Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Marxism. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Marxism Quotes And Sayings by 92 Authors including Yanis Varoufakis,Mikhail Gorbachev,Lionel Trilling,Vladimir Lenin,Slavoj Zizek for you to enjoy and share.
I was told once by a leftwing scholar that as a Marxist, you have to do two things: always be optimistic and always have a view about everything. That advice still sounds good to me.
If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.
At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.
It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.
I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.
Do you know who Karl Marx is? He is this strange little man, long dead, who lived his narrow little life, and somehow managed by the power of his wayward brain to lay hold upon millions of human lives!
The relevance of Marxism to science is that it removes it from its imagined position of complete detachment and shows it as a part, but a critically important part, of economy and social development.
Poverty is the mother of all revolutions
Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism, fools making laws for the breaking of jaws.
In crude Marxist terms, liberals have a theory of infallible government that is constantly at war with the reality of life.
All I know is that I am not a Marxist.
Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people's lack of understanding of economics.
It must always remain the great curiosity of history - a whim, a fantasy, an apparition, a thing unexpected and undreamed; and it should serve as a warning to those rash political theorists of to-day who speak with certitude of social processes. Capitalism
In my opinion, Marxism is a great creed of human liberation. It is the creed which says that when all other empires fade and vanish, our business is to enlarge the empire of the human mind
You know there are very few Marxists left in the world ... they're all in American universities.
Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
I still think like a Marxist in many ways.
Proposed Roads to Freedom
In this book Russell weighs the respective advantages and disadvantages of Socialism, Marxism and Syndicalism.
Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the
gospel of envy.
[PERTH, 28 MAY 1948]
PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
The study of Marxism outside of revolutionary struggle can form library rats, but not revolutionaries. Participation in the revolutionary struggle without the study of Marxism will inevitably be filled with hazards, be less confident, and turn out to be half-blind.
Socialism is the way, the truth, and the light.
What guides Marxism, then, is a different model of society, and a different conception of the function of the knowledge that can be produced by society and acquired from it.
The Marxist outlook ... represents the most consistent and systematic application of the scientific outlook and method.
Marxism requires that we destroy God, because government must become God. And the only way for government to become God is to destroy the concept of God.
I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.
Communists are frustrated capitalists.
The greatest factors making for communism, socialism or anarchy among a free people are the excesses of capital. The talk of the agitator does not advance socialism one step. The great captains of industry and finance ... are the chief makers of socialism.
The Western democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism which without it would not be thinkable. It provides this world plague with the culture in which its germs can spread.
Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.
Always moved by religious motives, the Church has condemned the various forms of Marxist Socialism; and she condemns them today, because it is her permanent right and duty to safeguard men from currents of thought and influence that jeopardize their eternal salvation.
Class analysis can thus function not simply as part of scientific theory of interests and conflicts, but of an emancipatory theory of alternatives and social justice as well. Even if socialism is off the historical agenda, the idea of countering the exploitative logic of capitalism is not.
Not mythical material productive forces, but reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs. What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is common-sense and moral courage.
There may be thousands of principles of Marxism, but in the final analysis they can be summed up in one sentence: Rebellion is justified.
Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master.
[Marx] explicates ideology as socially determined, [Stirner] as psychologically determined: both accuse it of remaining oblivious to its own determinations.
The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
Communism is Christianity castrated by Ockham's Razor.
One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
It's not my fault if reality is Marxist
The thirst to know and understand, a large and liberal discontent.
Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.
Communism is the opiate of the people.
The economic and social theories used by those who take part in the social struggle ought to be judged not by their objective value but primarily for their effectiveness in arousing emotions. The scientific refutation of them which can be made is useless, however correct it may be objectively.
Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.
Truth is not to be found either in traditional capitalism or in Marxism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically, capitalism failed to discern the truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise.
Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species
Any serious analysis of Marxism must begin with the controversy over whether he is a humanist champion of free will or a determinist. Because Marxian writings on the subject often are so contradictory, it is impossible to know for sure.
Besides, he grew up in the city of the poor. You know as well as I do that in this country Marxism is a religious passion of the middle class.
Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.
The uneasy ghost of Marx must suffer the torments of the damned at the truth glaring from the pages of history that one does not abolish property by transferring it to the state.
Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation.
Socialism is the triumph of people's prejudices over their reason.
Marx set forth a classic statement of inherent class antagonism on the market
Without Socialism the working class is a heterogeneous mixture of different categories, some of which have independent, varying interests, sometimes opposed to each other.
The term "Socialism" becomes a common label for the various theories of attack upon the principle of property, the various policies of communal control at the expense of the family and individual freedom.
I promote revolution against the Capitalists and the Social Marxists.
Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical.
Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
Socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.
Socialism has now become completely or almost completely identical with Bolshevism; that
Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk. But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities ...
Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities.
Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.
I spent part of my college years in a Marxist commune. I was not a Marxist. I wasn't even pretending to be one. I was a Marxist-in-law.
Marxists have more than once pointed out that the capitalist world economic system contains in itself the seeds of a general crisis and of warlike clashes.
This book is the best treatment of the best American Marxist philosopher-and the best philosopher to emerge from American slums. Young Sidney Hook is essential reading for anyone interested in democratic theory and practice in America.
There can be no immaculate conception of socialism.
The current disfavor into which socialism has fallen has spurred ... the frenzy to proclaim oneself a liberal. Many writers today have recourse to the strategem of inventing for oneself a liberalism according to one's own tastes and passing it off as an evolution from past ideas.
Socialism, like Christianity destroyed itself to gain power
Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.
Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936, 1969)
We are asked to orient our "strategies" and "tactics" around poverty and material immiseration at a time when revolutionary sentiment is being generated by the banality of life under conditions of material abundance.
The capitalist process shapes things and souls for socialism.
Communism is in conflict with human nature.
Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.
Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or a billionaire.
armed with the discourse of counter-ideology.
Many who have read Marxist books have become renegades from the revolution, whereas illiterate workers often grasp Marxism very well.
The core of the Marxist critique of capitalism is that although the individual capitalist is rational (as liberals assume), the capitalist system itself is irrational.
Ideology-the permission to hate.
In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen . . . "The
No force, no torture, no intrigue can eradicate Marxism-Leninism from the minds and hearts of men.
Every powerful movement has had its philosophy which has gripped the mind, fired the imagination and captured the devotion of its adherents.
Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren't his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he's lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.
Good Old Socialism ... Raping The Pocketbooks Of The Rich To Give To The Poor.
I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.
The bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to support its economic and political supremacy
Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley's 'Brave New World' suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating.
Futilitarianism.
I am not a Marxist, but I place myself resolutely at the left.
Marxism and psychoanalysis have been the two traps of the modern intelligence.
History is replete with ideologies of freedom, justice, liberation of the downtrodden and the exploited, that have been turned against the very people they had mobilised, or that have reproduced the same logic of exclusion and terror toward those whom they claimed to set free.
There's something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.
Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism and from it extracted the meaning of socialism. It also took from the cowardly middle-class parties their nationalism. Throwing both into the cauldron of our way of life there emerged, as clear as a crystal, the synthesis
German National Socialism.
I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.
Marxism will be able to do anything. Or why is Lenin lying whole in Moscow? He's waiting for science - he wants to be revived.
Primitive, simplistic anti-Communism is all too often used as a common denominator for diverse efforts to perpetuate one's own power in a democratic system, convert opinions into dogma, and kill off all opposition, even silent.
YOU find some one parade all of a sudden some -ism- as new and revolutionary socialism, for example.