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Quotes that suggest some of my political positions

To sum up what we mean by the term 'communism,' communism is primarily the tendency towards human community, which, in the various forms in which it has expressed itself in course of human history, has always been the search for a world where there will exist neither laws, nor property, nor the State, nor discrimination which divides people, nor wealth which distinguishes some people from others, nor power which oppresses some of them. - M., The Communist Tendency in History.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. - Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

The emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation -- and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production. Every relation of servitude is but a modification and consequence of this relation. - Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

For us there is no minimal and no maximal program; socialism is one and the same thing: this is the minimum we have to realize today. - Rosa Luxemburg at the founding congress of the KPD.

Whenever a group, no mater how small, bases its actions on the development of society, then it is a party, yes, the party. Science, theory and the tadctics which flow from it are what make a workers' party, not the number of members. Conversely, a workers' party whose actions are not based on the knowledge of society is not a real party even if it has a hundred thousand supporters. It is only a crowd, masses of people gathered around a troop of demogogues. - Herman Gorter, 'Sekte of Partij?'. De Tribune, Novemeber 19, 1910.

After its conquest of power by violence and terror, the proletariat does not need democracy, not because classes disappear from one day to the next, but because there must no longer be any masking or mystification. Dictatorship is required to prevent any return of the opposing class. Moreover, the accession of the proletariat to the State, is its own negation as a class, as well as the negation of the other classes. It is the beginning of the unification of the species, of the formation of the community. - Jacques Camatte, The Democratic Mystification.

Democracy is, as I take all forms of government to be, a contradiction in itself, an untruth, nothing but hypocrisy (theology, as we Germans call it), at the bottom. Political liberty is sham-liberty, the worst possible slavery; the appearance of liberty, and therefore the reality of servitude. Political equality is the same; therefore democracy, as well as every other form of government, must ultimately break to pieces: hypocrisy cannot subsist, the contradiction hidden in it must come out; we must have either a regular slavery — that is, an undisguised despotism, or real liberty, and real equality — that is, Communism. - Engels, Progress of Social Reform On the Continent. 1846.

The death of revolutionary energies lies in class collaboration. Democracy is class collaboration through lots of talk, fascism is plain class collaboration in fact. - Amadeo Bordiga, Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle. 1946.

This dictatorial and terrorist process of affirmation/negation of the proletariat as the dominant class always destroying ever more the basis of its own domination and thus founding a society without domination, without classes, without a State, without violence... therefore does not have anything to do with an ordinary "workers" democracy. On the contrary, the dictatorship of the proletariat for the abolition of wage labour is the most complete negation of democracy and by definition of that which is called worker. The assimilation of "workers" democracy and dictatorship of the proletariat is one of the the most serious counter-revolutionary deviations, destroying the base of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the benefit of the reappearance of the system of wage slavery in a more 'workerist' form. - Internationalist Communist Group, Communism Against Democracy: Theses.

Imperialism is not the creation of one or any group of states, but is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital … and from which no nation can hold aloof at will. - Rosa Luxemburg.

More and more politics appears as the carbon copy of economic life. During a certain period it could play a role of compromise and alliance between social layers. Today the importance of politics as an intervention in the economy has increased. But at the same time the political sphere has lost its autonomy. There is only a single politics of capital which compels both left and right regardless of the specific interests of their social bases. - Les Amis de 4 Millions de Jeunes Travailleurs, Un Monde Sans Argent: Le Communisme. 1975-76.

The Left has not failed. And that is one of the greatest disasters ever to befall the working class. Most people think that the Left is the movement of the working class for socialism (albeit riven by opportunism and muddle-headed interpretations on the part of many in its ranks). Nothing could be further from the truth. We in Subversion (and the wider movement of which we are a part) believe that left-wing politics are simply an updated version of the bourgeois democratic politics of the French revolution, supplemented by a state capitalist economic programme. - Subversion, The Revolutionary Alternative to Left-Wing Politics.

The capitalist class itself recognised that trade unions are necessary to direct the revolt of the workers into regular channels to prevent them from breaking out in sudden explosions. - Anton Pannekoek, General Remarks on the Question of Organisation. 1938.

The decline of labor unions at a time of high social unrest is troubling. In France, as in other democratic market economies, unions play important roles in integrating workers into the capitalist system. The lack of strong unions makes it difficult for employers to negotiate agreements that will have lasting effect. Unions often are able to facilitate and manage shifting employment patterns. As a result, even conservatives and employers worry about the decline of the labor movement and see it as the loss of a valuable partner. Thus, the leader of the French employers' association said in 1995: 'We have everything to lose if the unions become weaker still ... and so we have to find ways of keeping their heads above water.' - Frank L. Wilson, European Politics Today: The Democratic Experience. Third edition, 1999.

The anti-capitalists legitimise themselves by castigating unrealistic pro-revolutionaries and claim that they speak for the urgently poor. The accusation of irrelevance and unreality hurts and the anarchist milieu hides its face in shame, concluding that it has no licence to instruct the poor in the illusions of self-determination, anti-imperialism, and democratic political reform which it is decided must be the baggage of their liberation. In response to reformist bullying the milieu tacitly falls into line, in its aims and principles it adds other politically weighted oppressions to its class analysis, and swallows whole the leftist agenda. In this the milieu is wrong. It not only can but must extend its critique far beyond the easy target of America and 'big business.; In its analysis it must include the recuperative part played by those false and essentially conservative solutions to America that are proposed by the left, all of which are easily contained by the commodity system. The stated aspirations of the anti-capitalist movement are not identical to the interest of the world's poor; what we are told the poor want is what has been formulated for them as an alternative to the present and whilst the worst off's rejection of present conditions is sharp and instinctive their commitment to the alternative blueprint is more shaky. Nevertheless their democratic representatives do not cease in their pushing forward of these aspirations to fair trade and democracy, and that says it all. - Monsieur Dupont, Democracy.