremy got hit by the No 57 bus, or whatever it is, there's the next generation coming through. And the reality is the next leader should be a woman. It's high time to have a woman."

"We can't say to people 'Labour wants you to share in the running of your workplace, your community and your environment, but we don't trust you to have the final say over Brexit.'"

"I'd like them to vote Remain, but that's part of the debate we've got to have"

"John McDonnell, the nearest to a hero in both books. McDonnell worked tirelessly and pragmatically. He wanted to win, knowing that unity and a semblance of coherence were fundamental preconditions for victory. He kept up a dialogue with the so-called moderates and spoke out publicly on both anti-Semitism and the Salisbury poisonings, to the point where he and Corbyn did not talk for several months."

"Jenny Marx was born on May 1, 1844, grew up in the midst of the international proletarian movement and most closely together with it. Despite a reticence that could almost be taken for shyness, she displayed when necessary a presence of mind and energy which could be envied by many a man."

"The proletariat has lost a valiant fighter in her. But her mourning father has at least the consolation that hundreds of thousands of workers in Europe and America share his sorrow."

"A developing consciousness on the woman question today, therefore, must not fail to recognize that the Negro question in the United States is prior to, and not equal to, the woman question; that only to the extent that we fight all chauvinist expressions and actions as regards the Negro people and fight for the full equality of the Negro people, can women as a whole advance their struggle for equal rights. For the progressive women's movement, the Negro woman, who combines in her status the worker, the Negro, and the woman, is the vital link to this heightened political consciousness."

"if what I say here serves even one whit to further dedicate growing millions of Americans to fight for peace and to repel the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country, I shall consider my rising to speak worthwhile indeed."

"Will you measure as worth of one year’s sentence, my passionate adherence to the idea of fighting for full unequivocal equality for my people, the Negro people, which as a Communist I believe can only be achieved allied to the cause of the working class? A year for another vital Communist belief, that the bestial Korean War is an unjust war? Or my belief that peaceful coexistence of nations can be achieved and peace won if struggled for? Another year for my belief that only under socialism will exploitation of and by man be finally abolished and the great human and industrial resources of the nation be harnessed for the well-being of the people? Still another year’s sentence for my belief that the denial of the exercise of free speech and thought to Communists only precedes, as history confirms, the denial of the exercise of these rights to all Americans?"

"I find now, as throughout this trial of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, that it is we, the defendants, who are morally free and conversely it is the prosecutors and the Court itself that stands naked before the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the people of our country."

"It was the world-renowned Karl Marx, founder of the Marxist-Leninist science, for which application to American and world historical conditions, we were so fearfully convicted, who long ago predicted that “The time would come when the powers that would be would no longer live by the very laws they themselves have fashioned.”"

"The thinking process, as your Honour well knows, is a process that defies jailing."

"racist ideas, so integral a part of the desperate drive by the men of Wall Street to war and fascism"

"One thought pervaded me throughout this trial and pervades me still, and it is this: In the nine and one half months of this trial, millions of children have been born. I speak only of those who live. Will the future oft those children, including those of our defendants and even you Honour’s grandchildren, be made more secure by the jailing of 13 men and women Communists whose crimes are not criminal acts but advocacy of ideas? Is this not a tyrannical violation of the American dream of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?"

"I had early experience experiences which are shared by millions of native-born Negroes — the bitter indignity and humiliation of second-class citizenship, the special status which makes a mockery of our Government’s prated claims of a “free America” in a “free world” for 15 million Negro Americans."

"Marxism-Leninism — that philosophy that not only rejects racists ideas, but is the antithesis of them."

"One need only be a Negro in America to know that for the crime of being a Negro we are daily convicted by a Government which denies us elementary democratic rights, the right to vote, to hold office, to hold judgeships, to serve on juries, rights forcibly denied in the South and also in the North."

"I want to concur with Mr. Perry’s proposal to Mr. Lane that he recommend to the Department of Justice that they show more zeal, since they have not ever prosecuted a single anti-Semite or a Ku Kluxer in these United States with its total of 5,000 lynched Negro men, women and Children since the 1860s."

"one of the historical truths of all history is that the oppressed never revere their oppressors."

"And this, Honourable Judge, is exactly what is the purpose of all Smith Act trials, this one in particular. I share the faith of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Pettis Perry and all my c –defendants that America’s working people, Negro and white, will surely rise, not like sheep, but with vigilance towards their liberty, to assure that peace will win and that the decadent Smith Act, which contravenes the Bill of Rights, will be swept from the scene of history."

"It was the great Frederick Douglass, who had a price on his head, who said “Without struggle, there is no progress.” And echoing his words was the answer of the great abolitionist poet, James Russell Lowell: “The limits of tyranny is proscribed by the measure of our resistance to it”."

"If, out of this struggle, history assesses that I and my co-defendants have made some small contribution, I shall consider my role small indeed. The glorious exploits of anti-fascist heroes and heroines, honoured today in all lands for their contribution to social progress, will, just like the role of our prosecutors, also be measured by the people of the United States in that coming day."

"As Carole Boyce Davies has pointed out in her wonderful book on Claudia Jones, Left of Karl Marx, Claudia Jones was one of the leaders of the Negro Youth Congress (the American Negro Youth Congress and the Southern Youth Congress). And I mention Jones both because of her important work in the US and because she became a pivotal figure in the organizing of Caribbean communities here in Britain after she was arrested for the work she did in the US and eventually deported. How can we counteract the representation of historical agents as powerful individuals, powerful male individuals, in order to reveal the part played, for example, by Black women domestic workers in the Black freedom movement?"

"I will be strong to keep my mind and soul outside a prison,/Encouraged and inspired by ever loving memories of you."

"The Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Foley Square case on June 4, 1951. Just over two weeks later FBI agents in New York rounded up such "second string" leaders as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Pettis Perry, and Claudia Jones. After that we knew it couldn't be long before the arrests came in other places."

"Whereas for Claudia Jones the structural position of black people-black women in particular-in the political economy placed them in the vanguard of the revolution, for Paul Robeson it was their culture that gave the black movement its special insight and character."

"The other great tragedy, for the black freedom movement in particular, was the silencing of radical leadership. Robeson, Du Bois, and Claudia Jones were among the many victims of statesponsored anticommunist witch hunts."

"The position of women has been debated in socialist and communist circles, but even there it is usually left as a question. And black women specifically? They have never been a primary subject of the American Left, always falling somewhere in the cracks between the Negro Question and the Woman Question. As we've seen, key interventions by the likes of Ida B. Wells or Claudia Jones attempted to disrupt color- and class-struggle-as-usual, but few leftists paid attention."

"My feminism is the feminism of Claudia Jones, whose experiences of intense racism and working-class poverty led her to communism, who proposed Black self-determination as a guiding principle of communist organizing and was jailed for an anti-imperialist Women's Day speech. She criticized the left for failing to uproot male supremacy, and the elite feminists who ignored race and class and framed their struggles as a war between the sexes, and wrote that "the triply oppressed status of negro women is a barometer of the status of all women.""

"As social institutions, universities act to maintain the hierarchical nature of the status quo by excluding most of the population from its classrooms while ensuring that a small number are trained and certified to supervise others. In Gramscian terms, in the post-Civil Rights era black academics have functioned and continue to function as intellectuals in particular and politically contradictory ways in the "ensemble of the system of relations in which these activities have their place within the general complex of social relations." Are we meant to function as the black gatekeepers, ensuring the production, perpetuation, and maintenance of a small, black, middle-class elite, in the hope that this elite will act as a force to control the rebellious tendencies of the black oppressed?"

