Communists

"He's the head of a country, and I mean he's the strong head, don't let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same."

"I was really tough and so was he, and we went back and forth, and then we fell in love, OK? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love."

"How many guys- he was like twenty-six or twenty-five when his father died- take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden... he goes in, he takes over, and he's the boss. It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. I mean, this guy doesn't play games, and we can't play games with him."

"Life was given to man"

"The founders of this New Left reasoned that neither the current political status-quo nor the socialist states, as exemplified by the Soviet Union and its slave states, were the solution to the problems they reasoned were facing the American people. But as history teaches, the New Left fell victim to the power politics of the Old Left. As the result, what is still rhetorically referred to as the New Left is, in reality, only a Dorian Grey picture of the original vision of its founders."

"What Jerry [Rubin] doesn’t seem to be able to get is the fact that if we all go out and Do It! and smash the current state that we will end up with something quite worse. Even if successful, the anarchists are always the first to go once the revolution is consummated. The vacuum is always filled by power."

"My wife [Barbra] and I were walking with a friend, and we walked over to Jerry [Rubin] and his buddy… my wife said to him… ‘Hey, Jerry, I really dug your speech.’… ‘I did like the part about private property being pure s_.’ And Jerry got into it and said: ‘Yea, well property is s_ and after the revolution we will divide everything up. Like there won’t be anything private. My shirt will be your shirt and my car will be your car. And it will be one big commune.’…Barbra went on. ‘That’s a fantastic Indian head band you have on Jerry.’ Retort: ‘Yea. It was given to me by a friend.’ Barbra: ‘Why don’t you give it to me?’ Jerry: ‘Huh?’ Barbra: ‘You said that private property was s_ so why won’t you give me your head band.’ Well, Rubin looked astonished and blurted out: ‘But it’s my head band.’"

"Marx felt that the job of the proletariat was to be that of the tool. For Marx, the proletariat is ‘the material weapon of philosophy.’ In order to bring the proletariat into line he must first know it, and lean how to manage it. But his contempt for it, his hatred for the ‘petits grands hommes,’ is obvious by his constant referral to ‘the rabble,’ ‘the emigrant scum,’ ‘the rotten emigrant swine,’ ‘the toads.’ Marx asked Engels, “What is this rabble good for if it forgets how to fight?’"

"If the communist theories and philosophies are so rational and humanitarian, and if, as they contend, man is basically both rational and humanitarian, why have bloody violence and force been necessary to gain their ends?"

"Engels spoke of the proletariat as ‘those asses,’ or ‘those stupid workers who believe everything.’ Marx said, ‘The ultimate aim of the movement’ is not to produce small farmers by dividing up the land among them, but on the contrary, to expropriate those who already exist—it was all ‘agricultural property shit.’"

"The rigors of membership in the Progress Labor Party and its Stalinist tendencies only create a mental brick wall for the members of the sect. The Progress Labor Party and its vacuum-minded Communists should not be marked for government control merely because they are Communists. The illegal actions of PL do,…"

"The [Progressive Labor] leaders became so paranoid over the issue of their public ‘image’ that they told members to shave their moustaches, wear coats and ties, forget the cowboy boots, be careful with whom they are seen, stay away from people who take dope, date only certain girls, attend classes regularly, and watch their language in public. Strange concepts, indeed, for Communists who at times attempted to pose as libertines.”"

"Kindled with his touted (and still touted) ‘brother-hood of mankind,’ Marx said that toward Poland the correct line would be to take "from the western part of Poland anything that can be taken, let the Germans occupy their fortresses under the pretext of 'protection,' use the people for cannon fodder and devour their country.’"

"I was also not willing to accept the orders of the leaders regarding my personal life or the personal lives of the other members. I had refused to allow the government to tell me how to live, so why should I allow the leadership of Progressive Labor to reorient my life?... Open criticism of the leadership dictums did not sit well with them, and they immediately began to accuse me of ‘trying to create a splinter group.’… The leaders became so paranoid over the issue of their ‘public image’ that they told members to shave their mustaches, wear coats and ties, forget the cowboy boots, be careful whom they are seen with, stay away from people who take dope, date only certain girls, attend classes regularly, and watch their language in public. Strange concerns, indeed, for Communists who at times attempted to pose as libertarians!"

"Students today don’t debate whether the state should have any control over their lives, they only debate how much control it should have."

"Borrowing a chapter from the Nazis, they believe that the more often a lie is repeated, the more people are prone to accept it as truth. Nothing is too scandalous for them, and I am constantly amazed at the fact that at one time I was a close associate of people capable of such deceitful behavior."

"The state sees violence as an enemy which justifies the increase of state power for fighting purposes. Thus the state can always turn any threat of force into a resource."

"I discovered that I had deluded myself into believing that this world held the answer to the future and that Communism was basically humanitarian in its approach to politics. No one duped me into joining, and the struggle to see through my folly has been a great personal struggle. You don’t discover some morning that everything you believe in, and perhaps have staked your life on, is a myth. The act of breaking with Communism was the most difficult one of my life."

