237 quotes
For any truth, if overdone (as Dietzgen Senior put it), if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its applicability, can be reduced to absurdity.
Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)
The reflection of nature in man's thought must be understood not lifelessly but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)
Modern monopolist capitalism on a world-wide scale — imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic system, as long as private property in the means of production exists.
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917)
When we are reproached with having established a dictatorship of one party... we say, ‘Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position...’”
Down with all colonial policy, down with the whole policy of intervention and capitalist struggle for the conquest of foreign lands and foreign populations, for new privileges, new markets, control of the Straits, etc.!
Those who are opposed to armed uprising ... must be ruthlessly kicked out as enemies, traitors and cowards.
No idea could be more erroneous or harmful than to separate foreign from domestic policy.
In no country in the world are the majority of the population oppressed so much as in Russia; Great Russians constitute only 43 per cent of the population, i.e., less than half; the non-Russians are denied all rights.
No Bolshevik, no Communist, no intelligent socialist has ever entertained the idea of violence against the middle peasants. All socialists have always spoken of agreement with them and of their gradual and voluntary transition to socialism.
The substitution of the proletarian state for the bourgeois state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of "withering away".
The State and Revolution (1917)
To become a power the class-conscious workers must win the majority to their side. As long as no violence is used against the people there is no other road to power. We are not Blancists, we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority.
The groups of capitalists who have drenched the world in blood for the sake of dividing territories, markets and concessions cannot conclude an "honourable" peace. They can conclude only a shameful peace, a peace based on the division of the spoils.
Letters from Afar (1917)
Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1972)
Socialism, by organising production without class oppression, by ensuring the well-being of all members of the state, gives full play to the “sympathies” of the population, thereby promoting and greatly accelerating the drawing together and fusion of the nations.
Hundreds of thousands and millions of wage slaves of capital and peasants downtrodden by the serf-owners are going to the slaughter for the dynastic interests of a handful of crowned brigands, for the profits of the bourgeoisie in its drive to plunder foreign lands.
We Great-Russian workers want, come what may, a free and independent, a democratic, republican and proud Great Russia, one that will base its neighbors on the human principle of equality, and not on the feudalist principle of privilege, which is so degrading to a great nation.
One will readily agree that any army which does not train to use all the weapons, all the means and methods of warfare that the enemy possesses, or may possess, is behaving in an unwise or even criminal manner. This applies to politics even more than it does to the art of war.
Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)
If the writer of these lines has succeeded in providing some material for clarifying these problems, he may regard his labours as not having been fruitless.
The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899)
In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.
What is to be Done? (1902)
It is not our immediate task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers' Deputies.
April Thesis (1917)