"Kardelj had had many years of preparation for his postWorld War II role as theoretician of Yugoslav socialism. There was a two-year internship, from late 1934 to early 1937, first as a student, then as a lecturer of MarxismLeninism, in the USSR. There were the prison confinements in Yugoslavia (in Pozarevac from 1930 to 1932 and two detentions in Liubljana in 1938) which allowed time to read and meditate. Such prison stays seem to have been particularly productive spiritually and intellectually for political detainees. During these internments Kardelj reviewed literature on Slovene history and formulated his seminal work, Razvoj slovenskega narodnega vprasanja ("The Development of the Slovene National Question"), which was published in 1939 under the pseudonym of Sperans."

"What struck Broz most about Kardelj was his steadfastness and his calm, equable temperament. He was also favorably impressed by the quiet efficiency with which he did his work. Efficiency was a quality by which Broz set great store. 'Kardelj was so quiet,' he said many years later, 'that you hardly noticed him at first; but decisions were made, aims were achieved, and then you realized that it was he who had made the proposal, persuaded others to accept it, and put it into effect. No setback dismayed him. He was free of pretense and bluff. He eschewed fractionalism. His mind dwelt on essentials. After my first meeting with him I had no doubt that he was an honest man and a true revolutionary.'"

"Las leyes son para que las cumplan los pobres. Las leyes son hechas por los ricos para poner un poco de orden a la explotación. Los pobres son los únicos cumplidores de leyes de la historia. Cuando los pobres hagan las leyes ya no habrá ricos."

"The ones who filled the bars and brothels... the ones who were mowed down with bullets while crossing the border, the ones who barely made it back... the eternal illegals... the saddest sad people in the world, my countrymen, my brothers."

"You’ve already eaten the body of Francisco Morazán... and now you want to eat Honduras You need to be slapped given electric shocks psychoanalysed to return to your true self"

"The death of Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton in 1975 is one of the great tragedies of Latin American literature and of the Latin American left... Most of his best writing came during his exile in Cuba, where he wrote seven books of poetry, and Miguel Marmol,a biography of a 1930s Salvadoran revolutionary that’s one of the great, underappreciated masterpieces of Latin American historical writing."

"Born in 1935, Dalton was the illegitimate son of a U.S. coffee plantation owner and a Mexican single mother... educated by the Jesuits... He blamed their hypocrisy and support for the status quo for his break with Catholicism. One of his first political acts was a high school valedictory speech blasting his teachers for their tacit support of the school caste system by which poor children were demeaned."

"Back in San Salvador... aware that the police were looking for him again, Dalton broke the rules of life underground and, as he put it... ‘exercised my right to go out and drink a beer’. The police found him on a bar stool and ‘disappeared’ him... Dalton... was interrogated by a CIA agent. The military planned to kill him, the American told him, but he had come to offer him a way out. ‘It won’t be just any life...but a life with all the possibilities... where we have every resource available, in France, in Chile, in England. You should live like a writer, like a scholar, not like a criminal. Why die now, like a fool?’ Dalton wasn’t swayed, and after several nights the American tried a final ruse. The CIA, he promised, would use its operatives in the Salvadoran Communist Party to spread the word that Dalton had co-operated. ‘We’ll tell them that before dying you tried to save your skin... You won’t go down in history as a hero but as a traitor.’ Dalton was shaken, but he didn’t talk..."

"None of those who witnessed Dalton’s death have been willing to talk in public about what happened. His son Juan José, now a journalist, says that former members of the ERP... told his family in Cuba in 1978 that it was Villalobos who killed Dalton... the life Villalobos leads today resembles the one promised to Dalton by the CIA in 1964, ‘a life with all the possibilities’"

"Salvadoran revolutionary poet Roque Dalton, murdered by a different faction of his own country's left, wrote in his poem "Todos," "Altogether they have more death than we, but altogether we have more life than they." For this to be true, we must hold a larger vision of what is possible than the people who kill and torture and ravage."

"In more ways than one, poetry must recall us to our senses-our bodily sensual life and our sense of other and different human presences. The oceanic multiplicities of this art call us toward possibilities of relation still very much alive in a world where violent material power can speak only to and of itself, yet in which-in the words of the Salvadorean revolutionary poet Roque Dalton-"poetry, like bread is for everyone.""

"The Hindutva movement as it has emerged is, almost in a classical sense, Fascist in its ideology, Fascist in its class support, Fascist in its method, and Fascist in its program. All the ingredients of a Fascist ideology are present in it: the attempt to unify the majority under a homogenized concept, 'the Hindus'; a sense of grievance against alleged injustices done to this homogeneous group in the past by an excluded homogeneous minority; a sense of cultural superiority vis-à-vis this minority; a reinterpretation of history exclusively in these terms; a total rejection of contrary evidence, of dispassionate analysis, of the scientific method, indeed of rational discourse; and above all an appeal to the so-called homogeneous majority in passionate, blood-curdling, and essentially male chauvinist terms to 'stand up', 'assert their manhood', 'show that it is blood and not water that flows in their veins', all of which amount to an incitement violence, and result in actual violence, against the minority group. … Its appeal is based not on the dreams of a better or more prosperous or meaningful future, but upon hatred."

"The abrogation of labour laws in -ruled states (which could not have been done without Modi’s approval) is meant to make the more insecure rather than less. Some officers were punished recently for even suggesting that higher taxes should be collected from the rich. In short, the Modi government in its mindlessness is still picking up the intellectual crumbs that had fallen from the of the metropolitan establishment “four decades” ago, without realising that the world has moved on."

"Just as in the 1930s, world capitalism, as it had existed until then, had reached a dead-end, and the need for it to be altered for the sake of preserving the system itself, was emphasised by many perceptive bourgeois thinkers, exactly in a similar manner contemporary world capitalism too has reached a dead-end and cannot continue as before. [...] Any change in capitalism, however, including a revival of the so-called "" of the period, will entail a loosening of the hegemony of international and hence will face stiff opposition from it. The fact that the need for such change is clear to bourgeois thinkers, does not mean that finance capital will simply voluntarily make a sacrifice of the hegemony it currently enjoys. Indeed the history of the 1930s itself bears witness to this fact. [...] Boosting for overcoming mass unemployment finally got accepted as government policy only after the war when the weight of the working class in the advanced countries became much greater than before (of which the victory of the Labour Party in the British post-war elections and the vastly increased strength of the and Italy were obvious markers), and when the came right up to the very doorsteps of creating fears of a “communist takeover”. This conjuncture finally forced concessions from finance capital that had been unobtainable till then. Finance capital, in other words, does not voluntarily make concessions even when such concessions are seen by major pro-capitalist thinkers as being essential for the preservation of the system itself."

"It is real-life class struggle, informed no doubt by ideas, that ultimately determines which way the world will move. Hence even for altering contemporary capitalism in the direction of the so-called “welfare capitalism” of yore, it would be essential to have the working class fighting for such an agenda. But when it does so, and when international finance capital resists such an agenda, we would be in the thick of class struggle. Time alone will tell whether this struggle would remain merely at the level of achieving a revival of “welfare capitalism” or whether it would go beyond capitalism altogether towards a socialist alternative. Once class struggle, for changing the system in its present form, acquires momentum, its outcome would depend on praxis and may not necessarily remain bounded within the system itself."

