Marx And Engels Quotes

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

Still, in 1877, Engels wanted to protect us from false socialism. Still then, in Anti-Dühring, he wrote that not any nationalization is socialist, because in the contrary case both Bismarck and Napoleon would have to be arranged among the founders of socialism.

If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living.

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions.

But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

To say that "the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital", means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased.

Marx and Engels never tried to refute their opponents with argument. They insulted, ridiculed, derided, slandered, and traduced them, and in the use of these methods their followers are not less expert. Their polemic is directed never against the argument of the opponent, but always against his person.

The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is universally applicable. We should regard it not as dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is not merely a matter of learning terms and phrases but of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of revolution.

We Germans invented all the big movements of the twentieth century. Phenomenology from Heidegger and Hegel, communism from Marx and Engels. So you will have to excuse us for being a little stiff in our limbs – we have been busy.

You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels." "Its own grave-diggers," he said. "But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside." The camera tracked a cop chasing a young man through the crowd, an image that seemed to exist at some drifting distance from the moment. "The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are market-driven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system.

A lot of good men had been thinking for us. Marx did. Engels did. These people did beautifully. Yet maybe we need to get through Marx, for Marx doesn't give the keys and answers for us women.' If women must independently find their images, what of feminist-friendly men? 'If men want to join, leave the door open. They can listen,' Varda says.

When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a “Newtonian” or of a biologist when asked if he is a “Pasteurian.” There are truths so evident, so much a part of the peoples’ knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them. One should be a “Marxist” with the same naturalness with which one is a “Newtonian” in physics or a “Pasteurian.” If new facts bring about new concepts, the latter will never take away that portion of truth possessed by those that have come before. Such is the case, for example, of “Einsteinian” relativity or of Planck’s quantum theory in relation to Newton’s discoveries. They take absolutely nothing away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it achieved new concepts of space. The learned Englishman was the necessary stepping-stone for that. Obviously, one can point to certain mistakes of Marx, as a thinker and as an investigator of the social doctrines and of the capitalist system in which he lived. We Latin Americans, for example, cannot agree with his interpretation of Bolivar, or with his and Engels’ analysis of the Mexicans, which accepted as fact certain theories of race or nationality that are unacceptable today. But the great men who discover brilliant truths live on despite their small faults and these faults serve only to show us they were human. That is to say, they were human beings who could make mistakes, even given the high level of consciousness achieved by these giants of human thought. This is why we recognize the essential truths of Marxism as part of humanity’s body of cultural and scientific knowledge. We accept it with the naturalness of something that requires no further argument.

Take, for example, the problems of government. Marx and Engels would solve these problems by working for the day when they could eliminate government. Problems of morals would be solved by doing away with morals. Problems growing out of religion would be solved by doing away with religion. Problems of marriage, home and family would be eliminated by doing away with marriage, home and family. The problems arising out of property rights would be resolved by not allowing anyone to have any property rights.

I know him by another name. His real one is Slem, not uncommon for men of his generation. It stands for Stalin Lenin Engels Marx. He's always making up new names for himself--wouldn't you?

a stateless society (a civilization without a government) which Marx and Engels vigorously advocated would be an unorganized mob. It would be no society at all.

Marx and Engels thought all of these things could be traced to one root -- private property. If they used a final revolutionary class uprising to overthrow private property, it would mean that class struggle would become unnecessary because there would be nothing to fight over!

Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century.

Die Proletarier dieser Welt haben nichts zu verlieren als ihre Ketten. Sie haben eine Welt zu gewinnen. Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!

The bourgeoisie . . . has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

Conservative ideologues defend capitalism as the system that preserves culture, traditional values, the family, and community. Marxists would respond that capitalism has done more to undermine such things than any other system in history, given its wars, colonizations, and forced migrations, its enclosures, evictions, poverty wages, child labor, homelessness, underemployment, crime, drug infestation, and urban squalor. All over the world, community in the broader sense-the Gemeinschaft with its organic social relationships and strong reciprocal bonds of commonality and kinship- is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized, mass-market societies. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to capitalism's implacable drive to settle "over the whole surface of the globe;' creating "a world after its own image." No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.

The 'Manifesto' being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and the oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without, at the same time, and once for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles. This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845.

Bolshevik intellectuals did not confine their reading to Marxist works. They knew Russian and European literature and philosophy and kept up with current trends in art and thoughts. Aspects of Nietzsche’s thought were either surprisingly compatible with Marxism or treated issues that Marx and Engels had neglected. Nietzsche sensitized Bolsheviks committed to reason and science to the importance of the nonrational aspects of the human psyche and to the psychpolitical utility of symbol, myth, and cult. His visions of “great politics” (grosse Politik) colored their imaginations. Politik, like the Russian word politika, means both “politics” and “policy”; grosse has also been translated as “grand” or “large scale.” The Soviet obsession with creating a new culture stemmed primarily from Nietzsche, Wagner, and their Russian popularizers. Marx and Engels never developed a detailed theory of culture because they considered it part of the superstructure that would change to follow changes in the economic base.

The Marxist constituency has remained as narrow as the conception behind it. The Communist Manifesto, written by two bright and articulate young men without responsibility even for their own livelihoods—much less for the social consequences of their vision—has had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kinds of people. The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements from the days of Marx and Engels through Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and their lesser counterparts around the world and down through history. The sheer reiteration of the "working class" theme in Marxism has drowned out this plain fact.

Books are constantly changing the world. If you’re a Christian, you have been changed by the Bible, by the word of God, or what was left of it when it was finally wrung through the hands of men. If you are a Muslim, look to the Koran; if a Communist, to Marx and Engels. Don’t you see? This world is constantly being altered by books.

Marx and Engels said that disorganizing the army was the condition for a victorious revolution and also its result.

Marx and Engels accepted the fact that the remaking of the world will have to be a cruel and ruthless task and that it will involve the destruction of all who stand in the way.

The political utopia envisioned by Marx and Engels clearly implied a total separation between commodity and sentiment, interest and love, as a precondition for authentic, fully human relationships.

What is certain is that I am not a Marxist, as someone said a long time ago, let us recall, in a witticism reported by Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority in order to say “I am not a Marxist”?

Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company. Uncle Philips' views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal mattes of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engel's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.

...he composed his own quotations from Marx and Engels to confound the most learned communist, and recommended others to do the same. 'Twist the book', he would yell: 'Twist the book, so the Party always wins!

Manchester was all mix. It was radical — Marx and Engels were here. It was repressive — the Peterloo Massacres and the Corn Laws. Manchester spun riches beyond anybody's wildest dreams, and wove despair and degradation into the human fabric. It was Utilitarian, in that everything was put to the test of ‘Does this work?’ It was Utopian — its Quakerism, its feminism, its anti—slavery movement, its socialism, its communism.

Time to wake to a wholesome diet--Marx and Engels, Andy Warhol and Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouak and the Grateful Dead, Sartre and Gide--it was a regimen of semen in the sixties and we never even knew we were choking. [109]

Maximum awareness and respect for the scholarship of historians outside the boundaries of Marxism is not incompatible with rigorous pursuit of a Marxist historical enquiry: it is a condition of it. Conversely, Marx and Engels themselves can never be taken simply at their word: the errors of their writings on the past should not be evaded or ignored, but identified and criticized. To do so is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it.

Friedrich Engels’ first draft of the Communist Manifesto included a deliberate undermining of family bonds as part of the Marxian political agenda,100 though Marx himself was politically astute enough to leave that out of the final version.

I remember my first reading of The Communist Manifesto, which Marx and Engels wrote when they too were young radicals; Marx was thirty, Engels twenty-eight. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” That was undeniably true, verifiable in any reading of history. Certainly true for the United States, despite all the promises of the Constitution (“We the people of the United States …” and “No state shall deny … the equal protection of the laws”).

A critical analysis of the present global constellation-one which offers no clear solution, no “practical” advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us-usually meets with reproach: “Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?” One should gather the courage to answer: “YES, precisely that!” There are situations when the only true “practical” thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to “wait and see” by means of a patient, critical analysis. Engagement seems to exert its pressure on us from all directions. In a well-known passage from his ‘Existentialism and Humanism’, Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in 1942, torn between the duty to help his lone, ill mother and the duty to enter the war and fight the Germans; Sartre’s point is, of course, that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man needs to make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom and assume full responsibility for it. An obscene third way out of this dilemma would have been to advise the young man to tell his mother that he will join the Resistance, and to tell his Resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while, in reality, withdrawing to a secluded place and studying. There is more than cheap cynicism in this advice. It brings to mind a well-known Soviet joke about Lenin. Under socialism; Lenin’s advice to young people, his answer to what they should do, was “Learn, learn, and learn.” This was evoked all the time and displayed on the school walls. The joke goes: Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked whether they would prefer to have a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers, “A wife!” while Engels, more of a bon vivant, opts for a mistress. To everyone’s surprise, Lenin says, “I’d like to have both!” Why? Is there a hidden stripe of decadent jouisseur behind his austere revolutionary image? No-he explains: “So that I can tell my wife that I am going to my mistress and my mistress that I am going to my wife. . .” “And then, what do you do?” “I go to a solitary place to learn, learn, and learn!” Is this not exactly what Lenin did after the catastrophe in 1914? He withdrew to a lonely place in Switzerland, where he “learned, learned, and learned,” reading Hegel’s logic. And this is what we should do today when we find ourselves bombarded with mediatic images of violence. We need to “learn, learn, and learn” what causes this violence.

