Proletariat Quotes - page 7
Nobody would say the cowshed was heaven and nobody would say the inhuman torture of so many victims be called a revolution of the proletariat. ... A museum should be established to remind China of the follies and disasters that had fallen from 1966 to 1976. We cannot forget what had happened and history should not repeat itself.
Ba Jin
I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum.
W. Somerset Maugham
Disarmament is the ideal of socialism. There will be no wars in and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist. Dictatorship is state power based directly on violence. And in the twentieth century - as in the age of civilisation generally - violence means neither a fist nor a club, but troops. To put "disarmament” in the programme is tantamount to making the general declaration: We are opposed to the use of arms. There is as little Marxism in this as there would be if we were to say: We are opposed to violence!
Vladimir Lenin
The expenses of the royal household, wars, and lavish public building were financed by tolls and the profits of the king's foreign trade monopoly, by conscription of labour and heavy taxation. The results were impoverishment of the masses, alienation of land, and the development of a proletariat.
Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden
For in the end what is at issue in this idea of the cooperative is as clear as day. It is a means of preparing the daily bourgeois stew [pot-au-feu bourgeois] at all costs, divorced from any political thought, from any revolutionary struggle. It is the political and social abdication of the proletariat under the pretext of socialism; indeed it is not even that! Everyone is careful to insist and to prove that socialism has nothing to do with it, which is the truth.
Louis Auguste Blanqui
People think that they have no right to judge a fact - all they have to do is to accept it. Thus from the moment that technics, the State, or production, are facts, we must worship them as facts, and we must try to adapt ourselves to them. This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat, which are only expressions of the great modern divinity, the Moloch of fact.
Jacques Ellul
I entertain no doubt that Tariff Reform would considerably alleviate these evils, but I have never believed that it will end them. Which party in the State stands to lose most by their continuance? Is it not evident that the party, to whom stability and content are vital, is far more deeply concerned to restore happier conditions than the party which lives upon discontent and the promulgation of class hatred? A contented proletariat should be one of the first objects of enlightened Conservative policy.
F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead
If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.
Leon Trotsky
Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of the socialist dictatorship.** Terrorism and Communism : A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1920; 1975), p. 153* The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state ... Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i. e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.
Leon Trotsky
Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannons, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority? Therefore, one of two things: either that anti-authoritarians don't know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion. Or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the cause of the proletariat. In either case they serve only reaction.8 This.
Friedrich Engels
Today's despisers of free speech have their roots in a different ideology from the tribal sort that was used to justify slaveholding and Puritanism. This newer ideology began with Karl Marx-or rather, with the struggle of Marxist intellectuals to explain the failure of the European proletariat to rise in violent revolution at the outbreak of World War I. Rather than joining in solidarity with the working classes of other nations, European workers rallied in dismaying numbers to their national flags, exhausted themselves in a four-year killing spree that beggared all previous descriptions of war, and then succumbed to waves of populist fascism. The only revolution that Marxists could tease out of the charnel house of the Great War was a coup d'état in the most backward and least industrially developed empire of Europe and, even then, only by the substitution of what Vladimir Lenin called a "vanguard” of Marxist elites rather than a spontaneous uprising of the workers.
Allen C. Guelzo