"The ruling formation in India, however, is totally oblivious of the world conjuncture. The dead-end of neo-liberalism, which is visible to even bourgeois thinkers in the metropolis, is invisible to our ' brigade. Not only is the Modi government still wedded to the neo-liberal agenda in general, but it has not even deviated from this agenda in the midst of the acute humanitarian crisis unleashed by the pandemic and its own mindless response to it."

"Far from the pay cheques of employees coming out of the budget, the government has robbed s of workers, including 14 crore migrant workers (of whom around 10 crore are inter-state migrants), of their incomes, jobs and accommodations, without giving a paisa by way of compensation. This is partly no doubt the result of the utter inhumanity of the Modi government; but partly also it expresses its utter pusillanimity vis-à-vis finance capital, which it seeks to sustain through negating and and promoting a communal agenda that aims to divide people. But following the same track as was being followed in the "last four decades" and not recognising the dead-end of neo-liberalism, also means remaining stuck in that dead-end, which in turn would mean even greater recourse to authoritarian-fascistic measures and even more odious attempts to promote a communal divide. The working people will have to struggle against this entire endeavour and to show the way out of the dead-end of neo-liberalism."

"The scale of the movement was impressive, with over 120 committees established nationwide. The Antifa claimed 150,000 adherents. Many of these organisations broke through entrenched social barriers to include foreign slave labourers and establish working class unity across political parties and trade unions. Their functions ranged from creating local democracy, to restoring basic services like food supply. [...] The fact that so many committees adopted similar names and policies poses the question of whether there was a centralised organisation at work. Communists were prominent in nearly every Antifa despite the opposition of Moscow. Walter Ulbricht, the KPD leader, criticised the 'spontaneous creation of KPD bureaus, people's committees, and Free Germany committees', but he could do little as the KPD central apparatus had no communication link with the rank and file. Once communications were restored he could report: 'We have shut these [Antifas] down and told the comrades that all activities must be channelled through the state apparatus.' The Western Allies were equally disconcerted by the Antifas self-proclaimed 'ruthless struggle against all remnants of Hitler's party in the state apparatus, the local authorities and public life'. The US authorities expelled the committee from its offices, ordered the removal of all leaflets and posters from the streets, and then banned it. Any further use of the name 'Free Germany National Committee' would be punished severely. The military government stopped 's workplace councils purging Nazi activists and then abolished them. 's Nazis had been arrested by the Antifa, but were liberated by Allied command. When Antifa housed people made homeless by bombing in apartments abandoned by fleeing Nazis, the authorities evicted them."

"You can take my freedom, even my life, but not my thought, not my truth, not my contribution to the history of the people to which I belong."

"In this difficult moment and at a historical turning point, I call on you, brothers and sisters, to fulfill your sacred duty in defending the homeland. Let us be united in the fight for the freedom of our Croatian country, our sea and sky over our only and eternal Croatia."

"In carrying out our duties we need to always keep in mind the fact that in almost fourteen centuries of written history about Croats there has never been in any other institution of Croatian national life such outstanding declaration for survival, independence and self-determination as in the continued perpetuity and performance of the Croatian parliament."

"It is not only others who are to blame for all our evils. Nor will in any circumstances only others shape our destiny. And for the present situation we all bear part of the responsibility in our own way. And especially for the future: our personal, our vocation and our people."

"We live in an exciting and turbulent time. In a time that is filled with many openly present threats and insidious dangers. Many contemporaries were, and some still are, possessed by the nightmare of all kinds of hazards preying upon us along all our roads towards democracy and national sovereignty. Instead of tragic faintheartedness and passive feeling of impasse, I have personally always been more inclined to discovery and noticing those big chances that hid in that dramatic time and in the breaking point of a historical period. The history has already given us the answer, which says that we were in the right when we did not want to reconcile with the prospect of continuing as an object of foreign politics and when we consciously took the risk in becoming the recognized subject and creator of our own destiny."

"The creation of our independent State was the outcome of the indestructible moral strength of the Croatian people, based on a firm national awareness that has burned for centuries as an eternal fire in our hearts. A nation may have existed from time immemorial, but if it lacks the moral strength and an awareness of its unique individual being, of its nationhood and statehood, it will disappear from the stage of world history. The Croatian people yearned for their State and rallied to achieve it."

"The fall of Soviet and other European Communist and totalitarian systems has reinforced hope and provided the prerequisites for the comprehensive democratization of the world while simultaneously raising the question of what kind of multilateralism is required and possible in the contemporary world."

"Despite the inalienable right of the Croatian people -one of the oldest European peoples - to self-determination and to the renewal of their own State, despite the blatant barbaric aggression aimed at territorial conquest, the genocidal expulsion of the population and the destruction of the most precious cultural heritage of the Croatian people, such as Vukovar and Dubrovnik, the Croats would never have won the right to self-determination, to their State, to freedom and independence, had they not been prepared to make human and material sacrifices, had they not shown a firm nation-building will, with which they have resolutely asserted themselves as a member of the international community, while manifesting their readiness to be a constructive force in the development of the new international order to replace the unviable and failed old system."

"But today it is Croatian Knin and never again it will go back to what was before, when they spread cancer which has been destroying Croatian national being in the middle of Croatia and didn’t allow Croatian people to be truly alone on it’s [sic] own, that Croatia becomes capable of being independent and sovereign state...They were gone in a few days as if they had never been here, as I said. They did not even have time to collect their rotten money and dirty underwear."

"Between healthy nationalism and chauvinism, he chose chauvinism; between free-market economy and clientelism, he chose the latter. Instead of the cult of freedom, he chose the cult of the state. Between modernity and openness to the world, he chose traditionalism; a fatal choice for a small state like Croatia that needs to open for the sake of development."

"Unlike Milosevic, who was guided by the desire for power, Tuđman was possessed by Croatian nationalism. His devotion to Croatia was of the most primitive type, and he never showed understanding or interest in democratic values."

"It is easy to challenge such views of the past but not to shake the faith of those who wish to believe in them. In the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s, the old historical myths came to the forefront again. Yet again, the Serbs were fighting on alone in a hostile world. In 1986, a memorandum from the Serbian Academy of Sciences warned that all the gains the Serbs had made since they first rebelled against the Ottomans in 1804 were going to be lost. Croats were terrorizing the Serbs in Croatia, and Albanians were forcing Serbs to flee the province of Kosovo. In 1989, Slobodan Milošević went to Kosovo on the six-hundredth anniversary of the battle and declared, “The Kosovo heroism does not allow us to forget that, at one time, we were brave and dignified and one of the few who went into battle undefeated.” At the same time, in Croatia, nationalists were looking back into their past to argue that a greater Croatia, incorporating hundreds of thousands of Serbs, was historically necessary. History did not destroy Yugoslavia or lead to the horrors that accompanied that destruction, but its skillful manipulation by men such as Milošević and, in Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, helped to mobilize their followers and intimidate the uncommitted."

"Tuđman is a nationalist leader who made some very bad mistakes early in his presidency toward Croatia's Serbian minority. He also advocated a partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina between Serbia and Croatia. He has given at least passive support to Croatian military forces in Bosnia. That said, he is a man who has learned from his mistakes."

"Japan is the frontier of Asia in the Pacific. In the past the country's geographical position was an important factor in the development of Japanese imperialism. Today Anglo-American monopoly capitalism regards Japan as one of the stepping stones in its drive for world domination. That is why the Japanese monopolists and their agents believe that the only way to safeguard their future is to form a close alliance with international monopoly capital."

"All this is leading to a steady sharpening of class antagonisms and internal contradictions. Opposing the handful of monopolists and their agents are broad sections of the people and even certain representatives of capitalist circles and small and medium landlords."