In all spheres of modern life the influence of Stalin reaches wide and deep. From his last simply written but vastly discerning and comprehensive document, back through the years, his contributions to the science of our world society remain invaluable. One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin—the shapers of humanity’s richest present and future.” – Paul Robeson

When Marx and Engels applied the law of contradiction in things to the study of the socio-historical process, they discovered the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, they discovered the contradiction between the exploiting and exploited classes and also the resultant contradiction between the economic base and its superstructure (politics, ideology, etc.), and they discovered how these contradictions inevitably lead to different kinds of social revolution in different kinds of class society.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

There was no doubt for Marx and Engels about the necessity of having the proletariat conquer political power. It is left to Bernstein to consider the poultry-yard of bourgeois Parliamentarism as the organ by which we are to realize the most formidable social transformation of history, the passage from capitalist society to Socialism.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said, “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.

Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various way; the point, however, is to change it

Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!

The entirety of Marxism from top to bottom was established by means of the dialectical materialist method. In literally any work of Marx and Engels it is therefore both possible and necessary to study the logic of their thinking and the theory of knowledge which they consciously employed – dialectics. This must be studied not only in their writings, but in the real logic of the political struggle which they conducted throughout their entire lives. For dialectics is the logic not only of research, and not only of the unity of scientific works; it is also a logic of real causes which comes to life and enters into battle, finding realisation in whatever are the truly real causes changing the face of the surrounding world.

Just as Charles Darwin explains that species are not immutable, and that they possess a past, a present and a future, changing and evolving, so Marx and Engels explain that a given social system is not something eternally fixed. That is the illusion of every epoch. Every social system believes that it represents the only possible form of existence for human beings, that its institutions, its religion, its morality are the last word that can be spoken. That is what the cannibals, the Egyptian priests, Marie Antoinette and Tsar Nicolas all fervently believed. And that is what the bourgeoisie and its apologists today wish to demonstrate when they assure us, without the slightest basis, that the so-called system of "free enterprise" is the only possible system - just when it is beginning to sink.

Sottolineai tantissime frasi con forza, segnai punti esclamativi, freghi verticali. Sputare su Hegel. Sputare sulla cultura degli uomini, sputare su Marx, su Engels, su Lenin. E sul materialismo storico. E su Freud. E sulla psicoanalisi e l’invidia del pene. E sul matrimonio, sulla famiglia. E sul nazismo, sullo stalinismo, sul terrorismo. E sulla guerra. E sulla lotta di classe. E sulla dittatura del proletariato. E sul socialismo. E sul comunismo. E sulla trappola dell’uguaglianza. E su tutte le manifestazioni della cultura patriarcale. E su tutte le sue forme organizzative. Opporsi alla dispersione delle intelligenze femminili. Deculturalizzarsi. Disacculturarsi a partire dalla maternità, non dare figli a nessuno. Sbarazzarsi della dialettica servo-padrone. Strapparsi dal cervello l’inferiorità. Restituirsi a se stesse. Non avere antitesi. Muoversi su un altro piano in nome della propria differenza. L’università non libera le donne ma perfeziona la loro repressione. Contro la saggezza. Mentre i maschi si danno a imprese spaziali, la vita per le femmine su questo pianeta deve ancora cominciare. La donna è l’altra faccia della terra. La donna è il Soggetto Imprevisto. Liberarsi dalla sottomissione, qui, ora, in questo presente. L’autrice di quelle pagine si chiamava Carla Lonzi.

Whereas Buddhists believe that the law of nature was discovered by Siddhartha Gautama, Communists believed that the law of nature was discovered by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The similarity does not end there. Like other religions, Communism too has its holy scripts and prophetic books, such as Marx’s Das Kapital, which foretold that history would soon end with the inevitable victory of the proletariat.

Even Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto, make a very clear point early on that capitalism is a process of social-reproduction into which the class arrangement of wage-labor exploitation must involve the proletariat as-if willingly selecting their own submission to the system. Workers have to choose to subject themselves, or at the very least, have the true-belief that they are themselves free and willing participants in the process.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured an looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

Let’s think about the fake sense of urgency that pervades the left-liberal humanitarian discourse on violence: in it, abstraction and graphic (pseudo)concreteness coexist in the staging of the scene of violence-against women, blacks, the homeless, gays . . . “A woman is rpaed every six seconds in this country” and “In the time it takes you to read this paragraph, ten children will die of hunger” are just two examples. Underlying all this is a hypocritical sentiment of moral outrage. Just this kind of pseudo-urgency was exploited by Starbucks a couple of years ago when, at store entrances, posters greeting costumers pointed out that a portion of the chain’s profits went into health-care for the children of Guatemala, the source of their coffee, the inference being that with every cup you drink, you save a child’s life. There is a fundamental anti-theoretical edge to these urgent injunctions. There is no time to reflect: we have to act now. Through this fake sense of urgency, the post-industrial rich, living in their secluded virtual world, not only do not deny or ignore the harsh reality outside the area-they actively refer to it all the time. As Bill Gates recently put it: “What do the computers matter when millions are still unnecessarily dying of dysentery?” Against this fake urgency, we might want to place Marx’s wonderful letter to Engels of 1870, when, for a brief moment, it seemed that a European revolution was again at the gates. Marx’s letter conveys his sheer panic: can’t the revolution wait for a couple of years? He hasn’t yet finished his ‘Capital’.

In concluding this discussion of the basic fallacies in Communism we should perhaps make a summary comment on the most significant fallacy of them all. This is the Communist doctrine that problems can be solved by eliminating the institution from which the problems emanate. Even Marx and Engels may have been unaware that this was what they were doing, but the student will note how completely this approach dominates every problem they undertook to solve.

Marx, Engels, and Lenin have carried on the tradition of rational and non-mystical approach to all human problems; this is the tradition of the best Greek philosophers and the founders of modern science. Careful analysis; separation of factors; the following of causes into their effects; reliance on experiments; all are taken over into Marxism and provide it with a hard scientific core. There is nowhere any pandering to special intuitions or spiritual experiences.

The Marxist dialectic is essentially word-fetishism. Every article of the faith is embodied in a word fetish whose double or even multiple meaning makes it possible to unite incompatible ideas and demands. The interpretation of these words, as intentionally ambiguous as the words of the Delphic Pythia, eventually brings the different parties to blows, and everyone quotes in his favour passages from the writings of Marx and Engels to which authoritative importance is attached.

Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous historic period. In an old unpublished manuscript written by Marx and myself in 1846 I find the words: The first division of labour is that between man and woman for the propagation of children And today I can add: The first class antagonism that appears in history coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opened the epoch that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others.

Usually, after a disagreement, they suggested i read this or that, often Marx, Lenin, or Engels. I preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel, but i ended up having to get into Marx and Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches and stuff Huey Newton was putting out.

The success of Communism naturally depends on altering human nature because few things are more inherent in human nature than the ownership of property. This basic human right is as ancient as the ten commandments where God ordained that 'Thou Shall Not Steal'. The commandment implicitly acknowledges that persons have possessions and that they have an inherent right to that property. So it is thus not permissible for others to take it away from them. But Marx & Engels weren't about to admit the right to private property that we find even in the bible.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in The Communist Manifesto, declared: “In bourgeois society . . . the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.”13 This view is shared by contemporary statists, including the current occupants of the White House. On May 14, 2008, the future First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, while campaigning for her husband, Barack Obama, proclaimed: “We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history. We’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.”14 On October 30, 2008, when the polls showed him the likely winner of the upcoming presidential election, Barack Obama shouted during a campaign stop days before the vote: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”15

The proletariat, a class of laborers,who live only so long as they find work,and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity,like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

As a youth I enjoyed — indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered — the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system — which is to say by the accrual of wealth — house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.

Exploitation has much more terrible connotations in a Third World country that in a developed capitalist country, because it is exactly out of fear of revolution, out of fear of socialism that developed capitalism came up with some distribution schemes that, to a certain degree, d away with the great hunger that European countries were familiar with in Engel's day, in Marx's day.

The Shawnees, Miamis and Delawares follow the custom of placing their children into the male gens by giving them a gentile name belonging to the father's gens, so that they may be entitled to inherit. "Innate casuistry of man, to change the objects by changing their names, and to find loopholes for breaking tradition inside of tradition where a direct interest was a sufficient motive." (Marx.)

Marx and Engels were not putting forth philosophical concepts designated for philosophical excavation but concepts that were part of a scientific terrain. To claim that “the expropriation of the expropriators” is philosophically naive because there is a deeper meaning of property is the same as claiming that scientific proclamations about the anterior cannot be literal. In a revolution private property can and should be expropriated and any philosophical authority that seeks to question the meaning of “property” beyond the masses’ desire to pull down the grand exploiter will find themselves lost in the dust of historical momentum. The fact that anyone would seek to occult something that is so visceral, and believe that this occultation matters in the struggle for historical momentum is the height of philosophical arrogance.

At age thirty, Engels accepted his father's offer to work in the family business in Manchester. This became the source of Engels' livelihood —and much of Marx's. The young Engels called it "forced labor" — a painfully ironic term in view of what the phrase was to come to mean in twentieth-century Communist societies. Engels complained, for example, that "I've now got to be at the office no later than 10 in the morning.

As the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist.

The problem with governments is that they will tend to support these fragile organisms “because they are large employers” and because they have lobbyists, the kind of phony but visible advertised contributions so decried by Bastiat. Large companies get government support and become progressively larger and more fragile, and, in a way, run government, another prophetic view of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Hairdressers and small businesses on the other hand, fail without anyone caring about them; they need to be efficient and to obey the laws of nature.

It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of men. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.

