Quotes from Socialists

• On state and church schooling:

  "Public education by the State" is entirely to be rejected. ... Moreover, the government and the church must equally be excluded from any influence upon the school.

  (Karl Marx (1875), The Gotha Program (Workers' Literature Bureau, 1946, p.28))

• On nature:

  Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us.

  (Frederick Engels (1876), The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, (at end of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Lawrence & Wishart) p.261))

• On forestry:

  The development of civilization and of industry in general has ever shown itself so active in the destruction of forests, that everything done by it for their preservation and production, compared to its destructive effect, appears infinitesimal.

  (Karl Marx, Capital vol. II, ch. 13 (Charles H. Kerr, 1910, p.279))

• On marriage and female liberation:

  The legal inequality of the two partners bequeathed to us from earlier social conditions is not the cause but the effect of the economic oppression of women. ...

  The modern individual family is founded upon the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife ...

  ... the peculiar character of the supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family, the necessity of creating real social equality between them and the way to do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day when both possess legally complete equality of rights. Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands that the characteristic of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society be abolished. ...

  What we can conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman's surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual - and that will be the end of it.

  (Frederick Engels (1884), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Lawrence & Wishart) pp.136-138,148))

• On the State:
  • And people think they have taken an exceedingly bold step when they have freed themselves of faith in a hereditary monarchy and swear now by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the State is nothing else than a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed no less so in the democratic republic than in the monarchy.

    (Frederick Engels (1891), Introduction to The Civil War in France (Charles H. Kerr, 1934, p.26))

  • The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property. But in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State. ...

    The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society - the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society - that is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.

    The State is not "abolished." It dies out.

    (Frederick Engels, Socialism - Utopian and Scientific (Charles H. Kerr, 1914, p.127))

• On the Russian Revolution:

  What justification is there, then, for terming the upheaval in Russia a Socialist Revolution? None whatever beyond the fact that the leaders in the November movement claim to be Marxian Socialists.

  (J. Fitzjerald, Socialist Standard, Aug 1918)

• On vanguards and the working class:
  • All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.

    (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1848), The Communist Manifesto (Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1948, p.71)

  • The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions, carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul.

    (Frederick Engels (1895), intro to The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850, Progress Publishers, 1972, p.22)