"The struggle is no longer restricted to strikes, sabotage, demonstrations, land disputes and refusal to pay taxes. It has become a nation-wide political movement in defence of the national industry, education and culture, in defence of our national existence. This powerful offensive of the people, with the working class as the spearhead, has roused all sections of society. This anti-Government struggle is drawing into its orbit also Government officials and rank and file Democratic-Liberals and exposing the lawlessness and corruption in towns and villages. The people are becoming more and more indignant and resentful at the police and finance organs which are carrying out the Yoshida Government's anti-popular policy."

"The Communist Party is at the head of this struggle, exposing the treacherous policy of the Democratic-Liberal Party which at present holds an absolute majority in Parliament. The lower organisations of the Democratic-Liberal Party are forced to side with the people for they are afraid that otherwise they will be swept aside by the sweeping indignation of the people. As a result the big monopolists and their agents are being driven further into isolation."

"The struggle of the mass of the people for liberation from the colonial yoke and foreign independence is gaining momentum in the Far East. The leadership of this struggle has passed from the bourgeois nationalists to the Parties which are guided by the teachings of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin. The struggle for democracy in Japan is one of the fronts of the world democratic movement."

"Statements and actions by the instigators of war with regard to the situation in Formosa sharpen even more the antagonisms between the various countries, and also intensify the counter-offensive against monopoly capital. That is why military intervention in Formosa is impossible. As stated, the popular forces are achieving successes of historic significance, and the domination of international monopoly capital, the headquarters of which are in Wall Street, has been shaken considerably."

"It is clear that the popular revolution must combine three demands: a life of stability for the people, national independence, and world peace. These demands must be realised through international solidarity."

"The so-called "separate peace " makes the situation quite clear and completes it. At present a separate peace is being effected "'", step by step. Since a separate peace is hopeless in view of the existing international situation, they want to replace it simply by a "declaration about ending the state of war ". This means that Japan will actually be turned into a colony of a certain power. At present this is becoming an indisputable and concrete fact. Consequently, a separate peace treaty does not mean a peaceful settlement. It merely confirms the fact of the loss of the independence of the nation, and its enslavement."

"The immediate policy of our Party. To overcome the crisis in which the nation finds itself, and to ensure the actual stabilisation of the life of the people, the independence of the nation and peace throughout the world, it is necessary to secure the signing of an all-round peace treaty in which the U.S.S.R. and the Chinese People's Republic will participate."

"We stress also that for the rehabilitation of our country, free trade and cultural relations with these countries are essential. More than that, we must put emphasis on the international solidarity of the proletariat. In order to achieve victory we must consolidate the democratic national front which unites all sections of the people."

"Charging individuals who disagree with the above-mentioned principles with kulak tendencies – is aimless abstract criticism. This criticism is aimed at undermining the unity of the peasants' front."

"Solving problems only from the standpoint of struggle on a national scale is the attribute of light-minded people lacking in practical experience. Success will not be attained if this struggle is not linked with the exposure of illegal transactions. It is necessary also to unite this struggle with that waged against the local administration and to weaken the latter, since this will help us reinforce our strength. When we achieve success we will be in a position to force the local autonomous bodies to take part in our struggle and, in this way, strengthen our struggle considerably both qualitatively and quantitatively. Further, we must devote special attention to the struggle of the unemployed since they are resolute in their demands and might become a powerful force in the fight."

"We must display extreme care with regard to the organisation of a united front with the Right elements of the Socialist Party during the elections. These elements have always betrayed agreements. In some cases this betrayal followed after they had been elected as a result of an election agreement. We always supported the candidates of the bloc, but they did not help us, but cast their votes for other candidates. In other cases they deliberately hindered our joint election fight, violated the agreement, nominated their own candidates and helped our opponents. Considering this situation it will be correct to say that their real intention is to help the Liberal Democrats and to deceive the people. Therefore, we must take a resolute stand and reject common action with them until we are convinced of their sincerity."

"Cultural work naturally must serve the cause of the People’s Democratic revolution and only then will it benefit the masses. It is most important in cultural work not to ignore the national traditions in form and to maintain its class character in content."

"The task of artists – members of the Party – is to be real workers in art and not professional handicraftsmen. We must not forget that workers in the sphere of art can only achieve success if they express the strivings of the people."

"Despite the repressions, women, youth, intelligentsia and clergy are actively participating in this struggle. As a result, six million signatures have been collected to date for a Peace Pact of the five Great Powers. These sentiments even affect certain sections of the big capitalists for whom trade with the U.S.S.R. and the Chinese People's Republic is at present a matter of the greatest significance. As a result, representatives of these circles, too, express a desire to take part in the international economic conference to be held in Moscow."

"Our New Programme is, in practice, becoming the programme of the whole people."

"It is now absolutely indisputable that Japan has been turned into a country completely dependent on America."

"Now, for the first time, we have been able to clear up this basic question which, hitherto, was not properly understood by us. This enabled us to publish our New Programme with the greatest confidence."

"The situation in People's China shows that in the new conditions even capitalists can participate in the national-liberation movement. Consequently, the capitalists in our country must also change their way of thinking."

"The Communist Party of Japan calls, first of all, on the workers, peasants and intelligentsia and also on the small and medium manufacturers and other capitalists to take a most active part in the united national-liberation front and to fight resolutely under the banner of peace and democracy."

"All this shows that the revolutionary movement in Japan has become a serious obstacle to the aggressive policy of the U.S. imperialists in the Far East and that in this respect it plays an important role. This is precisely why it meets with a wide international response."

"The present rise of the revolutionary movement in Japan has become possible as a result of the 30-years' stubborn struggle, waged by the Communist Party of Japan."

"The main question on which the leadership of our Party lacked clarity was whether postwar Japan was an imperialist country or whether it had become a colonial, dependent country. The Party leadership held that Japan was, as before the war, a military imperialist state although its normal development had been disrupted. True, the leadership of the Party pointed out that, as a result of the American occupation, Japan found itself in a dependent position and that its liberation from the occupation regime was an important question. However, the leadership of the Party failed to give a clear definition to the character of the revolution as a revolution in a colonial, dependent country, a revolution the principles of which were explicitly elaborated by Comrade Stalin. The leadership of the Communist Party advanced the task of national liberation and felt that in these conditions the national bourgeoisie could become one of the active elements in the liberation struggle. We worked pretty hard on this question, but failed all the same to achieve complete clarity."

"As a result of the adoption of the New Programme which clearly outlined the aims of the Party, the entire Party engaged in still more active work."

"After the signing in San Francisco of the separate "peace treaty" with Japan and the U.S.-Japanese "security pact", which later were followed by the signing of the so-called "administrative agreement", it became clear that these treaties mean prolonged occupation of Japan by the U.S. armed forces. The enslavement of the Japanese people and the turning of Japan into a base for aggression against the Soviet Union, China, Korea, Viet Nam and other countries of the Far East."

"In reply, the working class, the peasantry, students and other sections of the intelligentsia as well as the medium and small businessmen rose in resolute struggle, acting in the spirit of the New Programme of the Communist Party."

"The demand for a revolutionary land reform and for handing over the forests, waste land, the irrigation systems, etc. became particularly widespread in the countryside after the publication of the New Programme of the Communist Party."