"Government cannot be abolished but they can be abandoned and this will take place when you give up your political adolescence and stop trying to establish your will on others. The bureaucracies will be abandoned when people demonstrate they can bet along without familia."

"New Leftists are not buying the collectivist doctrine of the established (Communist) organizations. They are quite simply libertarians, rebelling against unreasonable power and authority, whether it comes via established government or totalitarian (leftist) organizations."

"Thus civil disobedience seemed necessary, but the ‘disobedience’ was aimed directly against seemingly unjust and unconstitutional acts. This is the best tradition of radicalism in the United States. But the illegal activities of the Communists are not directed at any tests of the Constitution or of the ‘laws’ themselves. In fact, the Communists are opposed to the guarantees of the Constitution, no matter how many crocodile tears they might shed while using it amendments to try to overthrow the government."

"The difficult decisions first began in December 1964, when I refused to join a Progress Labor Party group preparing to go ‘underground.’ They ended with the most difficult choice—to leave the movement silently, quietly, as so many other had done before, or to risk the censure of those who had once been my friends and tell of the personal experience, political truths, and illegal activities that forced me to ‘split.’ The friends who were no longer friendly, the attempts at personal slander, the chorus that now sang out my name as the most dangerous enemy of all, the attempts to isolate me—all were expected. But the contemptuous and defamatory quality of the attacks were not, and the only thing one can say is that the Old and New Left have this something in common—they have no scruples when it comes to one who sways from their prescribed faith."

"But where communism is really unique is in its ability to convince reasonably intelligent people that its tyranny is somehow different, and that anyone silly enough to question the suppression of human and political rights in a communist state is some kind of a right-wing lunatic."

"Evan after I had replaced my civil-libertarian posture with the rigors of Marxism-Leninism, Chinese style, Clark’s [Foreman] advice about the necessity of maintaining individual freedoms stuck in my mind and often forced me into open conflict with Progressive Labor. In many ways it was the need for independence, which Clark helped to instill in me, that led to my eventual break with Communism."

"[The state is] never a contract among peaceful men but always a conquest of one group over another."

"Only by discarding a diet based on rotting corpses could men become sane. The fantasy of needing a blood-diet, a corpse-diet, was inseparable from the distorted relation to the parents I had been trying to clarify in myself and which one way or another existed in everyone. The corpse-eater was still in fantasy feeding on the parents. We discussed these ideas and decided to eat no more meat, no more animal products of any kind (such as milk, cheese, eggs) and to discard mineral salt. Apart from a few extreme applications of our position, when I tried to eat such nauseous things as raw potatoes, we found that we felt very much better in health."

"Of what was Herndon "guilty"? He had led a demonstration of unemployed Negro and white workers to City Hall, had been found with a couple of Communist pamphlets in his possession, and possessed a firm and inspiringly defiant advocacy of the freedom of Negroes and of the liberation of the white masses from exploitation. The "dangerous" policy he then espoused as a Communist, was the unity of the Negroes in the South with the impoverished white workers and poor farmers."

"My father ... rarely smiled. Then I did not know why, but now I do know that it was overwork, under-nourishment and the burdens of daily living which had made a broken man out of him, although still so young in years. His eyes were perpetually inflamed by the coal dust which also gnawed away at his lungs and made him spit out black sputum."

"My father worked from ten to fourteen hours a day and sometimes during the night, for which he never received any extra pay. Every year that passed only increased the wretchedness of his condition and our way of living. Work as hard as he would, there seemed to be no way out for us."

"My father was miserably treated by the mining company, but he had imbibed the false humility and meekness that the oppressors of his race and class had hypocritically taught him. He sought consolation from his torment in a touching devotion to his church, distracting himself from the sordid realities of his life and that of his family with dreams of the Reward Hereafter."

"I... want to see the construction of a multipolar world, an that obviously means the defeat of Washington’s hegemonist project for military control of the planet. In my eyes it is an overweening project, criminal by its very nature, which is drawing the world into wars without end and stifling all hope of social and democratic advance, not only in the countries of the South but also, to a seemingly lesser degree, in those of the North."

"The hegemonist strategy of the United States, which operates within the framework of the new collective imperialism, seeks nothing less than to establish Washington’s military control over the entire planet. This is the means to ensure privileged access to all of the world’s natural resources, and to compel subaltern allies, Russia, China and the whole third world to swallow their status as vassals. Military control of the planet is the means to impose, as a last resort, the draining of ‘tribute’ through political violence – as a substitute for the ‘spontaneous’ flow of capital that offsets the American deficit, the Achilles heel of US hegemony."

"Will Trump go so far as to repeal NAFTA? If he did so he would render a great service to the peoples of Mexico and Canada by freeing them from their status as impotent vassals and encouraging them to engage in new directions based on the autonomy of their popular-sovereign projects. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the vast majority of Republican and Democratic representatives in the House and the Senate, all of whom have demonstrated an unconditional support of the interests of the American oligarchies, will allow Trump to go that far."

