Communist Manifesto Violence Quotes

Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and a long line of implementers candidly admitted that force and violence would be necessary. In the close of the Manifesto, Marx said, “The Communists … openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” (italics added).

Our blindness to the results of systemic violence is perhaps most clearly perceptible in debates about communist crimes. Responsibility for communist crimes is easy to allocate: we are dealing with subjective evil, with agents who did wrong. We can even identify the ideological sources of the crimes-totalitarian ideology, The Communist Manifesto, Rousseau, even Plato. But when one draws attention to the millions who died as the result of capitalist globalization, from the tragedy of Mexico in the 16th century through to the Belgian Congo holocaust a century ago, responsibility is largely denied. All this seems just to have happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process, which nobody planned and executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist Manifesto.