Karl Marx zou dan in het begin van augustus* een tweetal weken in Oostende verbleven hebben. Hier zou hij samen met Friedrich Engels zijn programma op punt gesteld hebben voor de komende agitatieakties die voor Europa het sociaal-revolutionaire jaar 1848 zou inleiden. Jammer genoeg weten we niet of Marx in de Karnemelkstraat** of in de Witte Nonnenstraat verbleef en wat zijn opinie over het mondaine Oostende was. Nu weet ik alleen als ik door die twee straten wandel, dat de grondleggers van de marxistische ideologie er eveneens verpoosd hebben. *1846 **nu Christinastraat

Nowadays, the idea of development, of evolution, has penetrated the social consciousness almost in its entirety, but by other ways, not through Hegelian philosophy. But as formulated by Marx and Engels basing themselves on Hegel, this idea is far more comprehensive, far richer in content than the current idea of evolution. A development that seemingly repeats the stages already passed, but repeats them differently, on a higher basis (‘negation of negation’), a development, so to speak, in a spiral, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes and revolutions; ‘breaks in continuity’; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses to development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the closest, indissoluble connection of all sides of every phenomenon (history constantly discloses ever new sides), a connection that provides a uniform, law governed, universal process of motion - such are some of the features of dialectics as a richer (than the ordinary) doctrine of development.

So Marxism, for all its plurality, has been marked by the interplay of theoretical and political preoccupations. It has also been punctuated by widely perceived moments of internal crisis – starting in the late 1890s with the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s Preconditions of Socialism, but again during the First World War, in the 1930s, and at the end of the 1970s. Indeed, one of us has written, “Marxism is constitutively, from Marx’s contribution onwards, . . . crisis theory” (Kouvelakis 2005, 25). Perhaps there are two main reasons for this succession of crises. First, Marxism is inherently tied to capitalism, at once the object of the critique of political economy and an enemy to be vanquished. But since, as Marx and Engels showed in the Communist Manifesto, it is also a dynamic system constantly transforming itself, Marxism constantly falls victim to the anxiety that it is not adequate to its Protean antagonist, that it must run to keep up with the metamorphoses of bourgeois society. This is then connected to a second source of anxiety, namely that capitalism continues to exist, and that therefore the communist project remains unrealized, two centuries now after Marx’s birth.

It was also necessary to answer those who objected to the fact that the revolution itself had need of an administrative and repressive apparatus. There again Marx and Engels are largely used to prove, authoritatively, that the proletarian State is not a State organized on the lines of other states, but a State which, by definition, is in the process of withering away. "As soon as there is no longer a social class which must be kept oppressed ... a State ceases to be necessary. The first act by which the [proletarian] State really establishes itself as the representative of an entire society—the seizure of the society's means of production—is, at the same time, the last real act of the State. For the government of people is substituted the administration of things. . . . The State is not abolished, it perishes." The bourgeois State is first suppressed by the proletariat. Then, but only then, the proletarian State fades away. The dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary —first, to crush or suppress what remains of the bourgeois class; secondly, to bring about the socialization of the means of production. Once these two tasks are accomplished, it immediately begins to wither away.

It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all its benefits. He kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best wines, maintained a mistress, hobnobbed with the elite of Manchester at the fashionable Albert Club—in short, did everything one would expect of a successful member of the gentry. Marx, meanwhile, constantly denounced the bourgeoisie but lived as bourgeois a life as he could manage, sending his daughters to private schools and boasting at every opportunity of his wife’s aristocratic background.

In their famous Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx and Engels speak about two phases of communism, the lower and the higher. In the lower one there still prevails the "narrow horizon of bourgeois rights" with its inequality and its wide differentials in individual incomes. Obviously, if in socialism society, according to Marx, still needs to secure the full development of its productive forces until a real economy of wealth and abundance is created, then it has to reward skill and offer incentives. The bureaucrat is in a sense the skilled worker, and there is no doubt that he will place himself on the privileged side of the scale... In practice it proved impossible to establish and maintain the principle proclaimed by the Commune of Paris which served Marx as the guarantee against the rise of bureaucracy, the principle extolled again by Lenin on the eve of October, according to which the functionary should not earn more than the ordinary worker's wage. This principle implied a truly egalitarian society -- and here is part of an important contradiction in the thought of Marx and his disciples. Evidently the argument that no civil servant, no matter how high his function, must earn more than an ordinary worker cannot be reconciled with the other argument that in the lower phase of socialism, which still bears the stamp of "bourgeois rights," it would be utopian to expect "equality of distribution.

The problem of the seizure of power brings in its train the problem of the State. The State and the Revolution (1917), which deals with this subject, is the strangest and most contradictory of pamphlets. Lenin employs in it his favorite method, which is the method of authority. With the help of Marx and Engels, he begins by taking a stand against any kind of reformism which would claim to utilize the bourgeois State—that organism of domination of one class over another. The bourgeois State owes its survival to the police and to the army because it is primarily an instrument of oppression. It reflects both the irreconcilable antagonism of the classes and the forcible subjugation of this antagonism. This authority of fact is only worthy of contempt.

If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead-weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the evolutioni of the instruments of labour becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labour-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labour functions; that machinery, the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw that the “mean whites” (as they called them) of the South were hopeless politically. They felt that nothing could be done with them but to render them powerless until they died out of old age. This was not a unique observation. Wendell Phillips, the great Radical abolitionist, bluntly pleaded in 1870: “Now is the time … to guarantee the South against the possible domination or the anger of the white race. We adhere to our opinion that nothing, or not much, except hostility, can be expected of two-thirds of the adult white men. They will go to their graves unchanged. No one of them should ever again be trusted with political rights. And all the elemental power of civilization should be combined and brought into play to counterwork the anger and plots of such foes.

Businesses call this “profit.” Marx called it “surplus value.” For Marx, the crucial question is: Who gets this surplus value? Who is entitled to the profit that businesses accumulate? Marx insisted that this profit belongs wholly to the workers. They earned it, so they deserve to share it. In reality, however, the entrepreneur or the capitalist gets it. If he has investors, they too share it. Marx regarded this as the most scandalous form of exploitation. He insisted that workers spend only part of their day working to benefit themselves; the rest of the time they spend working to benefit the capitalists. Basically the capitalists are stealing from the workers. Yet Marx recognized that this was the essence of capitalism. Only a workers’ revolution, Marx believed, would end this unjust arrangement. Notice that Marx isn’t condemning the capitalist for taking “excessive” profits; he is condemning the capitalist for taking any profits. Marx, I want to emphasize, was not a progressive con man. He passionately believed that capitalists were greedy, corrupt exploiters. The reason he felt that way was that he was a complete ignoramus about business. He simply had no idea how businesses actually operate. Marx never ran a business. He never even balanced his checkbook. He was a lifelong leech. He had all his expenses paid for by his partner, Friedrich Engels, who inherited his father’s textile companies. Progressives like to portray Engels as a businessman but in fact he too didn’t actually operate the family business. He had people to do that for him. Freed from the need to work, Engels was a man of leisure and a part-time intellectual. Ironically Marx and Engels were both dependent on the very capitalism they scorned.

Just as Marx’s methodological method provides an objective analysis of capitalist development, the materialist concept of history developed by Marx and Friedrich Engels provides an objective analysis of how to reach communism. Therefore, by tracing the historical (as in necessary) development of the productive forces, we shall see that the ‘Leninist’ road – of revolution, proletarian dictatorship and centrally planned ‘state’ socialism – remains necessary. By drawing on the work of the Soviet Russian philosopher Genrikh Volkov, we shall see that the Leninist road opens up the path to a Single Automated Society – fully automated production in a de facto one-state world, the final stage of the socialist transition to global communism. We shall establish precisely why this road is the solution that must be pursued if humanity is to combat the climate crisis and survive to realise its full potential in what Marx called “the beginning of human history”.

Lenin, therefore, begins from the firm and definite principle that the State dies as soon as the socialization of the means of production is achieved and the exploiting class has consequently been suppressed. Yet, in the same pamphlet, he ends by justifying the preservation, even after the socialization of the means of production and, without any predictable end, of the dictatorship of a revolutionary faction over the rest of the people. The pamphlet, which makes continual reference to the experiences of the Commune, flatly contradicts the contemporary federalist and anti-authoritarian ideas that produced the Commune; and it is equally opposed to the optimistic forecasts of Marx and Engels. The reason for this is clear; Lenin had not forgotten that the Commune failed. As for the means of such a surprising demonstration, they were even more simple: with each new difficulty encountered by the revolution, the State as described by Marx is endowed with a supplementary prerogative. Ten pages farther on, without any kind of transition, Lenin in effect affirms that power is necessary to crush the resistance of the exploiters "and also to direct the great mass of the population, peasantry, lower middle classes, and semi-proletariat, in the management of the socialist economy." The shift here is undeniable; the provisional State of Marx and Engels is charged with a new mission, which risks prolonging its life indefinitely. Already we can perceive the contradiction of the Stalinist regime in conflict with its official philosophy. Either this regime has realized the classless socialist society, and the maintenance of a formidable apparatus of repression is not justified in Marxist terms, or it has not realized the classless society and has therefore proved that Marxist doctrine is erroneous and, in particular, that the socialization of the means of production does not mean the disappearance of classes. Confronted with its official doctrine, the regime is forced to choose: the doctrine is false, or the regime has betrayed it. In fact, together with Nechaiev and Tkachev, it is Lassalle, the inventor of State socialism, whom Lenin has caused to triumph in Russia, to the detriment of Marx. From this moment on, the history of the interior struggles of the party, from Lenin to Stalin, is summed up in the struggle between the workers' democracy and military and bureaucratic dictatorship; in other words, between justice and expediency.