"The International Economic Conference in Moscow showed that a certain part of the capitalists in many countries, including the U.S.A., faced with the threat of bankruptcy as a result of switching the economy of these countries onto a war footing, seeks peace with the Soviet Union, the New China, the People's Democracies and the German Democratic Republic and the development of trade with these countries. This is also true of many capitalists on Japan. Many delegates are anticipated for the Peace Conference for Asia and Pacific Region, scheduled for September in Peking. Three representatives of Japanese capitalist circles who recently participated in the International Economic Conference, represent Japan on the Preparatory Committee of this Conference."

"Our task is, persistently to conduct the class-political training of the membership, to master the art of combining legal work with underground work, to eliminate the shortcomings that we still meet in our work, to base our entire activity on maintaining the confidence of the masses and not to lag behind the revolutionary struggle which is developing at a rapid rate."

"La obra maestra no florece sino en un terreno abonado por una anónima u oscura multitud de obras mediocres."

"No es posible democratizar la enseñanza de un país sin democratizar su economía y sin democratizar, por ende, su superestructura política."

"No renegamos, propiamente, la herencia española; renegamos la herencia feudal"

"But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent."

"It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming."

"But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed."

"It has become almost received wisdom to bracket Stalin and Hitler as twin monsters of the past century - Mao and Pol Pot are sometimes thrown in as an afterthought - and commonplace to equate communism and fascism as the two greatest evils of an unprecedentedly sanguinary era. In some versions, communism is even held to be the more vile and bloodier wickedness. The impact of this cold war victors' version of the past has been to relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure."

"No major 20th-century political tradition is without blood on its hands, but battles over history are more about the future than the past. Part of the current enthusiasm in official western circles for dancing on the grave of communism is no doubt about relations with today's Russia and China. But it also reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed."

"Communism, which came to control a third of the planet in a generation, was the most important political movement of the past century. It carried out what other socialists had only talked about, abolishing capitalism and creating publicly owned, planned economies. Its crimes and failures are now so well rehearsed that they are in danger of obliterating any understanding of its achievements - both of which have lessons for the future of progressive politics and the search for a social alternative to globalised capitalism."

"The media and politicians in this country and all over the Western world would have you believe that the cause of this suffering and this carnage is the rockets of Hamas that are fired into Israel. That is to turn reality on its head. The Palestinian people have the right, as any occupied people under law and under all political and legal conventions - the right to resist. Israel, as an illegal occupying power, has one obligation, and that is to withdraw. Even now, despite the horrific casualties, Hamas is not broken and will not be broken, because of the spirit of resistance of the Palestinian people."

"What has transformed the contest has been the dramatic rise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, former Socialist minister and candidate of the Front de Gauche (Left Front), who has gone from 6% to 15% in a few months to become the pivotal "third man" in the election. He has done so with an unashamedly populist campaign, targeting marginalised working class voters prey to the National Front, inspiring the young and non-voters and using the kind of street language alien to the magic circles of the French political establishment he abandoned."

"There is a view among pro-Palestinian people often that the Zionist movement has a grip on the media, in a way that I think sometimes exaggerates the mechanisms through which that influence is exerted."

"Zionist movement activists [are] incredibly hard-working and dedicated, and they bombard the media, day in and day out, with their obsessive campaigns."

"A particular form of socialism grew up in the post-war period in the conditions of the Cold War [...] East Berlin was absolutely at the front line of the cold war. That’s what the Berlin Wall was. It was a front line between two social and military systems and two military alliances, and a very tense one at that. It wasn’t just some kind of arbitrary division to hold people in, it was also a front line in a global conflict. And that conditioned a lot of the things that happened."

"Emboldened by the wave of change and growing support across the region, Hamas has also regained credibility as a resistance force, which had faded since 2009, and strengthened its hand against an increasingly discredited Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah."

"During a Valdai club session I chaired, [[Vladimir Putin|[Vladimir] Putin]] told foreign journalists and academics that the unipolar world had been a "means of justifying dictatorship over people and countries" – but the emerging multipolar world was likely to be still more unstable. The only answer – and this was clearly intended as an opening to the west – was to rebuild international institutions, based on mutual respect and co-operation. The choice was new rules – or no rules, which would lead to "global anarchy". When I asked Putin whether Russia's actions in Ukraine had been a response to, and an example of, a "no-rules order", Putin denied it, insisting that the Kosovo precedent meant Crimea had every right to self-determination. But by conceding that Russian troops had intervened in Crimea "to block Ukrainian units", he effectively admitted crossing the line of legality – even if not remotely on the scale of the illegal invasions, bombing campaigns and covert interventions by the US and its allies over the past decade and a half. But there is little chance of the western camp responding to Putin's call for a new system of global rules. In fact, the US showed little respect for rules during the cold war either, intervening relentlessly wherever it could. But it did have respect for power. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that restraint disappeared. It was only the failure of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and Russia's subsequent challenge to western expansion and intervention in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine – that provided some check to unbridled US power."

"Putin’s oligarchic nationalism may not have much global appeal, but Russia's role as a counterweight to western supremacism certainly does."

"Only China offers the eventual prospect of a global restraint on western unilateral power and that is still some way off."

"Resistance and the unity of the working class is what will progress our movement."

"[On the 2011 London riots] Those people need to be organised and need to find a political expression . . . It is a huge opportunity to channel that anger."

"Seumas Milne, the Stalinist Rip van Winkle who now edits the Guardians comment pages"

"A particularly telling Milne moment came in 2006, when the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly voted to condemn "the massive human rights violations committed by totalitarian communist regimes". In the article he wrote in response, Milne admitted the USSR executed 799,455 people, then moved on. "For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality," he insisted. Now, you can quibble with the facts. Focussing only on the USSR's executions ignores the millions it starved to death in Ukraine, or in the mass deportations from the Caucasus and Crimea, the way it used rape as a weapon, or that fact it invaded without provocation half a dozen countries. You can also question those "huge advances" considering the fact that life expectancy in the USSR peaked in 1962, then declined steadily as chronic alcoholism took hold."

"[Initially referring to Jeremy Corbyn] I don't think he is showing any professionalism in his leadership of the Labour party and you see from his appointment of his strategy and communications director Seumas Milne, whom I happen to know and like as it happens. But he's completely unsuited to such a job. He has little connection with mainstream politics or mainstream media in the country and yet he's in charge of communications for the Labour party. That doesn't sound very professional to me."

"He was oversympathetic to autocratic regimes and undersympathetic to countries with the rule of law and democracy [...] That is the worst aspect of the hard left."

"Corbyn’s circle of advisers reflects and reinforces the moral absolutism of his political instincts. The anti-imperialist left is, in short, running the show. The name of Seumas Milne, a former Guardian journalist now Labour's head of strategy and communications, often emerges in this connection. His case illuminates precisely the ideological direction of Corbyn's Labour. Milne has a brilliant intellect and there is vanishingly little he does not know about anti-Semitism, its traps and tropes. (I know this because I owe a good deal of my own education on the subject to him, a former colleague.) Milne himself would never have fallen into his boss's grossest errors—of failing to notice, for example, that a London mural whose removal Corbyn protested in a recently-resurfaced 2012 Facebook posting contained shockingly obvious and explicit anti-Semitic stereotypes. But Milne is in lockstep with Corbyn in cleaving to the hard left's anti-imperialist line that whatever the faults of authoritarians such as Putin, Assad, and Maduro, they are at least enemies of American hegemony, and the crimes of the United States and Israel are infinitely worse."

