251 Quotes About Marxism

We have the choice of either burying our heads in the sand and accepting the verdict of leading capitalist propaganda that socialism has failed and capitalism has won, thus signaling the end of history, or we can choose socialism over barbarism like our courageous forbearers in 1917 and 1949 and many of our contemporaries today. They chose to struggle against capitalism and for socialism. The current reality could not be clearer and the choice is entirely ours.

Marx was concerned to change society or rather, if he adhered rigidly to his system, expected society to change in the way he wanted.

On the contrary, all experience shows that revolutionaries come from those who are economically independent, not from factory workers. Very few revolutionary leaders have done manual work, and those who did soon abandoned it for political activities. The factory worker wants higher wages and better conditions, not a revolution. It is the man on his own who wants to remake society, and moreover he can happily defy those in power without economic risk.

The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.

...it happens that "society is saved" as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an "assault upon society" and is branded as "Socialism.

When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.

It is essential that socialism should include overriding regard tot the experience and the consciousness of a people, for if it does not do so, it will be serving an idea and not a people. It will generate a contradiction. It will become dogmatic. It will shed its materialist and realist basis. It will become fanaticism, an obscurantism, an alienator of human happiness.

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.

From the moment when the bourgeois demand for the abolition of class privileges was put forward, alongside it appeared the proletarian demand for the abolition of the classes themselves. [...] The proletarians took the bourgeoisie at its word: equality must not be merely apparent, must not apply merely to the sphere of the state, but must also be real, must also be extended to the social, economic sphere. [...] Any demand for equality which goes beyond that, of necessity passes into absurdity.