Assim, o casamento monogâmico de modo algum entra na história como a reconciliação entre homem e mulher, muito menos como sua forma suprema. Pelo contrário. Ele entra em cena como a subjugação de um sexo pelo outro, como proclamação de um conflito entre os sexos, desconhecido em toda a história pregressa. Em um antigo manuscrito inédito, elaborado por Marx e por mim em 1846, encontro o seguinte: “A primeira divisão do trabalho foi a que ocorreu entre homem e mulher visando à geração de filhos”. E hoje posso acrescentar: o primeiro antagonismo de classes que apareceu na história coincide com o desenvolvimento do antagonismo entre homem e mulher no casamento monogâmico, e a primeira opressão de classe coincide com a do sexo feminino pelo sexo masculino. O casamento monogâmico foi um grande progresso histórico, mas, ao mesmo tempo, inaugura, ao lado da escravidão e da riqueza privada, a época que perdura até hoje, em que cada progresso constitui simultaneamente um retrocesso relativo, em que o bem-estar e o desenvolvimento de uns se impõem pela dor e pela opressão de outros. É a forma celular da sociedade civilizada, na qual já podemos estudar a natureza dos antagonismos e das contradições que nela se desdobrarão plenamente.

Hegel represents history as the self-realization of spirit (Geist) or God. The fundamental scheme of his theory is as follows. Spirit is self-creative energy imbued with a drive to become fully conscious of itself as spirit. Nature is spirit in its self-objectification in space; history is spirit in its self-objectification as culture—the succession of world-dominant civilizations from the ancient Orient to modern Europe. Spirit actualizes its nature as self-conscious being by the process of knowing. Through the mind of man, philosophical man in particular, the world achieves consciousness of itself as spirit. This process involves the repeated overcoming of spirit's alienation (Entfremdung) from itself, which takes place when spirit as the knowing mind confronts a world that appears, albeit falsely, as objective, i.e. as other than spirit. Knowing is recognition, whereby spirit destroys the illusory otherness of the objective world and recognizes it as actually subjective or selbstisch. The process terminates at the stage of "absolute knowledge," when spirit is finally and fully "at home with itself in its otherness," having recognized the whole of creation as spirit—Hegelianism itself being the scientific form of this ultimate self-knowledge on spirit's part.

Lenin clearly and unambiguously poses the question of the relationship between the ‘form’ of materialism and its ‘essence’, of the impermissibility of identification of the former with the latter. The ‘form’ of materialism is found in those concrete-scientific ideas about the constitution of matter (about the ‘physical’, about ‘atoms and electrons’) and in natural scientific generalizations of these ideas that are inevitably turn out to be historically limited, changing, subject to reconsideration by the natural science itself. The ‘essence’ of materialism is found in the acceptance of the objective reality that exists independently of human cognition and that is only reflected in it. The creative development of dialectical materialism on the basis of the ‘philosophical conclusions derived from the newest discoveries of natural science’ is, according to Lenin, found not in the reconsideration of this essence and not in making the ideas of natural scientists eternal, but in the deepening of the understanding of the ‘relationship between cognition and the physical world’ that is connected with these new ideas about nature. The dialectical understanding of the relationship between the ‘form’ and ‘essence’ of materialism, and therefore, the relationship between ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’ constitutes the ‘spirit of dialectical materialism

Now, insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them. Those rules, logical deductions from the nature of the parties and the circumstances one has to deal with in such a case, are so plain and simple that the short experience of 1848 had made the Germans pretty well acquainted with them. Firstly, never play with insurrection unless you are fully prepared to face the consequences of your play. Insurrection is a calculus with very indefinite magnitudes, the value of which may change every day; the forces opposed to you have all the advantage of organization, discipline, and habitual authority: unless you bring strong odds against them you are defeated and ruined. Secondly, the insurrectionary career once entered upon, act with the greatest determination, and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies. Surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare new successes, however small, but daily; keep up the moral ascendancy which the first successful rising has given to you; rally those vacillating elements to your side which always follow the strongest impulse, and which always look out for the safer side; force your enemies to a retreat before they can collect their strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known, de l'audace, de l'audace, encore de l'audace!

If you comrades here already know materialism and dialectics, I would like to advise you to supplement your knowledge by some study of their opposites, that is, idealism and metaphysics. You should read Kant and Hegel and Confucius and Chiang Kai-shek, which are all negative stuff. If you know nothing about idealism and metaphysics, if you have never waged any struggle against them, your materialism and dialectics will not be solid. The shortcoming of some of our Party members and intellectuals is precisely that they know too little about the negative stuff. Having read a few books by Marx, they just repeat what is in them and sound rather monotonous. Their speeches and articles are not convincing. If you don’t study the negative stuff, you won’t be able to refute it. Neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin was like that. They made great efforts to learn and study all sorts of things, contemporary and past, and taught other people to do likewise. The three component parts of Marxism came into being in the course of their study of, as well as their struggle with, such bourgeois things as German classical philosophy, English classical political economy and French utopian socialism. In this respect Stalin was not as good. For instance, in his time, German classical idealist philosophy was described as a reaction on the part of the German aristocracy to the French revolution. This conclusion totally negates German classical idealist philosophy. Stalin negated German military science, alleging that it was no longer of any use and that books by Clausewitz should no longer be read since the Germans had been defeated.” -Mao Zedong

While China's Communist leaders have shown little or no inclination to move towards democracy in a Western sense, they have thought seriously about changing their political terminology as well as their Maoist inheritance. It is a little-known fact that the Chinese Communist leadership, having sidelined the notion of 'communism' in the utopian sense, came close even to jettisoning the name 'Communist.' In the earliest years of this century, serious consideration was given to the top leadership of the CCP to changing the name of their party, removing the word 'Communist' because it did not go down well in the rest of the world. In the end, a name-change was rejected. The argument against the change which carried most weight was not based either on ideology or on tradition - fealty to the doctrine developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. It was the practical argument that some (perhaps many) members would say that this was not the party they had joined. The fear was that they would, therefore, set about establishing an alternative Communist Party. Thus, inadvertently, a competitive party system would have been created. The need for political control by a single party was the paramount consideration. The CCP leadership had no intention of embracing political pluralism, and the party's name remained the same. The contours of democratic centralism, though, are less tightly restrictive in contemporary China than they have often been in the past. There is discussion of what kind of reform China needs, and a lot of attention has been devoted to the lessons to be drawn from the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The former head of the CCP propaganda department, Wang Renzhi, was by no means the only contributor to the intra-party debate to conclude that to follow 'the path of European democratic socialism' would be a step down 'the slippery slope to political extinction for the CCP.

Siapa pun yang belajar politik dengan serius harus membaca semua buku politik dan ekonomi, termasuk karya Marx, Engels, dan semua penulis kiri sesudahnya yang jauh lebih modern. Tapi kami kan juga harus membaca pemikiran politik lainnya. Justru karena kami membaca, kami paham mengapa komunisme gagal di banyak negara. Buat saya, malah aneh melarang buku kajian komunisme di Indonesia. Karena itu menganggap masyarakat kita bodoh dan tidak bisa menggunakan otaknya. Puluhan tahun masyarakat kita dianggap tolol, tak bisa berpikir sendiri.

Page 18 Indeed, all the main writers on this topic – Marx, Engels, Bebel, Lenin, Trotsky, Zetkin and Kollontai – more or less imply that when women are engaged in wage labor on equal terms with men, and when housework has been socialized, we shall have arrived at the nirvana of proletarian heterosexual serial monogamy. Page 47 We have chosen to start at a very general structural level by showing how the family serves to pass on privilege and disadvantage from one generation to the next. We have done this partly because it highlights very clearly how the family embodies the principle of selfishness, exclusion and pursuit of private interest and contravenes those of altruism, community and pursuit of the public good. Society is divided into families and the divisions are deep, not merely ones of slight antipathy and mild distrust.

The word communism, coined in Paris in the 1840s, refers to three related but distinct phenomena: an ideal, a program, and a regime set up to realize the ideal.*1 The ideal is one of full social equality that in its most extreme form (as in some of Plato’s writings) calls for the dissolution of the individual in the community. Inasmuch as social and economic inequalities derive primarily from inequalities of possession, its attainment requires that there be no “mine” and “thine”—in other words, no private property. This ideal has an ancient heritage, reappearing time and again in the history of Western thought from the seventh century b.c. to the present. The program dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century and is most closely associated with the names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In their Communist Manifesto of 1848 Marx and Engels wrote that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Engels claimed that his friend had formulated a scientific theory that demonstrated the inevitable collapse of societies based on class distinctions. Although throughout history there had been sporadic attempts to realize the communist ideal, the first determined effort to this effect by using the full power of the state occurred in Russia between 1917 and 1991. The founder of this regime, Vladimir Lenin, saw a propertyless and egalitarian society emerging from the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would eliminate private property and pave the way for Communism.

... laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of workers.

... every class struggle is a political struggle.

En resumen, lo que en 1848 tal vez impresionara a un lector sin compromisos como retórica revolucionaria -o, a lo sumo, como una predicción creíble- puede hoy leerse como una concisa caracterización del capitalismo de fines del siglo XX.

...toda la historia de la sociedad [...] es una historia de luchas de clases, de luchas entre clases explotadoras y explotadas, dominantes y dominadas...

But Lenin founded a very unorthodox Marxist party, if indeed it should be called Marxist at all. Lenin learned to be an atheist, a revolutionary, and a socialist from other native Russian revolutionaries, no from Marx. He picked up the doctrine of dialectical materialism from the Russian revolutionary N.G. Chernyshevskii, not from Marx. An observation by Francis B. Randall

Enero 9 Elogio de la brevedad Hoy se publicó, en Filadelfia, en 1776, la primera edición de Sentido común. Thomas Paine, el autor, sostenía que la independencia era un asunto de sentido común contra la humillación colonial y la ridícula monarquía hereditaria, que tanto podía coronar a un león como a un burro. Este libro de cuarenta y ocho páginas se difundió más que el agua y el aire, y fue uno de los papás de la independencia de los Estados Unidos. En 1848, Karl Marx y Friedrich Engels escribieron las veintitrés páginas del Manifiesto comunista, que empezaba advirtiendo: Un fantasma recorre Europa… Y ésta resultó ser la obra que más influyó sobre las revoluciones del siglo veinte. Y veintiséis páginas sumaba la exhortación a la indignación que Stéphane Hessel difundió en el año 2011. Esas pocas palabras ayudaron a desatar terremotos de protesta en varias ciudades. Miles de indignados invadieron las calles y las plazas, durante muchos días y noches, contra la dictadura universal de los banqueros y los guerreros.