"But [[Owen Jones|[Owen] Jones]]'s real bete noire is Milne, whom he charges with a simple "lack of professionalism". One insider says he was one of the few people in Corbyn’s office "that you could actually discuss socialist theory with", but in Jones's telling, it was "impossible to get him to sign off press releases, speeches or other public interventions", and "this apparent non-engagement would frequently bring the entire operation to a grinding halt". From one of the Corbyn project’s most devout advocates, this is remarkable stuff."

"For the Labour Party, the exclusion of the revolutionary trend in the movement paved the way for the unchallenged domination of the right wing and locked the party ever more firmly into class collaboration and reformism. [...] In that sense, the decision to reject communist affiliation paved the way for the whole miserable litany of Labour-led disasters from 1931 to 1979."

"That things happened in the USSR which were inexcusable and which ultimately prejudiced Socialism's whole prospect is today undeniable. Whether Communists in the capitalist world could or should have done more than they did is much more contentious."

"Next Tuesday is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Josef Stalin. His career is the subject of a vast and ever expanding literature. Read it all and, at the end, you are still left paying your money and taking your choice. A socialist system embracing a third of the world and the defeat of Nazi Germany on the one hand. On the other, all accompanied by harsh measures imposed by a one-party regime. Nevertheless, if you believe that the worst crimes visited on humanity this century, from colonialism to Hiroshima and from concentration camps to mass poverty and unemployment have been caused by imperialism, then [Stalin’s birthday] might at least be a moment to ponder why the authors of those crimes and their hack propagandists abominate the name of Stalin beyond all others. It was, after all, Stalin’s best-known critic, Nikita Khrushchev, who remarked in 1956 that "against imperialists, we are all Stalinists"."

"Our party has already made its basic position of solidarity with People's Korea clear."

"Hitler is uniquely excoriated because his victims were almost all white Europeans, while those of Britain (and other classic colonialisms — French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian and Wilhelmine German) were Asian, African and Arabs. That Hitler's regime is seen as the most bestial of modern times is not of course objectionable. What needs to be confronted is the view that the crimes of other great powers of the last 150 years or so, being less lurid than those of the Nazis, can therefore be subject to a more nuanced judgment, in which the deaths of millions of people on the one hand can be offset against the construction of railways on the other. The British Empire was almost certainly responsible for more human deaths, albeit over a considerably longer period of time, than Hitler was."

"There is nothing in the imperial record as chilling as the systematic extermination of the great majority of Europe's Jews."

"[Israel is a "white settler state"] To ask Muslim community leaders to tackle "extremism" effectively when every night you can see on television a Muslim child being pulled lifeless from the rubble caused by the operations of the bloc of the USA, Britain, Israel and other white settler states like Canada and Australia is asking a lot."

"The Salisbury attack is something we got wrong. When it happened, I thought, "Well, probably there's Russians behind this, because of the use of novichok." I just thought it was Russian gangsters — some business interests, and so forth. I didn't think the Russian state was behind it. And we were wrong. The evidence that's emerged since is overwhelming. We misread that. I still think that the line Jeremy was trying to follow, which is, "Get the evidence first and then state sanctions, and so on, rather than the other way around," is a defensible position. You don't run into saying "This is Putin's responsibility" when you haven't produced the evidence of it. In fact, this evidence has now been produced. Had we known then what we know now, we'd have taken a different view, I think. We just didn't think the Russian state would be so stupid and brazen as to do something like that — to carry out a poisoning attack on British soil. I know, given the Litvinenko precedent perhaps we should have done but that never really got sorted out so clearly . . . Up until then we'd still ha[d] a quiescent PLP. We were doing all right in the polls. That started bringing all the doubts about Jeremy and the leader’s office to the surface again."

"There were no emails in 1978. Word processing meant dictating copy to stenographers; each newspaper had a phone booth in a gloomy corridor for this purpose. The [[w:Morning Star (British newspaper)|[Morning] Star]]s chief stenographer was an implacable Bolshevik called Doris. The 80-something comrade was hard of hearing with arthritis in her fingers, leaving her bereft of any qualification for her role beyond ideological rectitude. I had no chance of keeping an exclusive as I bellowed my scoops at a pace Doris could keep up with. Eventually I persuaded management that an infusion of youth was required in the stenography department, and a new typist was engaged. Dictating to her for the first time, I began my story, as so often in those days, with "Premier Thatcher...". I was stopped at that point. "How do you spell that?" she asked. "Which word?" I said. "Both." Give thanks for automatic spellchecks too."

"[During the 2017 general election campaign] Andrew Murray is a member of the Labour Party and he is an official at Unite, and he is temporarily helping us with the campaign."

"He is a person of enormous abilities and professionalism, and is the head of staff of Unite the union. To manage a very large union and a large number of staff takes special skills, and Andrew has them."

"[Asked about Murray's alleged "Stalinism"] I don't believe that Andrew is anything other than a democratic socialist and member of the Labour Party like me."

"[Following Murray's comments ("That things happened in the USSR...") cited above] Mr Murray believes that British communists in the 1930s were justified in backing the Great Terror, the Moscow Trials and the Ukraine famine."

"[Following Murray's comments ("That things happened in the USSR...") cited above] Murray is seriously maintaining that its an open question whether British communists did all they might have done in denouncing these abominations."

"Paris, that great but compact cosmopolitan and imperial city, has a strong claim to be considered the cradle of street photography. The city helped form this genre of photography and, equally, photography contributed to the formation of the city, as Parisians saw first their buildings and then themselves reflected in the many photographic photographic portraits constructed in magazines and books."

"The art market is regulated by dealers who control not only production but also consumption, vetting the suitability of buyers for particular works; the ‘who are you?’ question to buyers."

"The economy functions strictly and instrumentally according to iron conventions, imposed unequally on nations by the great transnational economic bodies; it establishes hierarchies of wealth and power; it enforces on the vast majority of the world's inhabitants a timetabled and regulated working life, while consoling them with visions of cinematic lives given meaning through adventure and coherent narrative (in which heroes make their lives free precisely by breaking the rules), and with plaintive songs of rebellion or love..."

"Art appears to stand outside this realm of rigid instrumentality, bureaucratized life, and its complementary mass culture. That it can do so is due to art’s peculiar economy, based on the manufacture of unique or rare artefacts, and its spurning of mechanical reproduction."

"Governments, as we have seen, look to art as a social salve, and hope that socially interactive art will act as bandaging for the grave wounds continually prised open by capital."

"The question of art’s use takes us back, naturally, to art’s freedom. That the very concerns of art – creativity, enlightenment, criticality, self-criticism – are as instrumentally grounded as what they serve to conceal – business, state triage, and war – is the consideration that must be concealed. And it can be, because the local liberation offered in the production of art, and its enjoyment, are genuine."

"Not everyone can learn from life, from other people."

"He who looks with indifference on life all round him "from the writer's carriage window" will never become a real writer...There is often a great deal of snobbish conceit in budding writers--and even frequently in workers' children, but [it] has to be thoroughly washed away."

"...The woman today is not simply a man's wife, she is a social worker, she wants to educate her children in the new way, she wants her whole day-to-day life to be rearranged of new lines. At every step she feels she lacks knowledge."

"The bourgeoisie of all countries understands to a nicety what a great power the experiences of childhood have over people, and for this reason it endeavours to bring the children up in the bourgeois spirit from their earliest years. The clergy, the teachers servile to the bourgeois Government, the unprincipled penny-a-line children’s authors and the grasping cinema proprietors all work feverishly in this direction."

"The girls must not be tied down to the home, but from the early years should be accustomed to being together, in one organisation with the boys—to be with them on a comradely footing."

