marxist☭leninist

for the liberation of all oppressed peoples

[liberashen]

“Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

— Rosa Luxemburg

[liberashen]

“Bourgeois women want completely free competition with men because their main enemy is patriarchalism, which must be negated before they can claim an equal share of their class privileges.”

— Marlene Dixon

[liberashen]

“No reformist program for “equal wages” or “democratic rights” has ever been or will ever be able to touch the roots of the subjugation of women; nor will women ever be mobilized to fight for “deferred” emancipation – women have learned that waiting until “after the revolution” means waiting “forever.” For women, as for all other oppressed people, the fight for their own emancipation begins today or it does not begin at all.”

— Marlene Dixon

[liberashen]

“More important, it is generally thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism—more broadly, fascism—also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under the other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders).”

— Susan Sontag

[liberashen]

“A principal accusation against the Jews within Nazi Germany was that they were urban, intellectual, bearers of a destructive, corrupting ‘critical spirit.’ The book bonfire of May 1933 was launched with Goebbels’s cry: ‘The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit.’ ”

— Susan Sontag

[liberashen]

“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

— Frantz Fanon

[liberashen]

“Now each of us must say to himself: either-or. Either we are national liberal sheep in the coat of the socialist lion, in which case we avoid any playing at opposition; or we are fighters of the proletarian International in the full meaning of the term, in which case we must set ourselves to the work of opposition, in which case the banner of the class struggle and inter-nationalism must be unfurled openly and at all costs.”

— Rosa Luxemburg

[liberashen]

“In any society, the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. This is completely true for our present society. The current mass struggle for women’s political rights is only an expression and a part of the proletariat’s general struggle for liberation. In this lies its strength and its future.”

— Rosa Luxemburg

[liberashen]

“We know that the present State is not “society” representing the “rising working class.” It is itself the representative of capitalist society. It is a class state. Therefore its reform measures are not an application of “social control,” that is, the control of society working freely in its own labour process. They are forms of control applied by the class organisation of Capital to the production of Capital.”

— Rosa Luxemburg

[liberashen]

“Racism and sexism are grown-up words. Black children in america cannot avoid these distortions in their living and, too often, do not have the words for naming them. But both are correctly perceived as hatred.”

– Audre Lorde

[liberashen]

“By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.”

– Audre Lorde

[liberashen]

“Women, in capitalist development, have suffered a double process of mechanization. Besides being subjected to the discipline of work, paid and unpaid, in plantations, factories, and homes, they have been expropriated from their bodies and turned into sexual objects and breeding machines.”

– Silvia Federici

[liberashen]

“Most Jews who know their own history see how relentlessly the Israeli government is attempting to turn Palestinians into the “new Jews,” patterned on Jews of the Holocaust era, as if someone must hold that place in order for Jews to avoid it.”

– Alice Walker

[liberashen]

“The whole theory of Marx is an application of the theory of evolution—in its most consistent, complete, well considered and fruitful form—to modern capitalism. It was natural for Marx to raise the question of applying this theory both to the coming collapse of capitalism and to the future evolution of future Communism.

On the basis of what data can the future evolution of future Communism be considered?

On the basis of the fact that it has its origin in capitalism, that it develops historically from capitalism, that it is the result of the action of a social force to which capitalism has given birth. There is no shadow of an attempt on Marx's part to conjure up a Utopia, to make idle guesses about that which cannot be known. Marx treats the question of Communism in the same way as a naturalist would treat the question of the evolution of, say, a new biological species, if he knew that such and such was its origin, and such and such the direction in which it changed.”

— Lenin

[liberashen]

“Colonialism can be described as the movement of Europeans to different parts of the world, creating new “white” nations where indigenous people had once had their own kingdoms. These nations could only be created if the settlers employed two logics: the logic of elimination— getting rid by all means possible of the indigenous people, including by genocide; and the logic of dehumanization—regarding the non-Europeans as inferior and thus as not deserving the same rights as the settlers. In South Africa these twin logics led to the creation of the Apartheid system, founded officially in 1948, the same year that the Zionist movement translated the same logics into an ethnic cleansing operation in Palestine.”

— Ilan Pappé

[liberashen]

“Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women.”

— Audre Lorde

[liberashen]

“Revolution. A nation decides for itself what it needs. How best to get it. Food. Dentists. Doctors. Roads.”

— Audre Lorde