One French scholar has suggested we take into account all comprehensive worldviews, religious and nonreligious, by talking about cosmographic formations. That would include the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well the Bhagavad Gītā, a sacred text from India.

Marx and Engels established the fact that the history of human society, beginning from the slave-owning societies, is essentially the history of the class struggle. The pseudo-scientists, the ideologists of imperialism, strive to prove that the struggle between races and not between classes is basic in human history. When reactionary scientists substitute the struggle between races for the class struggle as the chief motive force in history they are consciously falsifying history.

Mas toda luta de classes é uma luta política.

O que caracteriza o comunismo não é a abolição da propriedade em geral, mas a abolição da propriedade burguesa.

Os comunistas não se rebaixam a dissimular suas opiniões e seus fins. Declaram abertamente que seus objetivos só podem ser alcançados pela derrubada violenta de toda a ordem social existente. Que as classes dominantes tremam diante da ideia da revolução comunista! Os proletários nada têm a perder com ela, a não ser suas cadeias. E têm um mundo a ganhar. Proletários de todos os países, uni-vos!

Marx and Engels were right to argue that an unregulated market economy was socially undesirable, but wrong to assume that the replacement of the market by planning would lead to an attractive economic and social system.

A Lei”, este em resposta a Marx e Engels, onde defende com fervor as teses libertárias, ou seja, que o Estado não deveria interferir na sociedade para tentar criar uma igualdade forçada.

Marx devoted most of his life to the analysis of capitalism and was notoriously opposed to attempts to design utopias. Nevertheless, from his scattered observations about socialism, and from those of his close comrade Engels (for example, in Anti-Dühring and Karl Marx) his followers drew the idea that in a socialist economy the market mechanism would be replaced by economic planning.

Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. A proof of this is, for example, that because of aversion to any personality cult, I have never permitted the numerous expressions of appreciation from various countries with which I was pestered during the existence of the International to reach the realm of publicity, and have never answered them, except occasionally by a rebuke. When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes.

The second half of the nineteenth century brought two new forms of historical theory which are methodologically oriented toward positivism but undoubtedly include also elements of the absolutistic ideology of Hegel. The so-called materialistic conception of history conceived by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regards as the cause of all historical events the defects of the social conditions in which men live and which they strive to improve. In contrast to this, a more naturalistic movement, which is based upon Darwin and founded upon the modern theory of heredity, asserts that all history consists of the struggle and interplay of the different, essentially unchanging human races. A favorite antithesis in connection with these ideas is whether single "great men" or national groups "make" history, i.e., are the actual bearers of the historical development. In the same way one could ask in physics whether physical phenomena depend more upon electric or upon magnetic forces, or one could build up a theory according to which, e.g., the causes of all events are mechanical (as the philosopher Wilhelm Wundt did in 1866).

Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Che and Fidel of course, W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, Gavrilo Princip, and of course Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin,

people with names like Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Che and Fidel of course, W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, Gavrilo Princip, and of course Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin,

Discontent with industrialism was already strong on both sides of the Atlantic. Marx and Engels would soon be heard from. The American phenomenon, not even approached in Europe, of more than forty model communities founded during the 1840s alone, was very much part of the times. The impulse to create communities was linked with the cause of nonviolence; most of the founders were more interested in building models, which would be emulated because they succeeded, than in the destruction of the existing order. Still, American utopian socialism had much in common with the spirit of 1848.

After the experience both of Europe and Asia, anyone who speaks of non - class politics and of non - class socialism deserves to be simply put in a cage and exhibited alongside of the Australian kangaroo.

Every chemical compound, according to Engels, comes into existence only at a certain time in the development of the universe when the conditions are appropriate for it; and when it does come into existence it manifests this by entering into its characteristic relations. Neither carbon compounds or proteins are ideal forms, but are themselves witnesses of the conditions on a cooling planet. It is here that occurs his celebrated remark that life is the mode of existence of proteins.

Who is Friedrich Engels?” “He was Karl Marx’s inspiration for the Communist Manifesto. The early nineteenth century was a dark time for the workingman. The majority of the children born to working-class parents died before the age of five. So while Engels wrote about a political revolution, Dickens was writing about a different kind of revolution—a revolution of the heart. He was writing about the things he wrote about in his other books, the welfare of children and the need for social charity.

If the ENGELS of the MARX, caused by that LENIN, is STALIN the inevitable progression of the human race, would not PUTIN communism to bed be beneficial for the rest of the WORLD?

In the same way that Firestone’s embrace of scientific and technological progress as manifest destiny tips its hat to Marx and Engels, so also it resembles (perhaps even more closely) the Marxist-inspired biofuturism of the interwar period, particularly in Britain, in the work of writers such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, Julian Huxley, Conrad Waddington, and their contemporaries (including Gregory Bateson and Joseph Needham, the latter of whose embryological interests led to his enduring fascination with the history of technology in China). Interestingly, it is also in these early twentieth century writings that ideas about artificial reproduction, cybernation, space travel, genetic modification, and ectogenesis abound. As cultural theorist Susan Squier has demonstrated, debates about ectogenesis were crucial to both the scientific ambitions and futuristic narratives of many of the United Kingdom’s most eminent biologists from the 1920s and the 1930s onward. As John Burdon Sanderson (“Jack”) Haldane speculated in his famous 1923 paper “Daedalus, or Science and the Future” (originally read to the Heretics society in Cambridge) ectogenesis could provide a more efficient and rational basis for human reproduction in the future: [W]e can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.

O casamento burguês é, na realidade, um sistema de esposas em comum, portanto, quando muito, poder-se-ia censurar aos comunistas por desejarem introduzir um sistema abertamente legalizado de amor livre, em substituição a um hipocritamente escondido.

The theory of evolution was hailed by Marx and Engels as a dialectical materialist explanation of how living things change from one species to another species over time.

The proletariat is the agent of this emancipation because it is the only class whose particular interest is synonymous with he general interests of humanity. And it is charged with this supreme mission precisely because it is the most exploited and hence most dehumanized class in existing society.

It was now painfully clear to the "people" that equality before the law did not produce genuine, human equality

it is the "universal class because its sufferings are universal." He thus defined the proletariat in the first instance not as the body of factory workers but as the metaphysical demiurge destined to liberate the species from social inequality: it was as the victim class that it became the redeemer class, the class to end all classes.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The basic thought running through the Manifesto - that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and the oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles - this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.

Marxism, the theoretical foundation of Communism, carried within it the seeds of its own destruction, such as Marx and Engels had wrongly attributed to capitalism. It rested on a faulty philosophy of history as well as an unrealistic psychological doctrine.

In all the millions of recorded words of Hitler, however, there is nothing to indicate that he ever pored over the theoretical writings of Marxism, that he had studied Marx, or Engels, or Lenin (who had been in Munich not long before him), or Trotsky (his contemporary in Vienna). Reading for Hitler, in Munich as in Vienna, was not for enlightenment or learning, but to confirm prejudice.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind

Horrorizai-vos porque queremos abolir a propriedade privada. Mas em vossa sociedade a propriedade privada está abolida para nove décimos de seus membros.

Horrorizai-vos porque queremos abolir a propriedade privada. Mas em vossa sociedade a propriedade privada está abolida para nove décimos de seus membros.

In one way or another, these fears echoed the beliefs of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who argued in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that governments in capitalist society were political extensions of the interests of business owners. “The executive of the state,” they wrote, was “nothing more than a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”25 Over the following decades, scores of influential followers would advance various arguments that had in common a core theme. Marxists argued that the expansion of capitalism brought with it the reinforcement of class divisions and, through imperialism and the spread of finance capital around the world, the replication of these divisions both within countries and between them.

de la Haye, Y. (1979), Marx and Engels on the Means of Communication, New York.

Man's nature, he postulated, was to be a "free conscious producer," but so far he had not been able to express himself freely in productive activity. He had been driven to produce by need and greed, by a passion for accumulation which in the modern bourgeois age becomes accumulation of capital. His productive activity had always, therefore, been involuntary; it had been "labour.

Without the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, owned by Friedrich Engels’s textile-manufacturing father, the chronically impoverished Marx might well have not survived to pen polemics against textile manufacturers. Something

Truth is general, it does not belong to me alone, it belongs to all, it owns me, I do not own it. My property is the form, which is my spiritual individuality.

According to this conception, the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are not increasing insight into justice; they are to be sought not in the philosophy but in the economics of the epoch concerned. The growing realization that existing social institutions are irrational and unjust is only a symptom …’ It is the theory of which a modern Marxist says: ‘In founding socialist aspirations on a rational economic law of social development, instead of justifying them on moral grounds, Marx and Engels proclaimed socialism a historical necessity.

As intellectuals they were brilliant, incisive, prescient, and creative (but also elitist, cantankerous, impatient, and conspiratorial). As friends they were bawdy, foulmouthed, and adolescent. They loved to smoke (Engels a pipe, Marx cigars), drink until dawn (Engels fine wine and ale, Marx whatever was available), gossip (mostly about the sexual proclivities of their acquaintances), and roar with laughter (usually at the expense of their enemies, and in Marx’s case until tears streamed down his cheeks).

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.