"...We should try to link our personal lives with the cause for which we struggle, with the cause of building communism...This, of course, does not mean that we should renounce our personal life. The Party of communism is not a sect, and so such asceticism should not be advocated. At a factory, I once heard a woman addressing her work-mates say: "Comrades working women, you should remember that once you join the Party you have to give up husband and children." Of course, this is not the approach to the question. It is not a matter of neglecting husband and children, but of training the children to become fighters for communism, to arrange things so that the husband becomes such a fighter, too. One has to know how to merge one's life with the life of society. This is not asceticism. On the contrary, the fact of this merging, the fact that the common cause of all working people becomes a personal matter, makes personal life richer. It does not become poorer, it offers deep and colourful experiences which humdrum family life has never provided. To know how to merge one's life with work for communism, with the work and struggle of the working people to build communism, is one of the tasks that face us. You, young people, are only just starting out on your lives, and you can build them so that there is no gap between your personal life and that of society..."

"It was a great privilege to work so closely with these wonderful women of our movement...One of the greatest privileges of all was meeting Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, one of the most selflessly devoted human beings I have ever known. She always worked closely with Lenin, helping him in all his problems, and was technical secretary of the Party's Central Committee during their days of exile, a task which involved the handling of voluminous correspondence under conspiratorial conditions, and the most exacting labor with codes. Originally a teacher, her greatest interest was always in education, and her early work in the revolutionary movement had been organizing workers' study circles. As Vice Commissar of Education, she was in charge of adult education in the U.S.S.R. She told me of the immense problem of overcoming the illiteracy inherited from the tsarist regime. On my later visits she always sent for me to ask me for ideas from America which might be useful to the Soviet educational system."

"The population of the colonies means nothing but beasts of burden to the gentlemen imperialists. ... The imperialists of all countries treat the peoples who are the objects of their imperialist exploitation as slaves. Naturally the slaves rebel against their tormentors and naturally the strivings of these peoples for freedom and independence become stronger the more often they have the opportunity to conduct a war of defense against their oppressors. The socialists must recognize these wars of the colonial peoples against their European imperialist rulers as just wars of defense."

"Take a walk through the streets and market places of Petrograd and you can really see that every stone is a piece of Russian revolutionary history."

"The governmental machine of the bourgeoisie, consequently also the bourgeois parliaments, are to be broken, disrupted, destroyed, and upon their ruins is to be organized a new power, the power of the union of the working class, the workers' 'parliaments,' i.e., the Soviets. Only the betrayers of the workers can deceive the workers with the hope of a 'peaceful' social revolution, along the lines of parliamentary reforms. Such persons are the worst enemies of the working class, and a most pitiless struggle must be waged against them; no compromise with them is permissible. Therefore, our slogan for any bourgeois country you may choose is: 'Down with Parliament! Long live Soviet power!'"

"Since we are no prophets, none of us can say exactly how many months or years will pass before the victory of the proletarian revolution in the first of those important countries which really determine the fate of the World Revolution. One thing, however, we know exactly, and the new analysis of Europe’s economic situation at the Third Congress has again completely convinced us of it: The revolution is not over. We are not very far distant from the period in which new conflicts will begin, which will shake Europe and the whole world in a much greater degree than the sum total of all previous struggles."

"There is no greater honor than membership in the Communist Party. There is nothing more precious, there can be nothing more precious to us than our party, the splendid organization that has already helped the workers so materially in their hard fight for complete emancipation and that stands ready to help them until the fight is carried to a successful conclusion."

"We were indeed splitters at the beginning of the work of the Communist International. We could not have done otherwise. We were obliged to split the old socialist parties, to save the best revolutionary elements of the working class and to form a rallying point tor the new Communist Party in every country. For a time, we had to come out as splitters, but not one of us regrets it. ... But now, after the passing of two to three years, when we have firmly established our parties everywhere, we must go to the masses and work in such a manner that the simplest worker will understand us. The split for us was no end, but a means to win over the masses, and in my opinion is already half achieved. The masses begin to show a new attitude. They are now forced to see that the split was no selfish aim on our part, and that we are those who call and work for the unity of the revolutionary masses on one platform."

"The articulation of universalism with the sense of Jewish identity took varying forms depending on the different revolutionary currents: for internationalists such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg, the assimilation of a Jewish revolutionary into the concrete universal party, the dissolution of the 'little difference' into the status of equality of the militant, anticipated the society for which they fought; they did not consider the little difference' as called on to crystallize one day in terms of national identity. Were they blind? Blinkered, certainly, in the sense that they underestimated the national dimension of the Jewish problem in Eastern Europe."

"An atmosphere of extreme tension reigned during this period; it was necessary to act without mercy. I think that it was justified. If Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Rykov and Zinoviev had started up their opposition in wartime, there would have been an extremely difficult struggle; the number of victims would have been colossal. Colossal. The two sides would have been condemned to disaster. They had links that went right up to Hitler. That far. Trotsky had similar links, without doubt. Hitler was an adventurist, as was Trotsky, they had traits in common. And the rightists, Bukharin and Rykov, had links with them. And, of course, many of the military leaders."

"Another fifteen days have gone by; in this life of uncertainty and anxiety our very soul seems suspended. Our struggles in the field of labor are in a lull, weakened by the crisis that hampers us in affirming any rights. Our educational work seems ironic, now that the war has so deeply disillusioned us about our strengths. Yet we must go on living and waiting; the best we can do is to keep alive in our hearts the ideal flame of faith that seems to blow out under the rush of the storm. Meanwhile let us follow the events of the terrible war: we cannot count the dead, hundreds of thousands if not already a million. The fate that seemed to smile at German audacity now turns against its very arrogance. Like the soul of the common people, we see here a sanction imposed by the justice inherent in things."

"It is true that what has pushed public opinion increasingly against the Germans are excesses committed against the rules of international law that had been established as preventive measures to make war (as it were) less barbaric. But why would we want to punish the authors of such horrors by spreading further carnage? Do we not have a similar burden on our consciences? Who does not recall the ears of Arabs brought back from Libya as souvenirs by our soldiers?"

"The judgment of the civil world will issue a sentence much more useful in its moral effects than punishment inflicted with weapons at our own risk and danger. Thus we must oppose these false enthusiasms, in whatever quarter they arise."

"We women, who feel most responsible for the broken lives and calamities of war, and who therefore are by nature and by logic the most averse to war and least responsive to the lures of patriotism and combat, we are the most vigilant. If in the modest milieux where we live, our modest word can be of any value, let us employ it to dampen false enthusiasms, to recall to reality those who pursue reckless illusions. We, first among all, defend our party against the accusation of cowardice leveled against it. Let those who want to show their courage keep it for other, more sacred and fruitful battles!"

"With few exceptions, every man of any social class, owing to an infinity of unflattering reasons for a sex that passes as strong, considers the privilege of his sex as a natural phenomenon and defends it with astonishing tenacity, calling on God, the Church, science, ethics, and existing laws, which are merely the legal sanction of the prevarication of a dominant class and sex. And it is for this reason that, in spite of the intimate connections between these various problems, it seemed to me that I could isolate that of the social condition of woman from all other morbid phenomena of the social organism, mostly generated by that terrible tragedy of life, the struggle for existence."

"All the dispossessed and pariahs of society are on the move; they beg for some light, air, and a life that accords with human dignity. It is therefore only natural that, in our century, a serious and vast movement has emerged among the last and most numerous of pariahs who form half of humanity-that is, women."

