Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society.
The bourgeoisie are today evading taxation by bribery and through their connections; we must close all loopholes.
It is necessary sometimes to take one step backward to take two steps forward.
At the basis of these swindles and manipulations lies socialised production; but the immense progress of humanity, which achieved this socialisation, goes to benefit the speculators.
I particularly approve of and welcome the arrest of millionaire saboteurs in the first and second-class railway carriage.
Thus the Labour Party is a ‘capitalist workers’ party’.
Logic,′ indeed!
Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There’s no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.
American ethics”, which the European professors and well-meaning bourgeois so hypocritically deplore, have, in the age of finance capital, become the ethics of literally every large city in any country.
I had already drawn up the plan for the next, the seventh chapter, on the ‘Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917.’ But... It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of the revolution’ than to write about it.
Peace reigned in Europe, but this was because domination over hundreds of millions of people in the colonies by the European nations was sustained only through constant, incessant, interminable wars, which we Europeans do not regard as wars at all, since all too often they resembled, not wars, but brutal massacres, the wholesale slaughter of unarmed peoples.
What is a liberal-democratic philistine? An empty gut, filled with cowardice.
We do not at all disagree with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as an aim.
Take any parliamentary country, from America to Switzerland, from France to England, Norway and so forth – in these countries the real business of the ‘state’ is preformed behind the scenes and is carried on by the departments, chancelleries and General Staffs. Parliament itself is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the ’common people.
We are witnessing a highly instructive and highly comical spectacle. The bourgeois liberal prostitutes are trying to drape themselves in the toga of revolution.
Those who live by the labor of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.
Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.
The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.
As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will never be utilised for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists; it will be used for the purpose of increasing those profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries.
Under capitalism democratism is restricted, cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage slavery and of the poverty and misery of the masses.
Matter is a philosophicalcategory denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.