Already a land of boundless wealth, [America] can at one stroke treble its wealth, treble the productivity of its social labour, and thereby guarantee to all working-class families a decent standard of living worthy of intelligent human beings, and a not excessively long working day of six hours.

Marx is attacked with equal zest by young scholars who are making a career by refuting socialism, and by decrepit elders who are preserving the tradition of all kinds of outworn “systems”.

As before, official reaction is tightening the screw in the universities.

Primitiveness is a veritable ailment from which our movement suffers.

One is entitled to ask: Can a grown-up person be content with what people think of themselves, without comparing it with what they do? Is it possible for a Marxist not to distinguish good wishes and declarations from objective realities? No. It is not.

But you cannot draw the masses into politics without drawing in the women as well. For under capitalism the female half of the human race is doubly oppressed.

The words of Karl Marx that the government is a committee for managing the affairs of the capitalist class are confirmed to the full.

The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class.

But it is important to realize how infinitely mendacious is the ordinary bourgeois conception of socialism as something lifeless, rigid, fixed once and for all,

The non-economic superstructure which grows up on the basis of finance capital, its politics and its ideology, stimulates the striving for colonial conquest. “Finance capital does not want liberty, it wants domination,” as Hilferding very truly says.

You cannot lead the people into a predatory war in accordance with secret treaties and expect them to be enthusiastic…

One is inseparable from the other—home policy is inseparable from foreign policy.

Only a thorough and consistent break with the capitalists in both home and foreign policy can save our revolution and our country, which is gripped in the iron vice of imperialism.

Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.

During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.

The diplomats are in a flurry. There is a shower of “Notes”, “Reports”, “Statements”; ministers whisper behind the backs of the crowned puppets who…are “working for peace”. But their “subjects” know perfectly well that when crows flock together there must be a smell of carrion about.

[What] constitutes the very gist, the living soul, of Marxism [is] a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.

Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism

There is a Latin tag cui prodest? meaning “who stands to gain?” When it is not immediately apparent which political or social groups, forces or alignments advocate certain proposals, measures, etc., one should always ask: “Who stands to gain?”

For hundreds of years, freedom of trade and of exchange has been to millions of people the supreme gospel of economic wisdom, the most deep-rooted habit of hundreds and hundreds of millions of people.

It is not enough to describe these views as an expression of the politically spineless, flabby, and wavering petty bourgeoisie. They must be explained also from the standpoint of the existing state of affairs in the development of our revolution.

It is difficult to keep calm when reading outrageous speeches like these.

Actually, it is precisely the bourgeoisie that has always played the hypocrite by characterising formal equality as “democracy”, and in practice using force against the poor, the working people, the small peasants and the workers, by employing countless means of deception, oppression, etc.

Of course, finance capital finds most “convenient,” and derives the greatest profit from, a form of subjection which involves the loss of the political independence of the subjected countries and peoples.

But from this capitalist democracy–that is inevitably narrow and stealthily pushes aside the poor…–forward development does not proceed simply, directly and smoothly, towards “greater and greater democracy", as the liberal professors and petty-bourgeois opportunists would have us believe.

Disunited, the workers are nothing. United, they are everything.

Opportunism means sacrificing the permanent and essential interests of the party to momentary, transient and minor interests.

For that reason reformism, even when quite sincere, in practice becomes a weapon by means of which the bourgeoisie corrupt and weaken the workers. The experience of all countries shows that the workers who put their trust in the reformists are always fooled.

Of course one can use the expression “on the left” in this case only in a very relative sense, to characterise those who are inclined to play at Leftism.

Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations

The Address pointed out that wars serve the interests of the propertied classes. The masses of the workers bear all the burdens of war. The propertied classes derive benefit from national calamities. Let the workers unite to fight militarism, to ensure peace!

The essential thing is not merely to prevent war, but to utilise the crisis created by war in order to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

The question of imperialism is not only one of the most essential but is probably the most essential question in that sphere of economic science which traces the change in the forms of capitalism in modern times.

On all sides, at every step one comes across problems which man is quite capable of solving immediately, but capitalism is in the way. It has amassed enormous wealth—and has made men the slaves of this wealth.

Discussions (talks, debates, disputes) about parties and about common tactics are essential; without them the masses are disunited; without them common decisions are impossible and, therefore, unity of action is also impossible.

the opportunists ask nothing better than to “quite safely leave to the future” all fundamental questions of the tasks of the proletarian revolution.

The case…provides an illuminating example of how people who regard themselves as enlightened politicians, and even as free thinkers or radicals, drift with the tide, helpless and without convictions, flabby and powerless.

It is the business of the bourgeoisie to fight for privileges and advantages for its national capital, and to fool the nation or the common folk by passing off for a war of national liberation the imperialist struggle for the “right” to plunder others.

Democracy means equality. The great significance of the proletariat’s struggle for equality and of equality as a slogan will be clear if we correctly interpret it as meaning the abolition of classes.

All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.

…people who write about statistics often display an astounding lack of understanding of the nature of the figures they are analysing, their authenticity and their suitability for drawing certain conclusions.

the building of a fighting organisation and the conduct of political agitation are essential under any “drab, peaceful” circumstances, in any period, no matter how marked by a “declining revolutionary spirit”

The puzzled reader may ask: how could a learned liberal professor have forgotten these elementary axioms familiar to anybody who has read any exposition of the views of socialism?… the personal qualities of present-day professors are such that we may find among them even exceptionally stupid people

It is not important who directly advocates a particular policy, since under the present noble system of capitalism any money-bag can always “hire”, buy or enlist any number of lawyers, writers and even parliamentary deputies, professors, parsons and the like to defend any views.

Yes, we know perfectly well that nothing on earth can shake you out of your vulgar liberal complacency.

Power is in the hands of the banks, the trusts and big capital in general. The one guarantee of peace is the organised, conscious movement of the working class.

The employers and their supporters have always considered that if the workers begin to think about their conditions, begin to work for their rights and join forces in resisting the abominations and oppression of the employers, it is all nothing but “corruption.”

The fact that the masses are spontaneously being drawn into the movement does not make the organisation of this struggle less necessary. On the contrary, it makes it more necessary

This strange and incorrect use of terms in naming parties is not unique. In America, for example, the slave-owners of yesterday are called Democrats, and in France, enemies of socialism, petty bourgeois, are called Radical Socialists!

You liberal gentlemen make yourselves ridiculous!