The class struggle had a just motive, and Socialism at the beginning was in the right. What has happened is that instead of pursuing its original path of seeking after social justice among men. Socialism has turned into a mere doctrine, and one of the chilliest frigidity, and it has no concern, great or small, for the liberation of working men. Karl Marx was a German Jew who sat in his study and watched, with horrible impassivity, the most dramatic happenings of his age. He was a German Jew who, with the British factories in Manchester before his eyes, and in the middle of formulating inexorable laws about the accumulation of capital, in the middle of formulating inexorable laws about production and about the interests of employers and workmen, was all the time writing letters to his friend Friedrich Engels, telling him the workers were a mob and a rabble, which need not be bothered with except in so far as they might serve to test out his doctrines.

No special privilege has been granted to Marxist historiography as such. Despite the changes of recent decades, the great bulk of serious historical work in the 20th century has been written by historians foreign to Marxism. Historical materialism is not a finished science; nor have all its practitioners been of a similar calibre. There are fields of historiography which are dominated by Marxist research; there are more, in which non-Marxist contributions are superior in quality and quantity to Marxist; and there are perhaps even more, where no Marxist interventions exist at all. The only permissible criterion of discrimination, in a comparative survey which must consider works coming from such different horizons, is their intrinsic solidity and intelligence. Maximum awareness and respect for the scholarship of historians outside the boundaries of Marxism is not incompatible with rigorous pursuit of a Marxist historical enquiry: it is a condition of it. Conversely, Marx and Engels themselves can never be taken simply at their word: the errors of their writings on the past should not be evaded or ignored, but identified and criticized. To do so is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it. There is no place for any fideism in rational knowledge, which is necessarily cumulative; and the greatness of the founders of new sciences has never been proof against misjudgments or myths, any more than it has been impaired by them. To take ‘liberties’ with the signature of Marx is in this sense merely to enter into the freedom of Marxism.

Met zijn leer - handel altijd zó dat het een wet voor de gehele mensheid zou kunnen zijn - oefende hij grote invloed uit op Marx en Engels. En op Hannah Arendt, die thuis in Königsberg, op veertienjarige leeftijd de verzamelde werken van Kant ut de boekenkast pakte en ze aandachtig begon te lezen, een daad die haar denken en haar verdere leven zou bepalen. Uiteindelijk brak ze met Kant. Zijn categorische imperatief ging haar niet ver genoeg, zijn moraalfilosofie hield na de Holocaust niet langer stand. 'Wij - tenminste de ouderen onder ons - zijn gedurende de jaren dertig en veertig getuige geweest van de totale ineenstorting van alle gevestigde normen in het publieke en private leven, niet alleen [...] in Hitlers Duitsland maar ook in Stalins Rusland.' In een tijd van crisis - en de gehele twintigste eeuw was een tijd van verwoesting, zoals haar Königsberg bewees - letten mensen niet op regels en wetten. Het enige wat volgens Arendt voor ieder individu telt is: 'Ik moet trouw zijn aan mezelf. Ik moet niets doen waarmee ik niet kan leven, waarvan ik de herinnering niet kan verdragen.

George Soros, el especulador multimillonario a quien se había culpado de las debacles económicas de Asia y Rusia, advirtió en La crisis del capitalismo global: la sociedad abierta en peligro (1998) de la necesidad de controlar el instinto gregario de los poseedores del capital antes de que pisotearan a todo el mundo: El sistema capitalista no muestra por sí mismo tendencia alguna hacia el equilibrio. Los poseedores de capital buscan maximizar sus ganancias. Si se les deja que hagan lo que les venga en gana, seguirán acumulando capital hasta que se produzca una situación de desequilibrio. Hace 150 años Marx y Engels nos ofrecieron un análisis muy certero del sistema capitalista, debo decir que mejor en algunos aspectos que la teoría del equilibrio de los economistas clásicos … El principal motivo de que sus predicciones funestas no se hicieran realidad fueron las intervenciones políticas compensatorias de los países democráticos. Por desgracia, corremos de nuevo el peligro de sacar conclusiones equivocadas de las lecciones impartidas por la historia. Esta vez el peligro no proviene del comunismo, sino del fundamentalismo de mercado.

On May 10, 1933, National Socialist student groups marched “against the un-German spirit” and burned “un-German writings” in street actions designed to attract publicity. By now it seemed inevitable that the Franks would emigrate to Amsterdam. “When the Jews write in German, they lie,” the Nazis had proclaimed. The works of Thomas, Klaus, and Heinrich Mann, of Arnold and Stefan Zweig, of Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Maria Remarque, and Franz Werfel, not to mention the Communist writings of Marx and Engels and the books of Bertolt Brecht and many others, were tossed into the flames in many German cities to the accompaniment of shouted slogans; it was as though the demonstrators wished to burn the authors themselves at the stake. Otto Frank’s favorite poet, Heinrich Heine, whose poem “Lorelei” every schoolchild knew by heart, was declared a nonperson. In future textbooks, “Poet unknown” would replace the name of Heinrich Heine, a poet who had written a hundred years earlier, “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

1849 - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels present, The Communist Manifesto, declaring “the abolition of private property.

When God “died” in the 19th century, “social-ism” took the form of materialist scientism (hence the philosopher Eric Voegelin’s observation that under Marxism, “Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come”). It’s worth recalling that both Marx and Engels came to their socialism via their atheism, not the other way around.

Es bien sorprendente ver cómo la ideologia marxista desde Marx y Engels comenzando por el Manifiesto Comunista y subiendo hasta el Programa de Erfurt (especialmente Kautzky), y también los actuales mandatarios "socialistas", se detienen como a voz de mando ante los intereses del capital prestamista. La santidad del interés es el tabú.

John Kenneth Galbraith, in The Economics of Innocent Fraud, provided a still stronger condemnation of prevailing economic and social science, arguing that in recent decades the system itself had been fraudulently “renamed” from capitalism to “the market system.” The advantage of the latter term from an establishment perspective was: “There was no adverse history here, in fact no history at all. It would have been hard, indeed, to find a more meaningless designation—this is a reason for the choice…. So it is of the market system we teach the young…. No individual or firm is thus dominant. No economic power is evoked. There is nothing here from Marx or Engels. There is only the impersonal market, a not wholly innocent fraud.” Along with this, “the phrase ‘monopoly capitalism,’ once in common use,” Galbraith charged, “has been dropped from the academic and political lexicon.” Perhaps worst of all, the growing likelihood of a severe crisis and a long-term slowdown in the economy was systematically hidden from view by this fraudulent displacement of the very

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private liberty.

stopped at the corner of Marx-Engels-Platz. I looked around, all directions. Nothing. No trees, no stores, no life. I thought of all the poverty I’d seen in every corner of Asia. This was a different kind of poverty, more willful, somehow, more preventable.

Notice that Marx isn’t condemning the capitalist for taking “excessive” profits; he is condemning the capitalist for taking any profits. Marx, I want to emphasize, was not a progressive con man. He passionately believed that capitalists were greedy, corrupt exploiters. The reason he felt that way was that he was a complete ignoramus about business. He simply had no idea how businesses actually operate. Marx never ran a business. He never even balanced his checkbook. He was a lifelong leech. He had all his expenses paid for by his partner, Friedrich Engels, who inherited his father’s textile companies. Progressives like to portray Engels as a businessman but in fact he too didn’t actually operate the family business. He had people to do that for him. Freed from the need to work, Engels was a man of leisure and a part-time intellectual. Ironically Marx and Engels were both dependent on the very capitalism they scorned.

Now, there obviously is a white working class in the u.s. A large one, of many, many millions. From offshore oil derricks to the construction trades to auto plants. But it isn't a proletariat. It isn't the most exploited class from which capitalism derives its super profits. Far fucking from it. As a shorthand I call it the "whitetariat". Unfortunately, whenever Western radicals hear words like "unions" and "working class" a rosy glow glazes over their vision, and the "Internationale" seems to play in the background. Even many anarchists seem to fall into a daze and to magically transport themselves back to seeing the militant socialist workers of Marx and Engels' day. Forgetting that there have been many different kinds of working classes in history. Forgetting that Fred Engels himself criticized the English industrial working class of the late 19th century as a "bourgeois proletariat", an aristocracy of labor. He pointed out how you could tell the non-proletarian, "bourgeois" strata of the English working class – they were the sectors that were dominated by adult men, not women or children. Engels also wrote that the "bourgeois" sectors were those that were unionized. Sounds like a raving ultra-leftist, doesn't he? (which he sure wasn't). So that this is a strategic and not a tactical problem, that it has a material basis in imperialized class privilege, has long been understood by those willing to see reality. (the fact that we have radical movements here addicted to not seeing reality is a much larger crisis than any one issue).