"The debate concerns only some of the problems of society in the United States (anti-feminism and racism in particular). It does not call into question the economic foundations of the system that are the root cause of the degradations of social conditions in important segments of society. The sacredness of private property, including that of monopolies, remains intact; the fact that Trump is himself a billionaire was an asset and not an obstacle to his election."

"The creation of a front against hegemonism is the number one priority today, as the creation of an anti-Nazi alliance was the number one priority yesterday. No European project can make any progress unless the strategy of the United States is put to flight."

"Bernie Sanders' election campaign had given rise to much hope. By daring to introduce a socialist perspective into the debate, Sanders initiated the sound politicization of public opinion, which is no more impossible in the United States than elsewhere. We can only deplore, under these conditions, Sanders' capitulation and his rallying to the support of Clinton."

"The system in place in the countries of the historic imperialist triad (the United States, Western Europe, Japan) is based on the exercise of the absolute power of the national financial oligarchies concerned. They alone manage the whole of the national productive systems, having succeeded in reducing almost all small and medium-sized enterprises in agriculture, industry, and services to the status of subcontractors for the exclusive benefit of financial capital."

"The project of American hegemonism fits into the liberal logic of collective triad imperialism. It entails that the ‘sovereignty of US national interests’ should be placed above all other principles framing the legitimacy of political action. To be sure, the imperialisms of the past behaved no differently, and those who seek to mitigate the responsibilities of the US establishment today, or to find excuses for its criminal conduct, frequently invoke the undeniable historical antecedents. p.122"

"These oligarchies alone manage the political systems inherited from bourgeois electoral and representative democracy, having succeeded in domesticating the right and left electoral political parties, at the price of eroding the legitimacy of the democratic practice concerned. These oligarchies alone control the propaganda apparatuses, having succeeded in reducing the directors of news organizations including public broadcasters to the status of media clergy in their exclusive service. None of these aspects of the dictatorship of the oligarchy is challenged by the social and political movements at work in the triad, especially not in the United States."

"We are told [that the West is threatened by] the terrorist threat of Islamic jihadism. Again, opinion is perfectly manipulated on the subject. Jihadism is merely the inevitable product of the triad's continued support of reactionary political Islam inspired and financed by Gulf Wahhabism. The exercise of this so-called Islamic power is the best guarantee of the total destruction of the ability of societies in the region to resist the dictates of liberal globalization. At the same time, it offers the best pretext for giving the appearance of legitimacy to the NATO's interventions."

"Around the world we find institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose policies could mean starvation for three billion peasant farmers, according to Samir Amin, director of the Third World Forum in Senegal. Unable to grow foodstuffs that can compete with products imported from advanced countries, how can these people survive?"

"Washington’s propaganda apparatus has been foretelling an inevitable ‘clash of civilizations’ (actually of religions) as the dominant feature of the future world. In reality, it has managed to give a real face to such a clash by a number of systematic measures: the promotion of various communalisms on the pretext of respecting difference; an offensive against ‘outdated’ secularism; praise for religious obscurantisms, which postmodernists have placed on a par with any other ‘ideology’; systematic encouragement of nauseating ethnicist regimes (in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere); various kinds of cynical manipulation (CIA support for terrorist groups against enemies of the USA, in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Algeria, among others); and a false and dishonest war on so-called ‘terrorism’ (where terror does not serve Washington’s interests). The so-called clash of civilizations is an integral part of the barbaric downhill slide of capitalism; in no way is it an obstacle to the unfurling of the US hegemonist project."

"Whereas in democratic countries the businessman may use his money to influence legislation and public opinion and thus operated as a source of power and corruption, in fascist countries he can exist only as the subject upon whom State power operates. The corruption in fascist arises inevitably from the reversal of the role of the capitalist and the State as wielders of economic power."

"Japanese exporters are organized in export cartels by the State. The State restricts competition among exporters and importers. The same thing is done in Germany and Italy. Moreover, it is not only in totalitarian States that payments for imported goods have become dependent on governmental decisions."

"The existence of a state within the State—the Party and the bureaucracy—is a phenomenon of the post-War world."

"The totalitarian State does not tolerate any ‘second government,’ any challenge to the power of the all-wise dictator. [As the Nazi party has stated] ‘Within the constitution of the Third Reich any position independent of the will of the Fuehrer no longer exists. The principle of separation of power is a thing of the past. Only the Party has a privileged position.’"

"Fritz Nonnenbruch, the financial editor of the Voelkischer Beobachter, states: ‘There exists no law which binds the State. The state can do what it regards as necessary, because it has the authority…. The next stage of National-Socialist economic policy consists of replacing capitalist laws by policy.’"

"While State representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped, because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur’ followed by a prison sentence."

"You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain about it. The new State loans are nothing but confiscation of private property, because no one believes that the Government will ever make repayment, not even pay interest after the first few years."

"The old type of capitalist who adheres to the traditional concepts of property rights is doomed to failure under fascism."