"Is there a woman scholar in Italy who does not know the persistent and courageous efforts of such intellectually and morally gifted women as Giuseppina Poggiolini, Anna Maria Mozzoni, Laura Mantegazza, Gualberta Beccari, and others, to whom they owe the acquired right of pursuing higher and professional education?"

"However, with the evolution of modern civilization, the element of physical strength was increasingly eliminated from social activities, industrial production, and even agriculture, so that women of the social classes who earn a living through labor gradually found themselves in a situation more or less the same as that of men. And it is especially in our century that, owing to the laws of political economy-which we will not here take into consideration-and by collaborating directly in the production of social wealth, woman could become aware of her equivalence with man."

"I have chosen the question of woman's labor because I think it is the kernel of the whole woman question, as I firmly believe in the following great and fundamental truth of modern ethics, which is valid for both man and woman: labor alone, of whatever nature, divided and remunerated with equity, is the actual source of the enhancement of the human species."

"Nowadays, everybody complains about the decadent character of great and minor men alike. Let woman's character and personality evolve, and you will see woman, the real mother, will raise not cream puffs but real men!"

"It therefore seems to me that only when labor is equitably remunerated, or at least remunerated like man's, will woman take the first and most important step forward, since it is only by becoming economically independent that she will withdraw from moral parasitism and conquer her freedom, dignity, and the actual respect of the other sex. I believe it is only at that point that women will have the moral strength needed not to put up with the pressures of fathers, husbands, and brothers, and will themselves be able to create, among their sex, that powerful weapon of modern social struggles, namely, association, in order to acquire civil and political rights-which are now denied to them, as they are to men interdicted for imbecility, madness, or delinquency. The existing laws inflict this atrocious humiliation on woman, because not only men but also women themselves consider woman as an eternal minor, and she will be able to come of age only when she will be sufficient unto herself through her own intelligence, skills, and moral strengths."

"It is true that man's fear of competition plays a great role in this, which is dissimulated through social ethics arguments, based mostly on religious biases and habit. But by far most influential is the unconscious fear of having one day to renounce, out of love or necessity, the authority and arrogance of his sex, which has been embedded in man since prehistorical times—and I concede that abdicating power is always a difficult and painful thing."

"For the triumph of the cause of my sex, I hope only that men will be slightly less intolerant and women slightly more supportive of each other. Perhaps, at that point, the prophecy of the greatest poet of our century, Victor Hugo, will be realized: he predicted of woman what William Ewart Gladstone predicted of the factory worker-that the nineteenth century would be the "Century of the Woman.""

"Character never joins forces with servility. And, indeed, men and women-especially the latter-who have an independent character are often regarded as rebellious, unsettled and troubled people, a danger to society."

""In Milan there is only one man, who is actually a woman," wrote Antonio Labriola in an 1893 letter to Friedrich Engels, reporting on the "state of the art" of Italian socialism. The woman was Anna Kuliscioff, one of the founding members of the Socialist Party of Italian Workers, whose cosmopolitan militancy in Russia, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, and Italy at the turn of the twentieth century actively contributed to the flourishing of the Socialist International and, above all, to the construction and "deprovincialization" of Italian socialism...The delicate and relentless task of combining-without reconciling-the distinct and at times divergent instances of women's emancipation and class struggle that Kuliscioff first developed in this speech remained through all her writings the hallmark of her much underappreciated socialist feminism."

"Contrary to current opinion, the offensive is far from being the usual principle of anger. [...] or at the emotional exaltation there is a reversal of the combative fury of the subject against himself. But even if the orientation of the anger remains exclusively offensive, it only seems to set in motion the appropriate automatisms by the explosion of a diffuse agitation, which mixes with it, makes them stumble, and often ends up hitting them. of asynergy and adynamia, by resolving them into convulsion or syncope. They appear to be for her only a progressive, late, unstable conquest."

"Developing on another level, emotion is nonetheless, between automatism and objective action, a moment of psychic evolution. It forms the link between movement, which pre-exists, and consciousness, which it inaugurates. Incentives currently without outcome develop an erethism, the accumulated charge of which must explode, even if by transforming itself."

"The old man made a small, honking, animal noise and dropped back on the bed."

"The law don't like white people being finished off. Well I didn't mos mean it. Better get out before somebody comes. I never been in here. He looked at the sprawled figure that looked like a blown down scarecrow. Well he didn't have no right living here with us Coloreds."

"That's all they know. Shooting us people."

"We all good enough to be servants. Because we’re black, they think we good enough just to change their nappies."

"I’m not saying a person can change it tomorrow or next year. But even if you don’t get what you want today, soon, it’s a matter of pride, dignity...."

"Trouble. There’s always trouble.’ He spoke as if trouble was something he experienced all the time, but trouble was a stranger to her."

"Anger grew inside him like a ripening seed and the tendrils of its burgeoning writhed along his bones, through his muscles, into his mind."

"In the foyer of the offices of the petroleum company where Isaac worked, a woman with tired, bleached hair and the face of a painted wax doll accidentally left near a fire and then hastily retrieved, kept guard in the little telephone exchange behind polished plate glass and mahogany."

"Life has, for Beukes, become like a gangster movie, filled with"

"Science has been separated from wisdom in the sense that the organization of means has become independent of the reflection on ends. In all other cultures, for example in those of India, China, Islam (so far as Asia is concerned), one recognized two uses of reason: one proceeded from cause to effect and permitted adaptation to nature, and the other proceeded from ends to ends, from intermediate ends to higher ends, and gave direction to life. Western thought has let the second use of reason atrophy. Cut off from wisdom, occidental reason has become infirm, mutilated and monstrous, indifferent to all human finality."

"The world reduced to a market (the ‘monotheism of the market’, according to Roger Garaudy's accurate formulation) is indeed a senseless world, completely abandoned by God, regardless of the fact that crowds of religious dignitaries are often present at public ceremonies dominated by the economic, political and, above all, military leaders of the planet."

"For under certain conditions even dangerous absurdities can command massive support, as we know from history."

"There is a well-known law of physics, in the field of electricity, which says that the electric current follows “the line of least resistance.” This is also true about the situation of many social conflicts which decide, even if only temporarily, in which direction a given problem is settled for the time being, depending on the relation of forces (i.e. the strength of the resistance to the current situation) and on the realizability of suitable alternatives."

"Epochal conflicts and antagonisms are amenable only to epochal solutions."

"(About Adriano Celentano) [...] He has the right to say what he wants, and I would have defended him even if he had said that gay people should be sent to concentration camps."

"Lucio Dalla's funeral is one of the most striking examples of what it means to be homosexual in Italy: you go to church, they let you have a funeral, and they bury you with a Catholic service, as long as you don't say you're gay. It's a symbol of who we are: there's permissiveness, as long as you look the other way."

"Indeed, the Protocols have served many dictatorships, and they continue to cause harm to this day. Those pages make it clear what intellectual poisoning actually consists of: the idea that the world is not a collective creation, but merely a canvas woven by the Few and the Powerful. This concept denies the role of individual human agency in shaping history; therefore, it also denies any principle of transparency and trust, without which there can be no human community."

"[...] We European women need to start a real discussion about what immigration is bringing to our countries; about the hardship, and about the very real threats to our physical safety that we experience on the streets, on buses, and in our city neighbourhoods."

"Pope Benedict XVI is an excellent theologian and an outstanding pastor."

"[...] (Abou the Italian Family Day) I took part because I believe the family is a part of humanity's heritage that deserves protection: the family is neither right-wing nor left-wing; it belongs to universal values."

"I remain an atheist and a Marxist, but I have the utmost appreciation for Catholic culture."