Eu care am citit CRITICA RAȚIUNII PURE la 60 de wați, pe Beatrixgasse, pe Locke, Leibniz și Hume, eu care, la lumina slabă a lămpilor din bezna Bibliotecii Naționale, am devorat toate conceptele din toate timpurile, de la presocratici până la FIINȚA ȘI NEANTUL, care i-am citit pe Kafka, pe Rimbaud și pe Blake la 25 de wați, într-un hotel din Paris, pe Freud, pe Adler și pe Jung la 360 de wați, pe o stradă părăsită din Berlin, acompaniată în surdină de răsucirile amețitoare ale studiilor lui Chopin, eu care am studiat pe o plajă genoveză un discurs înflăcărat despre expropierea bunurilor intelectuale, scris pe o hârtie pătată de sare și îndoită de soare, care am citit la Klagenfurt LA COMEDIE HUMAINE în trei săptămâni, în pofida febrei și a slăbiciunii provocate de antibiotice, la München pe Proust până în zori, până când meseriașii au căzut cu acoperiș cu tot în camera mea de la mansardă, pe moraliștii francezi și pe logiștii vienezi, cu ciorapii lăsați, eu care am citit totul fumând treizeci de țigări pe zi, de la DE RERUM NATURA până la LE CULTE DE LA RAISON, care am practicat istoria și filozofia, medicina și psihologia, care am lucrat în ospiciul Steinhof la anamnezele schizofrenicilor și ale maniaco-depresivilor, eu care mi-am luat în Auditorium Maximum, la numai șase grade peste zero și la 38 de grade la umbră, notițe despre De mundo, De mente, De motu, eu care i-am citit pe Marx și pe Engels după ce m-am spălat pe cap și beată moartă pe V. I. Lenin, eu care am citit în derută și în dorința de a evada, jurnal după jurnal, încă de mică, în fața sobei, la foc, ziare, reviste, și cărți de buzunar peste tot, în toate gările, trenurile, în tramvaie, autobuze, avioane, eu care am citit totul despre toate, în patru limbi, fortiter, fortiter, înțelegând tot ce se poate citi, și eliberată pentru o oră de tot ce am citit, mă întind lângă Ivan și îi spun: O să scriu această carte, care încă nu există, pentru tine, dacă vrei cu adevărat. Dar trebuie să vrei cu adevărat, să mi-o ceri, iar eu n-am sa-ți cer niciodată s-o citești. Ivan spune: Să sperăm că o să fie o carte cu final fericit. Să sperăm.

We have traced the development of the materialist conception of history from Marx’s earlier concern with human freedom and alienation, but we have not examined the details of this theory of history. Is it really, as Engels claimed, a scientific discovery of ‘the law of development of human history’, comparable to Darwin’s discovery of the law of development of organic nature?

necessary’. According to Engels, Marx grew so irritated at misinterpretations of his doctrine that towards the end of his life, he declared: ‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

The materialist conception of history is a theory of world history in which practical human activity, rather than thought, plays the crucial role. The most detailed statement of the theory is to be found in Marx and Engels’ next major work, The German Ideology (1846).

In his speech at Marx’s funeral, Engels said that although the materialist conception of history and the doctrine of surplus value were Marx’s crowning theoretical discoveries

In arguing that Marx’s main achievements – his theory of history and his economics – are not scientific discoveries, I have already rejected the accolade bestowed on Marx by Engels, confirmed by Lenin, and echoed by orthodox Marxist-Leninists ever since. But if Marx did not make scientific discoveries about economics and society, what did he achieve?

After Marx died, Engels denied that Marx had said that ‘the economic element is the only determining one’. He and Marx, he conceded, were partly to blame for this misinterpretation, for they had emphasized the economic side in opposition to those who rejected it altogether.

In the absence of more plausible ways of making sense of the softening phrases used by Engels and – more rarely – Marx, the interpretation of the materialist conception of history seems to resolve itself into a choice between hard-line economic determinism, which would indeed be a momentous discovery if it were true, but does not seem to be true; or the much more pliable conception to be found in the Grundrisse, where Marx describes society as a ‘totality’, an ‘organic whole’ in which everything is interconnected (G 99–100).

he was in no doubt that his masterpiece was Capital. In this book he presented his economic theories to the public in their most finished form. ‘Most finished’, not ‘finished’; Marx saw only the first volume of Capital through to publication. The second and third volumes were published by Engels, and a fourth volume, entitled Theories of Surplus Value, by the German socialist Kautsky.

I shall begin by tracing the development of the materialist conception of history, which Marx himself described as the ‘guiding thread for my studies’ (P 389), and Engels, in his funeral oration by Marx’s grave, hailed as Marx’s chief discovery, comparable with Darwin’s discovery of the theory of evolution.

The movement does not depend on the hopes and plans of people. The proletariat becomes conscious of its misery, and therefore seeks to overthrow capitalist society, but this consciousness arises only because of the situation of the proletariat in society. This is the point Marx and Engels were to make more explicitly in a famous passage of The German Ideology: ‘Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness

According to Engels’ later account of the relationship between German philosophy and the materialist conception of history, ‘the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook’ is not The Holy Family but the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ which Marx jotted down in the spring of 1845.

Because Engels published them in 1888, long before any of Marx’s other early unpublished writings appeared, they are also among the most misunderstood.

Before seeking refuge in London, Marx and Engels had taken part in a secret society called the “Communism League” which commissioned them to prepare the now famous (Rest assured that we didn’t earn a penny from it…) COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

In his address at Marx’s funeral Engels described “the law of human history” his friend is said to have discovered: that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have a shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion etc; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence . . . form[s] the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even ideas on religion of the people concerned have evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case. In short, economics is the foundation of organized life: all else is “superstructure.

Marx and Engels, in their giddy enthusiasm for the industrial revolutions of their day, [...] were wrong to predict that market competition would compel factory owners to-go on with mechanization anyway. If it didn't happen, it can only be because market competition is not, in fact, as essential to the nature of capitalism as they had assumed. If nothing else, the current form of capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take the form of internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large semi-monopolistic enterprises, would presumably have come as a complete surprise to them.

Hollingsworth turns out to be a single-minded manipulator who plans to take over the colony for his own purposes. He is, in short, much like a number of real-life figures who succeeded in exploiting the utopian idealism of the era, “men of iron masquerading in Arcadian costume,” as one commentator has called them. Eventually the narrator comes to understand that such men “have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot.” In a time when, as Marx and Engels memorably put it, “all that is solid melts into air,” the Hollingsworths of the world—and the Strangs—offered firmness and strength; in a time when “all fixed, fast-frozen relations…are swept away,” they offered a sense of connection; and in a time of “everlasting uncertainty,” they offered absolute confidence.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

Beth thought for a moment of the world that had been, of the flurries of callout posts, the texts asking her why she’d hung out with so-and-so when she didn’t she know they were problematic, that they’d broken boundaries or gaslit someone or said the word “sex” where a kid might have overheard. There had been pain in there, too. Real pain swirling through a farrago of social justice buzzwords and ruthless self-professed socialists whose politics hewed closer to Nancy Reagan than to Marx or Engels.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social, status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.

Today, however, we could say that in a certain contradictory fashion, at least, the refutation of Marx has itself been refuted. In a broad sense, class society in the Marxian sense has re-established itself. For Marx, class was a relational concept: the exclusion from ownership of the means of production implied a fundamental asymmetry of power and distinguished workers from capitalists.155 Viewed in this way, Marx’s concept of class is completely relevant again today, as never before have more people been dependent on wages, above all because they do not possess any means of production.156 The (working) class-in-itself—as Marx called it—has grown both nationally and globally. At the international level, social distinctions between nations may well have lessened in the recent past, but within states they have increased immensely.157 Nevertheless, we cannot speak of a dichotomous class society as Marx and Engels prophesied in The Communist Manifesto.158 Despite downward mobility, the middle class continues to be important. For a modern class analysis, then, the most appropriate approach is a ‘pragmatic realism’ that embraces the dimensions of power, exploitation, closure and life chances.159

Competencia y cooperación no se reemplazan, sino que se complementan. Irónicamente, la aversión a la competencia es algo en común a Marx, Engels y los grandes capitalistas de la economía: bastaría citar al economista neoliberal Milton Friedman,110 quien en 1991 recordaba que los mayores enemigos de los mercados y de la meritocracia son los propios empresarios, dado que hablan de libertad y competencia, pero al final todo lo que buscan son ventajas para sus propios negocios.

Et plus haut encore, surplombant tout le défilé, incroyablement énormes face aux minuscules visages des minuscules manifestants du bas (que, ou plutôt dont l'une d'eux, Petworth regarde), se trouvent les plus grands visages, certains barbichés et d'autres lorgnonnés, certains moustahus et d'autres barbus, certains austères et glabres, de Marx, Lénine, Engels et Grigoric, Brejnev et Vulcani, ceux qui ont écrit l'histoire, sans qui l'occasion présente ne se serait pas présentée. [And higher still, over the whole display, unbelievably big against the tiny faces of the marchers down below (at whom, or rather at one of whom, Petworth is looking), are the greater faces, some goatee-ed and some pince-nez-ed, some moustached and some bearded, some stern and clean-shaven, of Marx and Lenin, Engels and Grigoric, Brezhnev and Vulcani, those writers of history without whom the present occasion would not have been possible.]

The term ‘utopian socialism’ was used by Marx and Engels as a way of dismissing a large number of their rivals, and denigrating their ideas in comparison with their own ‘scientific socialism’. Despite this, it does describe one strain of socialism in the early nineteenth century. Unlike the Communists, the utopians were generally not workers and initially did not have a close connection to working-class movements. They were also considerably less interested in seizing the central state. Instead, they focused their efforts on fashioning small, experimental communities, and presented a vision of the ideal society that was more appealing to many than the Spartan egalitarianism of the Babouvists. And rather than enforcing Weitling’s Christian morality, they sought to challenge what they saw as the oppressive doctrine of original sin on which Christianity was founded. Mankind, they argued, was naturally altruistic and cooperative, and right-minded education would permit these qualities to predominate. They were particularly hostile to what they saw as the grim work ethic of the new industrial capitalism, which was so closely associated with Christian, and particularly Protestant, ideas of the time. The factory system and the division of labour transformed men into machines and life into joyless drudgery. Society had to be organized so that everybody in the community could be creative and develop their individuality. Their vision was therefore Romantic in spirit. Though unlike the Jacobins, whose Romanticism was one of the self-sacrificing heroism of the soldier, theirs extolled the self-expression and self-realization of the artist.

The Communist Party and Karl Marx were names I had picked up on since coming to Blantyre, so I read what I could on the subject. The very last English essay I wrote in May 1961, before leaving school, was a biographical sketch of Karl Marx together with a synopsis of The Communist Manifesto, outlining Marx and Frederick Engels’s views of revolution as a consequence of the class struggle.

Page 429: The identifying characteristics of Marxist biology are numerous. Salient among these is the rejection of Malthusian doctrine. As Margaret Sanger admitted, "A remarkable feature of Marxian propaganda has been the almost complete unanimity with which the implications of the Malthusian doctrines have been derided, denounced, and repudiated. Any defense of the so-called 'Law of Population' was enough to stamp one, in the eyes of the orthodox Marxians, as a 'tool of the capitalistic class,' seeking to dampen the ardor of those who expressed the belief that men might create a better world for themselves. Malthus, they claimed, was actuated by selfish motives. He was not merely a hidebound aristocrat, but a pessimist who was trying to kill all hope of human progress. By Marx, Engels, Bebel, Kautsky and the celebrated leaders and interpreters of Marx's great 'Bible of the Working Class' ... birth control has been looked upon as a subtle Machiavelian sophistry created for the purpose of placing the blame for human misery elsewhere than at the door of the capitalistic class. Upon this point the orthodox Marxian mind has been universally and sternly uncompromising.

Indeed, Marx and Engels willingly conceded that this program would require despotism. They stated of their ten points, “Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads.

Once again the proletariat has discredited itself terribly. [Writing to Marx on November 18, 1868, following the victory of Conservatives lead by Disraeli in the 1868 UK general election first after passage of the Reform Act 1867, which enfranchised urban male working class)

Marx and Engels believed [...] that the social and political upheavals the world was then experiencing were directly related to the rapid technological change in production methods at the time. They argued that the rise of the capitalist class had played a major role in uprooting the feudal order and generating economic progress, but further maintained that ever-intensifying competition among capitalists could only result in a reduction in their profits, inducing them to deepen the exploitation of workers. Class struggle would therefore be inevitable since society would necessarily reach the point where the ‘proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains’.

What predominates in Italy is that destitute proletariat to which Marx and Engels, and, following them, the whole school of German social democrats, refer with the utmost contempt. They do so completely in vain, because here, and here alone, not in the bourgeois stratum of workers, is to be found the mind as well as the might of the future social revolution.

The essential condition for the existence and sway of the bourgeoisie class,is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor.

Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor.

The average price of wage-labor, is the minimum wage ...

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

The ruling ideas of each age have [n]ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

... [Communists] openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

It’s all about class struggle, isn’t it? Serfs against landlords throughout history. Marx and Engels are right. If there was only one class, where everyone worked for the good of all, it would be a better world.

But at the entrance to science, as at the entrance to hell, the demand must be posted: 'Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto; Ogni vilta convien che qui sia morta.'" "Here all suspicion needs must be abandoned, ⁠All cowardice must needs be here extinct

...the French Revolution took away from justice the duty which it had previously performed of defending the individual against the encroachments of Power….the cribbing and cabining of justice and the baring of the individual were the work, not of the Reign of Terror, but of the Constituent Assembly. Also because this condition of things has been bequeathed by the Revolution to modern society, in which these principles are still in action. Just as the Revolution crushed any bodies whose authority was capable of limiting that of the state, so it deprived the individual of every constitutional means of making his right previal against that of the state. It worked for the absolutism of Power. The Russian Revolution offers the same contrast, but still more pronounced, between the liberty promised and the authority realized. It was not any particular Power, but Power itself, which was denounced and damned by the school of Marx and Engels, with a vigour nearly equal to that of the anarchists. In a justly celebrated pamphlet Lenin asserted that the Revolution must “concentrate all it forces against the might of the state; its task is not to improve the governmental machine but to destroy it and blot it out.

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real condition in life, and his relations with his kind.

Centralización del crédito en manos del estado mediante un banco nacional, en el que el estado poseerá el capital y disfrutará de un monopolio exclusivo. Centralización en manos del estado de todos los medios de transporte. Multiplicación de las manufacturas nacionales y de los instrumentos de producción, roturación de los terrenos sin cultivar y mejora de las tierras cultivadas de acuerdo con un sistema general. Trabajo obligatorio para todos, organización de ejércitos industriales para la agricultura. Combinación del trabajo agrario e industrial, medidas cuya finalidad sea la desaparición gradual de la diferenciación entre la ciudad y el campo. Educación pública y gratuita de todos los niños, abolición del trabajo infantil en las fábricas tal y como se practica hoy, combinación de la educación con la producción material, etc. Las palabras de Marx y Engels constituyen una descripción ciertamente inquietante de lo que ha sido la evolución de las democracias en las últimas décadas. De manera sistemática, se intentaría avanzar hacia la sociedad socialista mediante un creciente intervencionismo estatal. Ese intervencionismo iría privando de su propiedad a los

Marxism or dialectical materialism: a self-proclaiming ideology and “sect”, clearly part of progressivism. Marx and Engels based their thinking on the work of American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81), best known for his study of Iroquois Indians.

Assim, os órgãos da constituição gentílica gradativamente se desarraigam do povo, da gens , fratria, tribo, e toda a constituição gentílica se converte em seu oposto: de uma organização de tribos que visa à livre regulação de seus assuntos internos em uma organização que visa à pilhagem e à opressão de povos vizinhos; de modo correspondente, seus órgãos se convertem de instrumentos da vontade do povo em órgãos autônomos de dominação e opressão de seu próprio povo. Isso, porém, jamais teria sido possível se a avidez por riqueza não tivesse dividido os integrantes da gens em ricos e pobres, se a “diferença de propriedade dentro da mesma gens não tivesse transformado a unidade dos interesses em antagonismo dos integrantes da gens ” (Marx) e a expansão da escravidão já não tivesse começado a fazer com que o trabalho para o sustento da vida passasse a ser considerado uma atividade digna de escravos e mais infame do que a rapina.

Marx era una persona odiosa. Vividor desaliñado y polemista virtulento le gustaba alardear que su espora era, por nacimiento, «la baronesa de Von Estphalen»(...). En consecuencia, durante casi toda su vida hubo de depender de los donativos de Engels, para quien el socialismo era una mera afición (...)

Engels had read The Origin of Species and wrote to Marx about the book in December of 1859. Engels praised Darwin for his theoretical triumph over teleology in the organic sciences, but at the same time also cautioned Marx against Darwin’s ‘clumsy’ style and apparent lack of sophistication in philosophical matters.2 The following year, Marx himself read Darwin’s book, whereupon he immediately accepted the theory of natural selection as a scientific confirmation of his own ideas about human history. Darwin’s theory, he felt, with its emphasis on struggle and evolution in the natural world, was the perfect complement to his own theory of class struggle and historical development. Writing to Ferdinand Lassalle in January, 1861, Marx explained that ‘Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.’ Of course, he added, echoing Engels’ comments of the previous year, ‘one [had] to put up with the crude English method of development.

#LastCall Marx, Engels, and the Proletariat walk into bar. Marx drinks. Engels buys. The Proletariat loses its chains. Then its keys. Then its phone. Then its Marx. Then its Engels.

Lenin's difficulty with Marxian revisionism and those who accorded an important role to liberals is symptomatic of a doctrinal and psychological problem peculiar to Marxism and absent in the old narodnik creed. Marx had revealed the systematic necessity of class exploitation. Capitalism was by its very nature savagely unjust. Since most revolutionaries were not simply thinking machines looking for the most rational foundation for production and distribution but possessed of "religious" attitudes, or, in any case, of a sense of mission, they found in Marx and Engels the description of a morally intolerable system in which the wealth of the few could only be gotten at the expense of the poverty of the many. On the other hand, Marx posited the necessary contribution of each historical phase to economic and social progress. The bourgeoisie and their liberal institutions could not disappear from history until they had developed the forces of production as far as they could, when the onset of the inevitable and fatal crisis of capitalism would occur. Capitalism was a necessary evil on the way to socialism. But Marx had no blueprint for its many historical variations, only his laws of capitalism and their consequences. Neither he nor Engels had a revolutionary timetable either, and it was possible for their followers to lapse into a purely "scientific" and morally slothful type of Marxism, an academic Marxism without a sense of urgency about revolutionary tasks to be performed. On the other hand, the most morally mobilized would find ways to hasten capitalism's final hour, even while separating themselves from the narodniki, whose revolutionism was "unscientific." Thus, during a period of mainly doctrinal debates and sectarianism, revolutionaries who were temperamentally quite close to each other engaged in combat; but when the real revolutionary moment arrived, they often found themselves working together.

Önemli olan, uçmayı sağlayacak uçma düşünün olmasıdır, marx ve engels'in materyalist tarih felsefesinin önerdiği gibi, para kazanmayı sağlayan bir düşün değil. Otto Lilienthal (erkek kardeşini şahsen ben de tanırdım) ve Wright kardeşler ve başka birçok kişi uçmayı düşlemişler ve bu düş uğruna bilinçli olarak yaşamlarını tehliye atmışlardı. Onları buna esinlendiren para kazanma arzusu değil, yeni bir özgürlüğe ulaşma -ekolojik barınaklarımızı geliştirme- düşüydü: Otto Lilienthal'in yaşamını yitirmesine nedne olan, daha iyi bir dünya arayışıydı.

Marx’s methodology, too, was wholly rabbinical. All his conclusions were derived solely from books. He never set foot in a factory and rejected Engels’ offer to take him to one. Like the gaon of Vilna, he locked himself up with his texts and solved the mysteries of the universe in his study. As he put it, ‘I am a machine condemned to devour books.

The Communist Manifesto (like anarchism, the rival ideology at the time) requires of its adherents a great deal of blind faith. In this, it’s more of a religious doctrine than a scientific theory. For this reason, it’s not surprising that the words of the Manifesto actually took root among the pre-industrial societies of Africa, China, South America and Russia – among the ‘rural idiots’, as Marx and Engels used to refer to people who worked on the land.